A reader asked us a while back, "How do I find out about the credibility of DirectBuy? (www.directbuy.com)
We have recently joined and [are] wondering if we made a smart investment." You're going to want to take a look at this entry on Justin Leonard's InfomercialScams.com site. You'll note a number of posters there don't think they got their money's worth out of the upfront "investment" of $4,500 (or $5,000, according to some posts). Also, Leonard reports that an attorney representing DirectBuy has threatened to sue, citing all kinds of legalistic flapdoodle. Public Citizen is apparently helping with the case, and their response to Direct Buy's lawyer is hilarious. For more on fighting back against legal threats, read Chilling Effects.

Posted by Beau Brendler at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Got a follow-up call within 24 hours of signing up at the Crazy Fox site. They want you to part with $9.95 shipping and handling for an instructional booklet and DVD. The pitch included asking whether I had $200 to $3,000 to spend on my own business. When we got down to the nitty-gritty, I asked whether the "business" was, in fact, a Herbalife distributorship. That's indeed what they're selling, and $200 gets you in at the low end, apparently.
By the way, before you succumb to buying something from a TV infomercial, you should first check out Justin Leonard's Infomercial Scams.com and its related sites.

Posted by Beau Brendler at 04:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We were intrigued enough at my house by the Crazy Fox TV commercials to check out the Web site, another entry in the "work-from-home-like-all-these-nice-people-and-buy-a-big-house-in-Florida" genre. Though it reads like the Crazy Fox people are going to send you instructional materials about how to build a home business, they are in fact a front for Herbalife, the controversial multi-level marketing distributor of weight-loss and dietary supplements.

Herbalife is also the "official nutrition company" of the LA Galaxy soccer team, home to the expatriate David Beckham, who probably should have quaffed a couple more Herbalife Cafe Latte energy drinks before England's devastating loss to Croatia last week.
Herbalife needs to be more upfront about its affiliation with Crazy Fox. You can't find much on that site beyond references in the privacy policy to "BMI and e-Team Marketing." Via various measures, you can get to the distributors' user agreement that discloses the link between Herbalife, BMI and e-Team.
My guess is that people who know something about Herbalife may be reluctant to disclose personally identifiable information on the Crazy Fox page, then pay $9.95 for "free" instructional materials after a lengthier registration that also asks them to part with a credit card number.
Herbalife may have cleaned up their act, but in that case, why are they hiding behind a fox mascot and a poorly architected Web site?

Posted by Beau Brendler at 03:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Bought some tea from this store and paid five bucks extra for expedited shipping. It took eight days for the item to arrive, which was still within the delivery scope, but didn't meet my definition of "expedited," so I asked for a refund and got it. That's the kind of behavior that earns repeat business.
It's of course the season now to pay close attention to the fine print on shipping when you're buying online. There are huge variations among sellers.

Posted by Beau Brendler at 02:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Use eBay long enough, you're probably going to get ripped off somehow, whether you know it or not. I should probably know better, but I got burned three ways by a seller; you might find the story amusing.
Those who know me know I'm a huge fan of Klaus Kinski. I wanted to track down what is something of a holy grail among Kinski collectors, a copy of his self-penned, self-directed, self-worshipping biopic, "Paganini" (also called "Kinski Paganini"). Sounds like an ideal mission for eBay, right? Well, I won the auction, but what followed was one of the worst eBay experiences I think it's possible to have.You can look at the auction, which was back in August, here.

First, I overpaid (more than $30 -- "Paganini" frequently goes at auctions for around $12). Then I sent a note to the seller, Yesmovies, asking whether she accepted PayPal, which provides extra fraud protection. She wrote back to say she didn't, and in the note asked me to e-mail her my credit card number in an open e-mail -- then initiated a payment dispute after I didn't ante up within seven days.
It gets worse. I made the payment, telling her in seven years of shopping on eBay with a 100 percent positive feedback record, no one had ever started a dispute with me, let alone that fast. I asked her to remove it, and warned her to expect negative feedback from me. Sure enough, I left it, and she reciprocated by ruining my perfect 100 percent rating by leaving a nastygram for me. And, of course, the final insult was that Yesmovies sent me a bootleg, yep, that's right, a dub off TV or some other source. So not only did I overpay, I got ripped off, my reputation took an unfair hit and technically, I participated in a crime.
So how could I have avoided this, and how can you learn from my mistakes?
First, I should have read Yesmovies' feedback more closely and thoroughly. Though Yesmovies has thousands of positive ratings and a high percentage overall, reading through all that feedback looking for the negatives would have been instructional in this case. Let me emphasize that: A long list of positive feedbacks for a seller is great, but read the negative feedbacks if the site makes them available. At least one ex-customer wrote in to complain Yesmovies sent a bootleg, too. She responded to another similar complaint by saying that bootlegs are all that's available among certain rare movies. So there's yet another shade of caveat emptor! Yes, it's true, eBay doesn't make searching negative feedback easy, for obvious reasons (they should make the negative feedbacks searchable, for one thing, by clicking on the little red number in the chart). But do it anyway.
Second, if you look on the auction page, the words "this video comes in a plastic snapcase, with color cover art insert," is basically code among people who swap bootlegs. If you want to lessen the risk, look for the words "factory sealed" (though anybody can buy a cling-wrap machine), "never used," or "new." The "color cover art" insert I got was clearly output from a copier, and was all in German, though the tape was subtitled in English (an English-subtitled videotape is intended for an English-speaking market, and so, would have a cover printed in English).
Third, PayPal has its problems, but the best sellers accept multiple payment methods. Those that don't, probably don't for a reason.
Fourth, eBay is a notorious venue for illegal bootleg sales. There are better places to satisfy a jones for a rare or out of print movie: MoviesUnlimited or Critics' Choice. If that doesn't work, go to the IMDB chat boards at the bottom of the page listing the movie you're looking for.
By the way: "Kinski Paganini," the movie, sucks. Especially a second or third-generation copy. Even if you loved the master's dubbed performance in Star Knight.

Posted by Beau Brendler at 01:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Take a look at this data from McAfee, and while you're at it, download a free copy of their Site Advisor:
* A consumer is almost 12 times more likely to encounter a drive-by-download [of nasty, harmful malware] while surfing Russian domains as Colombian ones. [You might want to take this opportunity to read about the Russian Business Network, which apparently has now moved to China].
* Registering at a Web site in India results in a 4.3% chance of getting spammy e-mail. Taking the same action with a domain registered in China yields a 7.2% chance.
* 5.2% of Vietnamese Web sites have risky downloads. Just 0.5% of Singaporean sites host such files.
* 2.7 million times every month, casual Web surfers visit risky Dutch Web sites. Even though Hong Kong has approximately the same percentage of risky Web sites, those risky domains receive just 52,000 clicks each month.
Our work with StopBadware.org and the ICANN has taught us that the Web has good neighborhoods and bad.

Go surfing in a bad one and you're likely to get mugged. Unfortunately, a number of those bad neighborhoods correlate with geography, making this topic a difficult one to broach politically from the perspective of international policy. The "country code" domains (like .TV, as we've written about before) are treated as sovereign territory, so nobody does much about countries that don't police their own domains.

Posted by Beau Brendler at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Several years ago, there were a number of health Web site seal-of-approval efforts underway -- Hi-Ethics, a group of 18 health sites, which was supposed to create a seal with Truste, the privacy organization; the Internet Healthcare Coalition, whose domain address is now for sale; and of course, the HON Code, still around, for better or worse. These days a number of health sites display logos from the "World Wide Web Health Awards," as if they constitute a quality seal -- in fact, on the WWW Health Awards home page, they market themselves as "providing a 'seal of quality' for electronic health information.' " We wanted to know more about these awards, since they give out dozens, twice a year. According to their Web site, they're administered by the Health Information Resource Center, which doesn't turn up much on a Google search.

Looking deeper among the various sites attached to the World Wide Web Health Awards pages we find HealthPrograms.com, most of which is "under construction" or broken links. There are logos appearing on the right hand side of that page for the "Consumer Health Publishers Association" and the "Online Health Association," both of which also appear to be largely under construction. Ultimately, the path leads to the American Custom Publishing Corporation of Libertyville, Illinois. We called the number on their home page and, indeed, the WWW Health Awards are run from there. What does American Custom Publishing do for a living? Well, they print brochures for the pharmaceutical industry and others. Their client list includes Liberty Medical, Pfizer, CVS, General Electric, Humana, "and hundreds more!" according to the site. The WWW Health Awards site is not exactly transparent about all this, but it wasn't all that hard to trace, and the nice person who answered the phone at American Custom Publishing was helpful.

The way the World Wide Web Health Awards appear set up, it's not a bad business -- $52 per entry, though we don't know how much of that goes toward the chicken entree at the awards banquet. Looks like just about anyone can become a volunteer judge, based on the online form. We couldn't find a list of judges anywhere on the site, so it's tough to speculate who's making the awards decisions. There are certainly some well-known names among the current crop of winners, though -- A.D.A.M., a good-quality content provider; our old friends at Johnson & Johnson, uh, Babycenter.com; Rozerem; Blue Cross/Blue Shield. And there are a whole host of non-profits there, too, doing really good things with great programs.

But we ask: How valuable are awards handed out by a company that prints brochures for the pharmaceutical industry? Are consumers fooled by awards logos into thinking that, for instance, a Web site produced by Takeda Pharmaceuticals to sell its Rozerem sleep drug -- a gold medal WWW Health Award winner in the, yes, patient education information category -- is an unbiased source of information? Why give an award to a drug company as a recognition of excellence in patient education? Isn't that like giving some sort of public service award to Sepracor for its pretty-blue-butterfly Lunesta commercials on TV?

Posted by Beau Brendler at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)