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Lifecell and other wrinkle cream ripoffs

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

There are many fake review sites out there that seem to provide unbiased, independent reviews of various wrinkle cream products.  Unfortunately, many of these sites are setup by affiliate marketers trying to generate commissions for the products they are shilling for (see the explanation of affiliate marketing here).

A typical format for an affiliate page would be a review site comparing 3-10 products, with one product getting the best rating (e.g. 5 star) and another product getting a mediocre or bad rating (e.g. 2-3 stars).  Making all the products 5 stars doesn’t work because people will pick up on that.  Two-sided reviews tend to be more effective.

The product that makes the affiliate marketer the most money gets the top spot, followed by the next most profitable, etc. etc.

So do these products really work?  I don’t know because I’m not a woman or a dermatologist.  But I can tell you that you need to be very careful when it comes to these products because a lot of deceptive practices are used to market them.  Here are a few of them:

Fake comments

Some sites will add fake comments from “visitors” to add an element of social proof.  We tend to be more likely to do something if everybody else is doing it too.  If this trick didn’t work, affiliate marketers wouldn’t be using it.

The following example is from wrinkleserased.com/lifecell-skin-cream/.  In this particular case, all the commenters’ websites point to http://none/.  Clearly these aren’t real comments because real people won’t post the same broken link.  This is a case where the affiliate marketer didn’t do a good job at making the comments look realistic.

wrinkleserased-fake-comment

Geo-targeting

Some websites will also personalize the landing page to its visitors so that the author of the page appears to be from the same city.  For example, Suppose I go to the site riyawrinklefree.com and I am browsing the Net from Toronto, Ontario (ON).

I see the following comment on the site:

riyawrinklefree-geo-targeti

This is performed by a Javascript on that site.  (Disabling Javascript will cause that script to not work and show blanks instead.)

What a coincidence!! I'm from <b>
                          <script src="http://j.maxmind.com/app/geoip.js"></script><script type="text/javascript"><!--
document.write(geoip_city());
// --></script>, <script type="text/javascript"><!--
document.write(geoip_region());
// --></script> </b>too! How long did it take to ship?

Sneaky bastards.

Appeal to authority

A lot of these sites will post logos of major media outlets on their site (e.g. ABC, CBS, New York Times, CBS, National Post, etc.) to give their product some credibility.  But chances are, none of these media outlets talk about the specific product being sold.

Similar appeals are made to celebrities and to TV personalities such as Oprah and Dr. Oz.  Affiliate marketers will find weak excuses to claim a connection to make the product sound more credible.

Some other products in this space

  • Lifecell
  • Dermajuv
  • Belisi RX
  • Revitol
  • Athene 7 minute facelift
  • Alphaderma CE
  • Strivectin SD
  • Freeze 24/7
  • Murad Resurgence
  • Hydroderm
  • And many more

Be careful out there!

Filed in affiliate / shill marketing, scams | | Comments (0)

Best Buy not honouring extended warranties

Monday, August 17, 2009

Everybody knows that extended warranties are almost always a bad deal for the consumer.

But now Best Buy has figured out a way to take things one step further.

The fan on my friend’s laptop stopped spinning and he took it into Best Buy for repair since he bought their extended warranty.  A few days later, he receives a call and Best Buy tells him that he won’t be covered because there is physical damage to the laptop and that it will cost $600 to replace the motherboard. They also wipe out the content of his hard drive.

He doesn’t want to pay $600 so he gets me to take a look at his laptop and help him talk to HP to get it repaired.  I call up HP’s tech support line and they tell me that I should try flashing/updating the BIOS before sending it in.  I do it, and it fixes the laptop.  The motherboard did not need to be replaced, there was no need to wipe the hard drive, and the repair was rather simple (an hour of a tech’s time, tops).

What Best Buy seems to be doing is to try to weasel out of the extended warranties that it has sold.  It then tries to charge the customer an inflated price for the repair.

So please, stop buying extended warranties from Best Buy and don’t let them sucker you again by getting you to pay an inflated price for the repair.

More info

Red Flag Deals has a thread on Best Buy extended warranty nightmares.

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Fake "independent" web hosting review sites

Saturday, August 1, 2009

When people are buying web hosting, one of the things they will look for are independent reviews comparing the many web hosts out there.  Unfortunately, there are many affiliates who capitalize on that by setting up their “review” sites while the web hosting companies pay them to shill for them via affiliate commissions (more info on affiliate marketing here).

These reviews have nothing to do with the quality of web hosting and everything to do with shilling for the hosts that pay the most.  Affiliates will tinker with their rankings to find out which order makes them the most money.  The comparison below shows two different webpages on the same domain.  In this case, the affiliate probably screwed up and did not intend for the pages to be different, as you can navigate from one page to the other.  But this clearly shows that affiliates are not very interested in providing an honest review.

web-hosting-shill-comparison

A variation on this is web hosts shilling for themselves.  One web host put up a fake review site where they listed themselves as #1 (without an affiliate link because that would be superfluous), and put affiliate links for their competitors in the rest of the slots!  If they happened to drive traffic to their competitors, they still make money.

Wordpress

Wordpress is trying to make money to support itself, so it too has jumped on the affiliate marketing bandwagon.  It has a page recommending web hosts here:

http://wordpress.org/hosting/

To some degree, Wordpress gushes about its recommended hosts and vaguely discloses its affiliate relationship.

We’ve dealt with more hosts than you can imagine; in our opinion, the hosts below represent some of the best and brightest of the hosting world. If you do decide to go with one of the hosts below and click through from this page, some will donate a portion of your fee back—so you can have a great host and support WordPress at the same time.

Personally, I’ve had a site hosted with Dreamhost (one of the hosts recommended by the people behind Wordpress) and they weren’t great.  Their hosting was down for an entire day when their data center lost both power and its backup power (granted, they weren’t entirely to blame for their data center losing power).  Support also forgot to get back to me about my domain transfer problem and it took me weeks to get it resolved.  Which brings us to…

Overselling

Overselling is the practice where web hosts absurd amounts of bandwidth and disk space. Some even go so far as to offer unlimited bandwidth and disk space. However, hidden away in the terms and conditions are clauses that allow them to kick customers off for using excessive server resourches (e.g. using up too much bandwidth, CPU, memory, etc.). The web hosts have little intention of actually delivering on their advertised claims. The reason why they can get away with overselling is because 99% of customers use very, very little bandwidth and disk space. Almost all websites use <100MB of disk space and less than 5GB of bandwidth. The typical customer will not realize that overselling is false advertising.

The other downside to overselling is that it attracts the kind of customer that does use a lot of server resources (e.g. warez sites). Before a web host kicks these customers off their service, these customers will use a disproportionate amount of a server’s resources and cause all websites hosted on a particular server to be slow. When you purchase shared hosting, your website is hosted on a server that is shared with other customers. Overselling is typically a bad practice for the customer as your web server may be shared with resource pigs. Or crazy promotions like Dreamhost’s $9.99 for the first year may cause a huge surge of customers that the web host can’t adequately handle. When looking for a web host, I would like for a web host that does NOT oversell their services.

Resources

One good resource for learning about web hosting and picking a web host is Web Hosting Talk.  WHT readers tend to be savvier at spotting and outing shills, though you still need to take what you read with a grain of salt.

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Weight loss scams

Saturday, August 1, 2009

There’s a lot of weight loss scams out there. Here are some of the more common ones:

Wu Yi Tea / “Easy Weight Loss Tea” / Green tea

There’s nothing very special about green tea, but some marketers will try to convince you that it’s some “ancient Chinese secret”.  Unfortunately, some people have stereotypes about Chinese people and believe things that simply aren’t true.  Some of these sites play upon those stereotypes and make ridiculous claims, saying that green tea is “the reason why Chinese people don’t get fat”.  Reality check: there are A LOT of fat Chinese people.  If there are ancient Chinese secrets, clearly they weren’t in on it.

If somebody speaks English with a Chinese accent, it does not mean that they are more authentic Chinese and know ancient Chinese secrets about health and medicine.  It’s just that English is not their first language – that’s it!

Now you might be led to believe that green tea has health benefits.  That’s what people in the green tea business would like you to believe.  Many other food industries will also promote the health “benefits” of their food.  Take alcohol.  There are reports of its positive effects on health, even though we are talking about a POISON that impairs your ability to drive and causes LIVER DAMAGE.  A lot of these health effects are overrated but intentionally overpromoted.

Acai berry

Another food whose health benefits are blown out of proportion for commercial benefit.  Other foods have more antioxidants, and having an excess of antioxidants does not seem to provide health benefits.

See the blog post deconstructing an affiliate site for acai berry pills for information on how these products are promoted.

Other products that probably don’t work

Colon cleanse / colon cleansing / detox products – Some marketers might pretend like it’s endorsed by Rachel Ray, Oprah, Katie Couric, Jesus, etc.  That’s a lie.

If you simply use your common sense, you can probably figure out the products which are likely a scam.

Fitness Clubs

These are not a scam, but only if you go to the club and actually exercise.  Most people pay upfront for a membership but don’t actually go to the health club.  This is where the clubs make most of their money (especially around New Year’s resolutions).

What does work?

Honestly, I have no idea (other than exercise).  However, do watch out for sites that tell you that X is a scam but Y is not.  Y is probably a scam too.

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An affiliate page deconstructed

Saturday, August 1, 2009

Note: Read the explanation of affiliate / shill marketing first to understand the motivations behind affiliate sites.

Let’s look at one affiliate site I found by searching for “weight loss”.  The URL is http://www.laurasdietsuccess.com/gca1/index.php
This site tries to sell the ThermothinPlus with Acai and Colon Cleanse products.

laura-diet-deconstruction

1- Geotargeting

The website is targeted specifically to the visitor’s location, in this case Toronto.  The affiliate marketer is hoping that visitors will relate more to somebody from their own city.

If you visit the website from a different IP address, you will actually get a totally different site.  In the alternate version of the site, the “Laura Johnson” character (probably the affiliate marketer pretending to be a fat chick) is apparently somebody who has created a weight loss system, not some fake blogger recommending a product that “worked” for her.

laura-alt-site

2- Images likely made up

Affiliate marketers usually pull images from Google Images or sxc.hu because it’s a way to quickly put something together (they are always tinkering with their webpages to figure out what will convert better).  In this case I couldn’t figure out where the images came from.  But it’s highly likely that the images are of different people.

Firstly, in the before/after comparison, anybody who loses such significant weight will likely have excess, flabby skin. When people lose a lot of weight, they don’t lose the skin.  Trying Google images on “weight loss loose skin”.

L-mebeforeandafter

Also, the page shows another set of before/after pictures.  But the “after” picture in that set does not match the earlier set- there’s no way that the cute brunette sitting on that bed is the same person as the one pictured below.  The flab does not fit the other.

L-beforeandafter2

Bottom line: it’s very likely that these are all different people.

3- The site claims that 46 pounds was lost… but the first sett of pictures shows a much more dramatic weight loss.

4- To gain credibility, the site points out that the product was endorsed by Dr. Oz on the Rachel Ray show.  Affiliate marketers will try to associate the product with authoritative or trustworthy sources in order to induce visitors into buying.  Dr. Oz probably never endorsed the weight loss products in question.

5- The site is a “blog”.

The marketer is trying to gain the visitor’s trust.  The site is masquerading as a blog where the blogger relates her own experience about a particular product in a way that appears less biased than a hard-sell (which don’t work).

It should be obvious that the site is a blog only in appearance.  There is no other content on the site.  When you try to navigate away from the page, a pop-up is thrown up that makes a last-ditch attempt at converting the visitor.

laura-exit

6- The site was updated this month.

If you look in the HTML code of the website, there is a Javascript that changes the text to the current month.

—

Other tricks in the text of the website:

- The author talks about her experiences in a way that the target audience would/might relate to.

I tried all the “brand-name” diets like Atkins, South Beach, cabbage (my least favorite) soup, lemon juice. I even tried weight management plans like Weight Watches – the food was horrible! I eventually gave up. I stopped going out with friends. I felt ugly. I started eating more and more because I just didn’t care. I was in a downward spiral.

There’s a lot of people out there (fat and thin, male and female) who are very insecure about their weight.  They would probably relate well to other insecure people.  They would also have the shared experience of trying diets that don’t work.

Act soon!!!

The first part of the page is designed to get the visitor interested (”this worked for me” / “this can make you thin”) and to make the visitor trust the blogger.

Halfway into the page, there is copy that makes it appear as if the visitor’s chance of getting a deal on the weight loss products is disappearing.

Please do also make sure to order those free packages right now. Because the ThermothinPlus Free Trial Offer is expiring on July 31, 2009 and the Colon Cleanse Free Trial is expiring on July 31, 2009! So make sure to get yours before they run out of stock!

The marketer is trying to get the visitor to act quickly and not carefully research the purchase.  Of course, there is a Javascript on the page that keeps updating the date to whatever the current date is.

Social Proof

At the end of the blog, there are a bunch of comments left by the blog’s “readers”.  This may be an attempt to use social proof.  People are more inclined to do something if everybody else is doing it.

Choice of weight loss products

Affiliate marketers will promote the products with the best payouts, which tends to be the products with the highest margins.  It costs less than a dollar to make a bottle full of pills.

Do the products actually work? It’s extremely unlikely.

Are people really dumb enough to fall for this stuff?

You might be asking yourself that.  Keep in mind that while most people are smart enough to be skeptical, there are people out there who are extremely insecure about their weight.  So insecure that they will try a lot of things to be skinny.  And many anorexics don’t even realize that they aren’t fat.

It’s sad that affiliate marketers prey on these people… but that is what they do.  And it works. There is also a lot of money to be made.  Some marketers make six to seven figures a year doing affiliate marketing.

No honour among thieves

Another practice among affiliate marketers is to simply copy somebody else’s campaign.  Hence, Sandra’s diet blog.  However, the copycat didn’t do a very good job as their geotargeting failed and left blanks on the blog page.  Oops.

sandras-diet-blog

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Affiliate/shill marketing – how it works

Monday, July 27, 2009

One form of advertising on the Internet is what’s known as affiliate marketing.  The marketer places affiliate links on his/her website.  Whenever a visitor clicks on the link and makes a purchase, the marketer is credited with that purchase and receives a commission.  Note that there are both ethical and unethical ways of doing affiliate marketing.  The problem with any marketing is that there is a conflict of interest between the advertiser (which sells a product or service) and the publisher (e.g. a website owner).  There is a conflict of interest as the publisher may promote the products that make them the most money.

The sinister thing about affiliate marketing on the Internet is that some marketers will say ANYTHING to make a sale.  Some of them will engage in deceptive practices like “independent” review sites.  Don’t get suckered by these sites as their goal is to make as much money as possible rather than providing useful information.  And in some cases, the marketers putting up these sites haven’t even used the products or services they are marketing.

How to spot affiliate links

To check for an affiliate link, move your mouse cursor over the link and look at the URL that is displayed by your web browser in the lower part of your screen. You should see the following URL for the previous link:

http://www.somemanufacturer.com/BI/1234/KBID/5678

The codes /BI/1234/KBID/5678 at the end of the link identify the affiliate marketer’s account (1234 and 5678 are made up numbers).

Other affiliate links look like the following:

http://affiliatename.cybersam.hop.clickbank.net (Anything with clickbank in it is probably an affiliate link.)

http://affiliates.opienetwork.com/ez/abcdefgh/

http://www.hostmonster.com/track/opie/affiliateAccountName

http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-1234567-12345678 (commission junction link; will redirect to the retailer’s website.)

http://www.fatcow.com/join/index.bml?AffID=1234567

Unfortuantely, there are ways for affiliates to cloak their links to make them hard to spot. To spot those links, you can download a Firefox add-on called Live HTTP headers.  The add-on will let you spot the sequence of re-directs and show you all the URLs, which may contain the affiliate link.  Fortunately, most affiliate marketers aren’t bothering to cloak their links.

Another way of spotting fake review sites is if you found the site through paid advertising. Those who pay for advertising (e.g. sponsored links in Google) is looking to make money.

But be careful!  Not all shill marketers have affiliate links on their website!  Many companies have employees write positive reviews while posing under fake identities.  Some marketers are crafty and will hide their tracks, e.g. by not using affiliate links.  Sometimes, sloppy fake reviews can be detected if the marketer does not write natural-sounding reviews or does not cover their tracks completely (e.g. uses same IP, IP does not match their stated location, etc.).  However, there is little that can be done to prevent a good shill from posting positive fake reviews.

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