just run across your postings. Question, are there any legitimate web sites that a person can go to to make a few extra bucks to supplement ss. I just had to leave my job due to health reasons and would like to supplement my limited income. I know aboutn the scamming that goes on and I gotta be tight with money. Any help would be appreciated, including how to maybe set up a web site as I have read about. I dont want to con anybody as i dont like being conned. Thanks

Note…I’m not saying all the affiliates on that forum are scammers or fraudsters or use this method…but it’s clear that a number of them do/have. Of course, affiliates don’t trust their peers anymore than anyone else so they rarely show their websites to anyone but you can be sure that many of the blogs/”models” mentioned above belong to some of the members there.

For those that don’t know the system it works like this…

companies have a product service they want to promote. They join a networks, or many networks, who then have individual affiliate marketers who join. The ad network works as a middle man and is the one who pays the affiliates after taking a cut of the commissions.

After some research I’ve learned that most of these acai type “offers” pay the end affiliate as much as $35 (sometimes more) for every single “lead” (meaning the people that fall for the fake blogs). So for every person that falls into it and pays the shipping the affiliate gets paid about $35.

The ad company in the middle makes a cut as well so the main advertising company who offers the product is paying even more for each lead.

The advertiser makes their money back because of the sneaky auto billing they hide in their terms because they know most people are too lazy to actually read and the ones that do read still have a hard time actually following the terms to cancel because the companies make it hard…sometimes shipping the product late into the “15 days” so the customer doesn’t even get it to “trial” the product until almost the end of the 15 day trial.

How can you trial something in 1 or 2 days left in your trial period? You can’t and they know it but they are counting on you not even reading the terms in the first place so they get at least one auto bill on you and then by not answering the phone or having non-stop busy signals makes actually canceling almost impossible.

Who is to blame? Or who should be fined/jailed for this scam? I’d say all of them that lie or screw the end customer with sneaky methods.

Each level of the process is responsible at some point:

1. The company/advertiser: having a crappy product with very very sketchy terms and even sketchier methods to help make customers break those terms by not making canceling easy or attempting to make it impossible.

2. The ad networks/middle men: They know full well what is going on, give their affiliates tips on how to sell the crap and then take a cut of the commissions. And they are the ones that should be “policing” their affiliates so any fraud is partially their liability.

3. The affiliates who are behind the fake blogs/fake testimonials or use any fraudulent methods to promote. They get paid for every lead and sometimes that seems to drive them to lie and commit fraud. There are many affiliates who promote products legally and responsibly but then again they have to choose which products they want to promote and they know full well how the system works and that the customers end up getting screwed. But there are many affiliates making tens of thousands of dollars a DAY (yes, a DAY!) so it’s easy to see how they can be tempted to the darkside and use the fake blogs and fraud people…after all, in the end, even if they do get “busted” the most likely turnout is they get fined and it would probably be much less than what they made.

4. The dumb ass public: yes, all these “victim” customers who fall for this crap have a responsibility and are to blame as well. Seriously, were you never taught to READ CONTRACTS?! Sure, companies make that really painful with tons of annoying “legal speak” but even just skimming these acai terms you should have been able to see the rebill info. If it weren’t for all the silly lazy consumers who don’t take the time to research and learn there wouldn’t be so many people making money off them and maybe there would be less of this crap. Should you/they have to pay for the charges from their acai trials? That’s a hard one…if the acai companies made it possible to cancel in their trial periods then I think they should be charged. But if the companies made it almost impossible to cancel then, no, they shouldn’t be charged for the sneaky scam.

When it comes to dieting products, sadly it’s because of the same laziness that people get fat in the first place that they end up falling for bogus products and sneaky products. The answer is never magic pills or super special exercise equipment. It all comes down to basic math…burn more calories than you consume every day and you WILL lose weight. I actually did one of the low carb diets a few years ago along with actually exercising and I lost quite a bit of weight and pretty fast as well. Surprisingly, cutting out most of the carbs/sugars I actually had more energy, slept better and felt better while losing all the weight too. Moral of the story…stop being so damn lazy!

Just to help some other people avoid other scams:

First of all, read the damn terms! Be skeptical regardless what the ad/blog/website/newspaper/tv commercial says and spend a little time actually researching the claims an the product. You’d be surprised how much of it all is a sham in one way or another.

couple other current commercials that are flat out scams:

cash4gold – stay far away from it and warn your older family members and such. A huge ripoff/scam.

extenZe – You probably see these commercials just as often…tons of people must be falling for it if they can afford to advertise as often as they do. Same kind of rebill scam as the acai offers. But they were going even further and making people show proof from a doctor that it wasn’t helping and such supposedly. Making people too embarrassed to get the required documentation to cancel and such.

…and pretty much any other product/service you see advertised anywhere. Meaning DO SOME RESEARCH BEFORE YOU BUY! Or don’t and continue to get scammed.

2. They are template productions provided to affiliates of the company at the heart of the automatic re-billing scam.

3. The templates include scripts (this is a recent development) which change the location of the blogger according to the ISP of the person visiting the blogger’s website.

4. A minor crack-down has already occurred in the ‘States but it’s too little and too late. Its principal result is to now force affiliates — who aren’t called Karen, or Jenny, or Angela but Herbert, Ivan and Tony Soprano — to include almost illegible 5pt disclaimer text.

5. Affiliates who got on the band wagon early have made enough in commission to pay for advertising on major websites, the biggest of which is Microsoft part-owned MSNBC.

6. Complaints continue to be made to MSNBC about allowing these frauds onto the site. So sometimes the “blogs” disappear. But then they reappear again. Clearly, MSNBC is desperate for cash.

7. The company involved has a variety of false-front ‘companies’ trading from different websites but the format is the same.

8. As far as can be established, the only time the company has ever responded to any complaint made in any Internet forum is the following eloquent defence it provided to a US forum:

Poor AMERICANS!!! you keep on complaining!!!because you are not aware of the terms and conditions!!! who the hell will offer $5.95 for an acai with out any terms and condition!! it is clearly stated at the lower part of the website that we are givng you 15 days trial period to try our product or to cancel with in the days trial period so that your only going to pay for the shipping fees..but if you did not called with in the 15 days trial period you will going to pay for the original price of the advertised product!!and where going to deliver you automatically a 30 days supply of the product!!and the reason you cannot contact us is that where are receiving a thousand calls in 1 day!!!to cancel their account!!!!this is our customer service schedule mon-fri am9:00-6:00pm EASTERN TIME!!!follow some instructions Poor AMERICANS!!!!!! you just want to buy some cheap products!! POOR PEOPLE!!!!

9. From the above it may be deduced that the outfit is not blessed with much in the way of communication skills and that English is probably a fourth or fifth language.

10. The big losers (not of weight, but of money) are those who fall for the criminal scam — because the blogs are criminal; they exist to secure a monetary advantage through deception — and Sambazon, the originators of the acai berry supplement and a company which re-invests in the area of production.

11. Acai is also devalued because of the fraudsters because there is evidence to suggest NOT that it is a magic formula for instant weight loss, rather that it can have an impact on the metabolic rate of some users to the extent that the body “burns” calories at a faster rate and then “burns” stored fat.

12. However, it’s emphatically NOT a fat burner, because everyone’s metabolic rate is different. There’s no guarantee that what works for one person will work for another. There’s no guarantee that even if Acai does work, the results are guaranteed to be consistent in every case. The product is not a “miracle” and has never been promoted as such — well, it has, but only by the scammers / the company involved, which doesn’t actually produce the genuine Sambazon article anyway and has only been put together to rip-off the original product.

13. Finally. . . congratulations to this blogger for providing so much public service information. The sooner that all the affiliates and the owners of the company concerned are on a genuine weight-loss regime behind bars, the better for consumers everywhere.