AlwaysSuspicious 6 months ago

I searched the name “Becky Bell” and ended up here. It sure sounds good, doesn’t it? The fact that I even used my time to investigate this claim instead of ignoring it outright speaks volumes as to the allure of the scam. That said, however, I did see some warning signs along the way. I thought it might serve the common interest to share them.

1. The story claimed that a major discovery had been made by a woman in, if you can believe it, my hometown. I live in Kelowna, BC, Canada. Its a small town in a small country. Thats why nobody reading this will have heard of it. What are the odds she and I could be neighbours? About the same as those of a perfect teeth whitening costing 5 dollars.

2. In the “news story” “comments” section, the content was too clean and edited to be legitimate. All the usernames of other “posters” where spelled perfectly. The grammar and punctuation in the comments were also flawless. This is a sure sign of BS. Only college English profs care about this. Anyone who has used youtube knows what a legit comments section looks like. It’s messy, full of misspellings and littered with slang. Also, NOBODY enters their username as a perfectly spelled name with proper capitalization. Nobody calls himself “Robert”, it always “robbieD243″ or something like that. Every fake poster’s name was a traditional caucasian first name spelled perfectly and starting with a capital letter. Give me a break! I knew it was BS once I noticed this. But I wanted proof. That’s how I found this page.

3. The internet address was a sham. The “news source” that “ran the story” of my genius neighbor had a web address like this: www.somelegitsoundingnewspublication.com/stories/amazing_secret

Curious, I decided to check “legitsoundingpublication” out. So I deleted the end so that only this was left in my address bar was: www.legitsoundingpublication.com and then hit enter. This should take the user to the mainpage of the publication. Instead, it just auto-looped my browser back to the original scam “new story” page, I was already viewing.

4. There where icons of large TV networks above the site. This is like the above “username” dead giveaway. Its just lazy. Anyone can post a downloaded picture on the internet. When scammers do this they are using the respective TV netowrk’s own media image for themselves, hijacking them for their own purposes. There is something psychologically comforting about seeing those familiar logos atop the fake news story. This is evidence of the power of advertising itself. Familiarity illicits comfort.

5. The TV networks icons were not hotlinked. Any story featured on a primetime investigative magazine would have a cooresponding page on the offical website of that TV netwok or newsbroadcasting site. There are no links because there are no features pertaining to this product.

6. No author’s credits on “independent reviews” of the products when I searched them. The first site that showed up when I searched “Ivory White reviews” appeared to be a legitimate site called www.consumerhealthtips.org. It did have a homepage and other articles, but a cursory scan of the article I had opened appeared to be little more than an advertisement mascarading as an independent review. A further investiagtion found similar pages of “reviews” all advocating other products, often with the exact same verbiage or wording. Whomever is running these scams has put some time and effort into this. Though there are dozens of products wholeheartedly endorsed on this site, so Ill someone is making a lot of money with a lot of scams, all of which work similarly.

6. It claimed to be a secret. We live in a culture dominated by mass media and effortless acces to communication of all types. I mean, Tiger woods has been having an affair and how the entire world knows it. There are no longer any secrets. If 2 combined teeth whitening products were this effective, they wouldn’t be cheap and they wouldn’t rely on viral marketting for sales. They’d be on gunthy-renker by now. You can’t keep secrets that are immensely lucrative.

7. Professional before and after photos. No way an at-home-mom was able to take perfectly clear, perfectly lit photos of her own mouth. The lighting alone would require several hours and a professional.

And finally, the most telltale sign of all:

They want your credit card.

No free sameples. No paypal.

No way.

The purpose of samples is to allow a consumer to discover a product or service’s value firsthand. It’s putting the product to the test. If a product has value, that is to say people who try it love it, they’ll be back. As a seller, you need not worry about finding customers, if comsumers discover a product to be valuable, they’ll find YOU. The only reason to require a committment (in this case a cc #,) is a lack of confidence in one’s own product, or the knowledge that there IS no product.

I don’t know how many people read these boards, but I have posted this information in the hope that somebody, somewhere will find it helpful and aviod being ripped off. Clearly by the ease at which I was able to find ample evidence of BS before stumbling across this page, scammers are playing a numbers game- they know that very few people will actually surrender their CC #s, but they know that there is always that few who are determined to believe in something too good to be true, and are willing to risk their hard-earned money in hope of finding it. The reality is that anything that is worth something costs something. Nothing is free, except BS. I hope more people take the time to investigate these claims before they spend their money, and I applaud the moderators of web pages like this that try to prevent it.

-MJD

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