the.com/snake oil

means A fraudulent remedy or scheme sold with big promises and nothing behind them — and by extension, the sales pitch itself, hawked by someone who knows better.

from The phrase comes from 19th-century America's traveling medicine shows, where hucksters sold tonics claiming miraculous cures for everything from rheumatism to baldness, often invoking exotic-sounding 'snake oil' as the secret ingredient. Some peddlers did bottle actual snake fat, riffing on Chinese and Native American liniments that used animal oils for joint pain — but the traveling-show versions were typically just mineral oil, capsaicin, and nerve, dressed up with a convincing speech. The most notorious case, Clark Stanley's 'Snake Oil Liniment,' was tested in 1917 and found to contain no snake at all — just the fraud the name now means.