5 Big Companies Who Went Insane Trying To Get Ahead

5

One Of The UK's Biggest Brewers Tried To Poison Their Rival's Cider

Aston Manor Brewery is a major cider company in the UK, specializing in large, cheap plastic bottles of cider beloved by elderly alcoholics and preteen gangs alike. Those two key demographics helped Aston Manor become the third-largest cider producer in the UK. But when the booze market entered a downturn in 2001, the company found itself in a battle for market share with HP Bulmer. After Bulmer snagged a major contract, Aston Manor managing director Michael Hancocks decided to go Wicked Queen on their ass. That's right, he was gonna poison their apples.

Walt Disney PicturesThey don’t specify that he wasn’t wearing a black hood and calling everyone “dearie,” so that’s how we’re choosing to picture it.

After hiring a chemist to produce a variety of yeast that would cause nausea and violent diarrhea, Hancocks bribed a factory employee to dump eight bottles of the stuff into Bulmer's production line. If the plan had succeeded, it would have forced an expensive recall -- and also, you know, a bunch of people would have become seriously ill. Fortunately, the Bulmer employee had a change of heart and called the police. Hancocks was found guilty in 2003 and sentenced to 18 months in prison. He is presumably very sick of people asking him how he liked them apples.

4

A Student Loan Company Created A Fake Journalist To Promote Their Loans

Young people of today emerge from college burdened with heavy debts, and possibly legally owned by a Mauritanian brick factory. Fortunately, Drew Cloud was there to help. As a financial journalist specializing in student loans, Cloud ran his own website, and his commentary appeared in mainstream outlets like The Washington Post and Boston Globe. He wrote, he researched, he did interviews with journalists, and his work appeared under his own smiling headshot. There was just one problem: Drew Cloud didn't exist.

The Chronicle Of Higher Education revealed that Cloud was a fake person created by the student loan company LendEDU, which apparently took the whole "corporations are people too" thing a little too far. Cloud's advice on dealing with student loan debt often suggested refinancing (or other services offered by LendEDU), and Cloud's site also linked to LendEDU without disclosing that the company owned the site (and the fictional Cloud).

3

BlackBerry Hired Women To Flirt With Guys In Bars

These days, BlackBerry is best known for its innovative approach to not being a thing anymore. But back in the day, they were renowned for their creative approach to marketing. That started in the early days of the company, with a team of employees that would hang around in airports looking for people who seemed like business executives, then walking up to them and begging them to try their product. It was called the Puppy Dog Routine, and was surprisingly effective at getting the company off the ground. But eventually BlackBerry grew beyond guerrilla guilt trips and decided to adopt a sneakier approach to marketing.

BlackBerry maker RIM hired attractive actresses to flirt with guys in bars while prominently holding BlackBerries. One operation involved a woman asking passersby to take her picture in tourist spots to get them to handle the phone, and one actress admitted she asked men to put their phone numbers in her BlackBerry, even though she "definitely didn't call anyone." So that's why all of those women never called us!

2

Air Canada Proved WestJet Was Hacking Them (By Going Through WestJet's Trash)

In 2003, upstart Canadian airline WestJet obtained login credentials from a former Air Canada employee named Jeffrey Lafond, giving them access to an internal Air Canada website, which contained flight loads and other valuable information. And boy did they use it. Lafond's login was used 243,630 times in less than a year, a number rivaled only by Ted Cruz's Pornhub account. It was just the start of a very weird, very Canadian air travel rivalry.

In 2004, Air Canada sued WestJet, alleging corporate espionage. But how could they prove that? Quite easily, as it turns out, because Air Canada had paid private detectives to repeatedly steal the garbage of WestJet co-founder Mark Hill. (There are apparently two of them in Canada.) Hill even photographed one group of detectives who screeched up to his home in Victoria, emptied his trash cans into their pickup truck, and peeled out again, ignoring his shouts of "Do you work for Air Canada?" That might seem like a weird question, given that the alternative was a roving gang of garbage perverts, but this was one of few situations in which the latter would actually be preferable.

The stolen trash included shredded documents, which the investigators painstakingly pieced back together to reveal Air Canada's secret flight load data. They got another break when Hill took an Air Canada flight to Florida. The airline moved his girlfriend to a different seat, and sat a private eye in fake glasses and a goatee next to him instead so he could sneak peeks at confidential information on Hill's computer. Meanwhile, Hill had started loading his trash cans with fake shredded documents which, when pieced together, revealed his plans to "take digital photos of the two morons digging thru my garbage looking for propriety [sic] WestJet information."

Bruce Bennett/Getty ImagesUnfortunately, lawyers stepped in before this could culminate in the Wile E. Coyote “runway painted on a wall” finale this was obviously leading to.

1

Ringling Bros. Had A Secret Spy Agency

In 1990, disgraced former CIA deputy director Clair George was hired by the legendary Ringling Bros. Circus. No, he didn't start a new life as a geek -- he was initially hired to help persuade the Chinese to sell them a panda, but Ringling was feeling the heat from animal rights groups, and owner Ken Feld soon asked George to help them set up an in-house spy agency to undermine the circus' enemies. For the next 10 years, the circus ran a secret operation using Watergate-style dirty tricks to destroy anyone who threatened the business.

Theo Wargo/Getty ImagesThe clothes might have been a bit conspicuous for spy work, but the hired muscle was second to none.