Acai Berry Scams Latest: Fake News Reports
El Cerrito, CA 3/13/2010 10:34 AM GMT (TransWorldNews)
The people behind Acai Berry Scams have proved themselves more than willing to take any steps to deceive customers. It started with the fake 'personal experience blog', complete fake before and after images (often of completely different people). Then were the fake celebrity endorsements.
Now the latest scam involves online advertisements, websites, and blogs all looking very much like real news reports.
Fake news reports are using pictures of real reporters to reinforce their fabricated stories. The news reports often claim that the person in the picture is Julia Miller (it is not), with the station being News 6 or News 7. The stations Health News 7 or Health News 6 are also often quoted. The details are largely irrelevant since Julia Miller and all her associated News stations are completely fake!
The pages are professionally done, and try very hard to look like a real announcement from a real news outlet. There is a crucial difference, though: these pages have the sole intention of scamming you from your hard-earned cash.
The idea behind this scam – and all those that preceded it – remains constant. An excited customer is offered a free trial of an acai berry product. This 'free trial' is in fact just a ruse to get the customer's credit card details; once these are obtained, the customer is insidiously enrolled in an expensive program which sees them receiving sub-standard products on a regular 'subscription' basis. Details of this subscription are regularly hidden in the small print of the offer, and are rarely seen.
Once these unwanted products start arriving, customers are finding it very difficult, if not impossible, to cancel the subscription, with the only solution often being to cancel the card outright.
Bryan Nettles, Director of Communications at Pure Acai Products, had this view on the Julia Miller News 6 acai scam:
“It's not surprising to me that the scammers have found yet another way to scam innocent people out of their money. The people behind these scams are unscrupulous vultures, pure and simple.”
Of the continued threat posed by the scams to legitimate acai businesses like Pure Acai Products, Nettles said:
“It's a problem, that's for sure. Business suffers and the market confidence in acai drops. But the real loser in all this is those people that were scammed. We have put very clear warnings about the scams on our Acai Berry Site website, and are doing the best we can to warn people of the dangers.”
Unfortunately it seems that the scammers are one step ahead of the authorities the legal system.
business@acaiberrysite.com
acaiberrysite.com/
