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As a veteran “Shark Tank” judge, you’d expect Mark Cuban to spot a con when he sees one. However, in 2013, the Mavs owner was taken in by the ultimate scammer, Charles Michael Yim. And it wasn’t just Cuban who fell for the con; Kevin O’Leary, Daymond John, Lori Greiner, and Robert Herjavec were also reeled in.
All five judges were blown away by Yim’s pitch for his product Breathometer, a small plastic device that could attach to a smartphone to provide an accurate measurement of a user’s blood alcohol content (BAC). If that wasn’t enough, the budding entrepreneur claimed that the Breathometer also had a button that could be pushed to summon a cab if a person’s BAC reading was too high to drive legally.
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Yim didn’t need any bells and whistles; he had the judges at “the world’s first smartphone breathalyzer.” He was seeking $250,000 for a 10% stake in his company, but all of the Sharks wanted a bite of Breathometer. To satiate their collective business blood lust, for the first time in the show’s history, they joined forces and shelled out $1 million for a 30% stake. With four times the investment he expected, Yim was all set to make the Breathometer the next great thing. However, the Federal Trade Commission had other ideas. The agency charged Yim with misrepresenting the product’s ability to accurately measure people’s BAC and ordered him to pay back $5.1 million to customers.
