|
Exercise Product and Supplement Scams
Get Ripped in 4 Weeks Supplements - The Real Deal?
The truth about the sites that claim you can go from the couch potato beer belly to rock hard muscles and defined abs in a matter of weeks, simply by taking supplements or other products.
Okay so most of us have seen the sites, typically through banners and advertisement spaces on other sites. The typical claims like “Get Ripped in 4 Weeks” and “Get Rock Hard Abs Doing Nothing” are designed to attract people who want the body, but lack the motivation to obtain it. The idea of simply taking supplements and doing little exercise to achieve a great physique is always going to appeal to most, but is it a reality?
Sadly, it isn’t. The people who operate these sites and the “blogs” that promote it are in reality nearly always online fraudsters trying to get into your wallet, and we’ll explain why and how next.
The area of self improvement is constantly focussed on by scammers, meaning that anyone signing up for any self improvement product online must be extremely careful. Online health supplements are one always under constant speculation, as are the usual penis enlargement scams, and getting “ripped” is certainly no exception.
These sites usually come into two different varieties – the first is the site that directly promotes the product and will use most of the deceptive, pressuring tactics you find in a plethora of different online scams. These sites never shy away from fake testimonials, fake before and after pictures and fake endorsements. The Acai Berry health products recently found themselves in trouble because of recent FTC guidelines concerning such endorsements beings updated and the scammers finding themselves on the wrong side of an Oprah Winfrey & Dr. Oz lawsuit for misuse of their names. However this has not stopped these “Get Ripped” supplement scammers from constantly directing their fake endorsements at Hollywood, with many asserting that big Hollywood stars and other celebrities use these products – assertions that are ultimately untrue.
Often present is the red flag of the “As Seen On…” ploy that lists reputable companies in an attempt to imply that said companies endorse the products which is yet again untrue. Often these companies listed will be the likes of search engine giant Google, health magazine Men’s Health and online company Yahoo Inc.
Also worth noting is these "Get Ripped" sites often bear a very similar resemblance to Get-Rich-Quick scams in the way that they are laid out, with hyped up sales garble and tacky red fonts and yellow highlight.
Nearly always present are the before-and-after pictures that are either faked or if they are genuine, are certainly not a result of solely (or mostly) using the supplements the site is selling.
Often used is the tactic of limited discounts, special prices and promotional codes and other time limited prices that are used to pressure the victim into signing up as fast as possible, hence as hastily as possible.
The other type of site that are involved with this scam are the fake blogs that purport to be from a previous customer who just happens to be posting his or her results about the product on a website. In reality this person is the same person (or people) who operate the scam in the first place, ergo the “blog” is actually just a promotional tool to persuade victims into signing up. As well as using many of the deceptive sales tactics we talked about above, these sites also possess many other warning indicators. For a start these sites often take names like [name]getsripped.com. The .com can be replaced with any domain extension and the name also varies as well. At the time of writing a popular domain promoting the products is stevegetsripped.com or stevegetsripped.net, but other deviations exist as well, including stevelostweight.com and other similar sounding sites. As well as the near obligatory before-and-after pictures, visitors can also expect to see some conjured story about how Steve [or whatever] discovered this product and how it changed his life. Also often present is a comments section which is full of positive feedback about the product, but of course this has been faked, and if the ability to add your own comment hasn’t been disabled “because of SPAM” then you can be sure that if you do add a comment it will never make it onto the website.
So that explains how these sites dishonestly get people to sign up, but what about the products themselves? From the many sites we have seen, the products are some sort of concoction of a health supplement that is ultimately unproven, and the scammers clearly need to rely on fake testimonials and endorsements to sell them. Hardly reassuring. The products are usually given catchy names like Fire Burn, Xtreme Max, Acai Force Max and Colo Trim but you’ll find no one else selling them other than the scammers.
What we are sure about, is that even if the products are indeed some sort of genuine health or exercise supplement and not a clear cut placebo, users will have absolutely NO chance of achieving the purported results simply by using them, let alone in the ridiculous timeframes these sites claim.
So finally how do these scammers actually get your money?
For the majority of these scams, two words explain it pretty clearly – FREE TRIAL. This is used as bait as people believe they have nothing to lose.
Victims are told that all they need to pay is the shipping fees which typically range from 1 to 5 USD, and their free trial will duly be sent out. Problem is that similar to many get-rich-quick schemes and other health supplement scams, the terms and conditions tell a different story. The fact is that many people don’t read all through the terms and conditions, especially if they are long winded, and it doesn’t help when these online swindlers bury them in extreme small print at the bottom of the webpage, often disguised and difficult to read, like below -
Wouldn’t read this? Scammers don’t want you to.
This small print often states conditions like the victim has to opt out by cancelling their contract if they do not want to proceed with their subscription or face a number of non refundable monthly fees from various companies. This means that if the victims doesn’t actively cancel their account by contacting a phone number (which are notoriously hard to get through on) in a number of days, this once nearly free trial has turned into a very expensive subscription, with often hundreds of dollars getting billed every month until the victim manages to actually cancel the account.
This is not to mention the countless complaints that often surface about payments being billed earlier than stated, accounts being cancelled and yet still being billed, or even unmentioned payments being billed from the victims account. Additionally victims may find themselves enrolled on more than one subscription which may not even be mentioned in the terms and conditions, meaning that even if the victim does cancel within the required timeframe, they may continue to be billed for subscriptions they were not even aware they had signed up for.
To summarise, it is important not to sign up to unrealistic exercise or health supplement trials online. There are next to no legitimate offers and nutritional and health experts constantly stress that gaining a better physique is mostly down to a good diet and regular exercise, which absolutely cannot be substituted by pills or powders. These schemes that promise these sort of dramatic results will enter their victims into a subscription nightmare where only one thing is certain - the `free` trial used to bait victims will turn out to be very expensive for the victim indeed.
Sorry readers, but if you want the body of Adonis, be prepared to put in the hard work and eat properly. Whilst exercise supplements can help with the task, they won’t help anywhere as near as the sites claim.
If you ever want advice concerning the subject of this article, we recommend speaking to a nutritional expert or local doctor, who will be able to give you better explicit advice targeted at your specific situation.
[Please also note that many of these schemes may appear as ads on this page. Don’t sign up for them.]
ThatsNonsense.com
References:
FTC Targets Weight-Loss Marketers’ Allegedly Bogus ‘Free’ Sample Offers
Buying Health Supplements Online.
Comments
|
|
