I start by saying I have no understanding whatever of how this works. But here’s what happened with my last online order from a company called “buletboard.”¹
I wish I had bought these directly from Amazon, I could have gotten an instant refund, because these things are:
So poorly designed that there’s hardly an American car that the device will clip to. I barely got it to stay on my Rav4, and then the phone essentially blocks my view of the road. The device does not take phone cases into consideration, the phone barely fits in the clips, and getting the phone into the holder is close to impossible. Shame on me for buying from China once again.
The product was ordered on August 16, and arrived today, September 10th. But the most interesting thing was the emails I kept getting from the company about “The status of your parcel has been updated.”
Belfast,bt170wg,United Kingdom,The shipment has been processed in the parcel center of origin.
The shipment has left the sorting center.
Lincoln,LN4 3SD,United Kingdom,The shipment is in transit in United Kingdom.
The shipment arrived at the customs of United Kingdom.
The shipment is being inspected at the customs of United Kingdom.
The shipment has been shipped to United States.
The shipment arrived at the customs of United States.
The shipment is declared at the customs clearance of United States.
Departed Shipping Partner Facility in the United States.
Transit: New Orleans,70139,United States,The shipment is in transit in the country of United States. (four days after the parcel arrived.)
When the package arrived, it had several labels, one on top of the other. The first one was in Chinese, and included my name, address, the product description, and a bunch of barcodes.
The second label indicated that it was shipped from “Online Seller, 2700 Center DR, Dupont, WA 98327.
This is far, far from the East coast where I would have expected the package to arrive, if it were indeed being shipped from Belfast, and being processed through customs in the UK. It’s also an Amazon fulfillment center.
The second, final label indicated that the sender was:
DEBRAG HABOUSHS 3511 VICTORY BLVD STATEN ISLAND NY 10314
A self-storage office? This makes no sense at all. I mean, I can see the package being sent from Washington on the West Coast if the item were shipped from China, to a distribution point in the East, since we live in Maine. But a self-storage office, and with such a phony-sounding name?
One thing is clear: the chain of emails sent to me by “buletboard” was 100% bogus, since the product obviously came directly from China. Combine that with the poor quality of the product I received and essentially wasted my money on, should be a glaring drudge siren flashing in my eyes to remind me never to buy anything from a Chinese vendor again.
The Old Wolf has sadly spoken.
Footnotes
¹ Most of these Chinese companies must use random name generators for their popup companies which are here today and gone tomorrow, re-appearing somewhere else with a new name after the first one is shut down for shady dealings.
Ad-blockers and FB Purity or Social Fixer are pretty much “de rigueur” these days if you want any sort of a sane experience on Facebook. Sadly, those conveniences don’t exist for the mobile platform. And since I pretty much use my phone for everything for the most part, I’m assailed with a news feed that is about 10% things I want to see from my friends, family, and groups I like, and the rest is ads (mostly scams), promoted posts (mostly clickbait), and groups that I have no interest in (Facebook’s insane, desperate bid for more engagement – meaning more clicks and eyeballs on advertisements.)
I’ve had one or two good experiences buying things from FB ads, but I’ve been badly stung by Chinese scammers, and so I’ve sworn those transactions off. Facebook does an abominable job vetting their advertisers, and they’ll take money from anyone who has two coppers to rub togrther. Combine that with the facts that far too many Chinese businesses have all the ethics of a starving honey badger and the CCP encourages businesses to take advantage of America, and Facebook’s advertising landscape becomes worse than the lawless Old West.
But leaving the outright criminal scams aside, far too many of Facebook’s promoted posts are designed to serve up as many advertisements as possible. Look at a few examples that I’ve scraped off of Facebook just in the last two days:
Notice first of all that the entity making the post is simply linking to another website, usually one dedicated to serving advertisements and scraping information from visitors. If there’s no direct relationship between the poster and the link site, then these entities are simply functioning as affiliate marketers.
Make no mistake, some of these websites provide some interesting information and visiting them can be very entertaining, but if you do happen to click through to these websites out of curiosity, you will find one or two things that make your experience there a lot less than fun, if you’re trying to find out the story behind the ad.
Many of these sites are broken up into 50 or 60 different sub-page, so that every time you click on “next” you get a whole new crop of ads to look at. The ones that aren’t like this will have you scrolling and scrolling and scrolling until the heat death of the universe, with an advertisement inbetween each factoid. And most annoyingly, many of these lists don’t even contain anything about the image or story that got you to click in the first place, or else the hook is much less intriguing than they make it out to be.
Clickbait has been with us for a couple of decades at least. The term was coined in December 2006 by Jay Geiger in a blog post, and refers to treating internet users as prey, lured into clicking nonsensical content for the purpose of getting eyeballs on advertisements. Sadly, Facebook is one of the largest disseminators of clickbait, and recently they have taken to displaying more and more TikTok reels which, instead of being informative or entertaining, are simply more advertising.
So some might ask, in the voice of Tevye, “If it’s so annoying, why do you stay on Facebook?” Well, I stay because Facebook is my Internet home, where many of my family and friends from all over the world are found, and it’s the most convenient way of keeping in touch with them until something better comes along. Like Anatevka, it’s not much… but it’s better than nothing. That said, if there ever happens to be a better platform that doesn’t treat its user base as product to be sold, I’ll be “off like a jug handle.”
I really, really need to stop ordering things from Facebook-promoted ads. I’ve written previously and copiously about the nature of promoted posts on Facebook, and thought I had learned my lesson; some of these things are pretty enticing, though. Well, shame on me.
But as a word to the wiser-than-I, my latest escapade with a Chinese merchant, one who – not unlike most of them – have all the ethics of a starving honey badger.
This one of many Amazon listings for the item we ordered, although we bought from a company named “blueorxy” – clearly a randomly-generated name. They’re still out there, and I would trust them as far as I could throw a Steinway piano. As soon as we ordered, we started getting notifications from a supposed tracking company; the notifications ended on December 10, and from then nothing was heard.
The package finally appeared on 15 January, with the following label:
The label shows clearly that it was shipped directly from China. The whole series of notifications from “shipping@24hservice.vip” was a bunch of computer-generated nonsense. We paid nearly $40.00 for a cheaply-made, cheaply painted resin piece of garbage that isn’t worth $3.95.
When I tried complaining about the quality and shipping deception, I got this from their auto-bot (no hope of contacting a real person):
～Uh-oh. I sincerely apologize for giving you an unpleasant shopping experience. Please trust your first choice. This product has a high sales volume in our company and has several advantages:
First: The price is high cost-performance. Second: Customer evaluation is good. Third: The buyback rate is high. So it is a better choice to keep it.
Sorry you are not satisfied with our products. Will it be possible to give others as a gift? They are superior in quality and reasonable in price. They have been in top-seller in our company for many years. Under the circumstance that we did not send the wrong goods, we cannot provide you with return and exchange services. If you need to return or exchange, we need to report and verify your problem to the after-sales department, which will take a long time.
Therefore, we recommend that you keep this item.
Thank you for your understanding. Yours sincerely, Customer Service Team
In other words, “We’ve got your money, sucks to be you.”
The level of dishonesty and deception from Chinese vendors is breathtaking in scope. Learn from my mistakes, and stay away from all Facebook promoted posts or anything that looks like it’s sold directly from China. Amazon, too, is a nest of fraud and trickery, thanks to thousands of illegitimate sellers, and Amazon is not doing anywhere near enough to combat the problem.
I have written before about dealing with scammers on Craigslist, but this vehicle – as well as Facebook Marketplace or local swap/sell groups – is still an effective way to generate some cash for items that one no longer needs.
But above and beyond scams, which seem to surface with just about every ad placed thanks to bots run by the bad guys, there are always challenges to deal with. The series below by Kevin McShane at kevincomics.com is illustrative of some of the things one has to deal with on a regular basis.
The first one (being ghosted) is by far the most common. Hey, if you’re not really interested, why did you ask in the first place? How much energy does it take to just send a courteous message to the seller saying “Thanks for the info, but I’ve changed my mind” or something like that? I cannot tell you how much I appreciate the people who have the decency to do this.
The second one is infuriating. Sometimes it’s all I can do to refrain from sending back (in all caps) “JUST READ THE @#$% POST, YOU BLISTERING SIMPLETON!”
Despite putting in all my posts something like “No holds, no deliveries” I will invariably have someone express interest and then say “Can you deliver to Augusta?” Lazy wanker. Instead of unloading a semi-full of obscene imprecations at them, the Goodwoman of the House suggested replying, “Sure, for an extra $100.00.” That might just get the message across as well.
Then there are the folks who will say, “I want this but I won’t get paid until Friday, can you hold it for me?” I’ve been stung far too often by this, because Friday comes and either they ghost me (#1 above) or come back with “Hey I changed my mind.” In the meantime, I could have sold it three times over and by now the other buyers have moved on. So I don’t do that any longer. If you want me to hold something, you can pay me with PayPal or one of the other cash apps, and then I’ll hold it until Friday.
The kind of person who is too lazy to bargain is always a burr under my saddle. Just sending a message saying “bottom dollar price” or “what’s the lowest you’ll take” or “will you take less” is a dick move. No, I’m not going to put in your work for you, dipweeds. Make me an offer and I’ll either accept it or counter. And if I counter and you don’t move at all, I’m not likely to sell it to you. This is how dickering works. If you don’t do this, you’re more interested in “winning” than in getting an item for a good price.
[When we sold our first home in 1980, my first wife and I listed it for a very fair price given the work we had put in to improve it. We had a guy come in and say outright, “I’m the kind of guy who is used to getting what I want” and offering us $500 less on a $49,000 home. (I know, I know, prices today are insane, but at that time it was a good deal on an 800 ft² home.) Clearly it wasn’t about the money, it was about winning, and if he hadn’t said that I might have been just fine with a bit of wiggle room. We took the offer because we were in a difficult situation, but I wish I had been able to tell him to shove his offer where the sun doesn’t shine; pay our asking price or buy something else. The smug grin on his face still raises my blood pressure when I think of it 40 years later. Up yours, Monty.]
As for the last one, I’m not your therapist, buddy. Leave the story out and just cut to the chase. Can you pick it up today or not?
Like I said, online selling can be very productive, but dealing with idiots definitely raises the blood pressure. It makes me have even more respect for retail workers, who doubtless have to put up with similar nonsense many times every day.
This is a broad generalization, but based on results and statistics, it’s not an unfair statement. An overwhelming preponderance of Facebook advertising leads to scammy sites that promise one thing and deliver another, or which take your money and deliver nothing at all. I’ve written about this before, but another one crossed my screen today.
Interestingly enough, the link (sent to me by my wife) leads to the general website which has all sorts of “amazing deals” but which makes no mention of the product above.
Amazon has the same item… for almost a thousand dollars.
And this “auntpump” website is offering you two of them for $30.00? You can bet this website has been set up by unscrupulous scumbags with all the ethics of a starving honey badger. I’d bet a bowl of wonton soup it’s being operated from China.
Be very, very careful with anything you see advertised on Facebook. Never click on Facebook ads directly. Do a web search and locate the company directly, and make some inquiries before sending money to any firm that advertises there, because Meta will happily take advertising dollars from anyone with two coppers to rub together without the slightest effort to verify their legitimacy.
I have written about blog spammers multiple times. I had hoped that with time this repugnant technique for driving traffic would have died out, but no such luck.
Looked at my list of followers today, and the top ones are displayed here:
Every single one of these is a sleazy-looking marketing website. By following my blog, I assume they hope either a) I will follow them back, or b) this will somehow raise their rankings in Google or other search engines. A few examples of what you find if you happen to click their links:
Seriously, people? This is not how to advertise your businesses. It’s definitely a dick move, and is a solid guarantee that I will never ever use your services or do business with you.
“Research has recently discovered an incredibly effective way to shrink your prostate,” trumpets the landing page. “We don’t know how long this video will be up, the medical industry sure does not like it… watch it now while you can.”
Well, just because I am concerned about prostate issues, I did watch it. But now I want that hour of my life back. The first thing that annoyed me is that there’s no progress bar, so you can’t skip to the money shot at the end. You have to watch the. whole. thing.
So I did. And here’s this guy dressed in a doctor’s coat, spewing the awfullest marketing drivel I have ever heard, mostly involving scare tactics about what could happen if your enlarged prostate is not treated, and how ineffective / painful / inconvenient / expensive traditional treatments are.
For years, the good doctor (I looked him up, and find absolutely no hits on Google for his name) “wrecked his brain” [sic] regarding a better solution, and after 40 minutes or so of frightening you into thinking you’re going to die, finally introduces his own “Prostate well-being formulation” which is affordable and effective.
The remainder of the video discusses all the ingredients at length and makes significant claims for all of them. (Yes, the official website includes the standard “Nutritional Miranda” popularized by Orrin Hatch, to wit:
“Statements made by Mediamap Limited, PhytoThriveLabs and Fluxactive Complete have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA does not evaluate or test herbs. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any illness or disease.”
but it’s well-hidden in a separate disclaimer page. And, this product is nothing more than a compendium of herbs (a formula “based on decades of science”), not one of which has any tested and proven effect on prostate health.
But hey, we’ve got over 60,000 customers, so it’s got to be good, right? Right?
Some of the claims made during the course of this video imply:
Stop prostate cell growth
Reduce insulin levels
Cayenne, Vitamin E
Rare and powerful anti-inflammatory effects
Bulletproof your prostate
Rejuvenate your DNA, reduce arthritis
Enhance blood flow
Increase ability to pee
Increase sexual function – transform you into a MAN as well
Increase libido and quality of erections.
Nerve tonic
Add years if not decades to your life expectancy
Regain your dignity (Today is your last chance!)
Feel a surge of energy you haven’t felt in decades
Repair inflammation and cellular damage over time
Achieve the prostate of a 20-year-old
Then comes the financial pitch. “I don’t care about money, says the good doctor. “I just want to help people.” Customers have told me they would pay thousands of dollars for a single bottle. 🐂 💩
“For a limited time (scarcity) this is the largest discount I’ve ever offered. Buy the multiple-bottle discount packages. One-time offer! Buy the multi-pack today to avoid future disappointments and price increases. Order at least three bottles! But if you don’t want [horrible symptoms], take advantage of our 6 bottle package! Make the right investment in your health. Act NOW while supplies last, because we may discontinue production any day now if we can’t make this great formulation. (scarcity) If you don’t, you’ll be hooked for life and pay large money for treatment, including that $30,000 surgery. The longer you wait, the greater your risk of complications like Urinary Tract Infections, Testicular Tumors, and a whole host of others. Time is running out! Buy this Product. Make the Right Decision! I’m not trying to scare you, these are real risks of doing nothing.
The video claims to offer a 60-day risk free money-back guarantee, even if you return empty bottles. But! The official return policy (also buried in a totally non-obvious link) says:
“All items purchased online can be returned within 60 days after they have been received by you. We accept returns of all unopened items within 60 days of receiving them for a full refund minus any shipping fees.”
So I would suggest you might have a hard time returning empty bottles for a refund, even if the product did nothing for you.
But wait, there’s more!
Act right away and complete order in the next 5 minutes, get the Fast action Upgrade Kit (questionable digital documents that cost them nothing)
Biohacking secrets ($97.00) – hack your mind and body with modern techniques
Supercharge your body ($97.00) – Charge your immune system, best exercises, foods to adopt
Includes 20 helpful videos
1-day detox miracle guide – ($67.00) – only need to use it once a month. Flush out the toxins. Designed to flush out all heavy metals and other toxins. ¹
10 ways to turbocharge your Testosterone ($67.00)
More disclaimers:
Results will vary. But these ingredients will have same effects on everyone. Guaranteed. This remedy will work for you. Absolutely. But you have the 60-day money-back guarantee. “The information presented on or through the Website is made available solely for general information purposes. The Company is not making any warranty about the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of this information. Any reliance you place on that information is strictly at your own risk. The Company disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on those materials by you or any other visitor to the Website, or by anyone who may be informed of any of its contents.”
In other words, “Let the buyer beware.”
So what’s in this miracle formulation?
Ginseng
Vitamin E
Ginko Biloba
Oat Straw
Vitamin B3
Hawthorn
Muira Puama
Epimedium Saggitatum
Tribulus
Catuaba
Damiana
All of these ingredients are claimed in various places to have all sorts of health benefits. None, if any, have been rigorously scientifically proven with double-blind, randomized, placebo-based trials. But the herbal supplement global market is a $30 billion affair, and far too many producers want a slice of that pie regardless of how effective their products are, and as long as they include the “nutritional Miranda,” the FDA can’t touch them.
It’s hard for the average consumer to get accurate information about any given product. Go to google and type in “Fluxactive Complete scam or legit” and you’ll get pages and pages of things like this… all placed by affiliate marketers. The bottom line of these pages is “Buy this product now so that I can get a commission on the sale.” And these are the top results, thanks to black-hat SEO techniques which have essentially ruined searches on the internet.
Even YouTube is awash with deceptive videos:
And there are literally pages of these, each posted by affiliate marketers. Each one of these claims to show that FluxActive Complete is a scam, but in the end they recommend that you purchase the product through their affiliate link, hoping to make a commission on the sale.
From a product analysis website in India:
“There’s a lot of attention around Fluxactive, so is it a fraud or a real health supplement? At this point, it’s uncertain. What is known is that the product has not yet been subjected to scientific testing, and some users have reported negative consequences after using it, such as a rash and nausea. While Fluxactive Complete may be beneficial to some people, it is not a full health care and should be treated with caution.”
The sad part of this whole deal is that there are virtually thousands of herbal nostrums, placebos, and nocebos² being marketed in this way. Until the nutritional market can be appropriately regulated, which means repealing Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, Nutritional supplements need to be treated like drugs, not food. Sadly, the lobbying effort to preserve this status is massive, given the quantities of money to be made on vitamins, minerals, herbs, and other supplements.
The sad part of this whole deal is that there are virtually thousands of herbal nostrums, placebos, and nocebos² being marketed in this way. Until the nutritional market can be appropriately regulated, which means repealing Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, Nutritional supplements need to be treated like drugs, not food. Sadly, the lobbying effort to preserve this status is massive, given the quantities of money to be made on vitamins, minerals, herbs, and other supplements.
The bottom line: Be careful out there, and make good choices with your health. Don’t waste money on compounds that are advertised in this manner. Consult your doctor. If this were really an effective way of treating enlarged prostates, the medical machine would be all over it.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
Footnotes
¹ Heavy metal poisoning is treated with chelating agents such as:
Dimercaprol.
Dimercaptosuccinic acid (succimer).
Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA).
Penicillamine.
.Heavy metal poisoning cannot be treated with herbs, minerals, or other “natural” remedies, despite many such claims.
² A nocebo is a treatment that has negative effects upon the patient rather than the desired benefit.
Just an example here of how the mad rush to monetize the internet infects almost every website you visit. Today, Bon Appétit is the teacher in the moment.
There’s a section about “What You’ll Need,” with the ever-present disclaimer:
All products featured on Bon Appétit are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through the retail links below, we earn an affiliate commission.
So let’s see what we’ll need to make this recipe:
All of these products, lovingly chosen by Bon Appétit’s editors, were selected not for utility but to generate the maximum possible revenue for the website’s owners. I mention this because in order to purchase every one of these items at the listed links (with the exception of the Bon Appétit Market which is currently 404), you would need to shell out $314.00… and Bon Appétit would earn a commission on all of those sales.
I pity the poor wights who come to this page and think they need to buy all of these utensils before they can make the recipe; almost every item on this list could be had at Dollar Tree for $1.25 each (you’d have to go to Walmart or somewhere similar for a 1-quart saucepan for $8.97 instead of $155.00 at Amazon), and the digital scale isn’t even used in the recipe unless you’d rather measure 625 grams of flour instead of 5 cups.
The Internet is an amazing source of information, but overshadowing everything is the commercialization of any possible space. I remember one of the earliest and cleverest examples of turning the Internet into a cash cow, the “Million Dollar Homepage.”
Every pixel on this page sold out, meaning whoever came up with this idea made off with a cool million. It’s interesting to go back in time and revisit the purchasers (many of which are now defunct), and to wonder if that investment in an odd form of advertising ever converted into sales… but I doubt it.
Advertising in general is expensive and largely ineffective; the best websites hit around an 11% conversion rate, but the average landing page conversion rate is 2.35%. That means that 97% of the money a company spends on internet advertising or a web presence goes directly into the sewer. The ones who make that money are the advertising providers.
The monetization of everything on the Internet seems to be unavoidable, but from where I sit, it’s exhausting.
Back in 2013, I wrote about “junk followers” on WordPress, fake or empty or commercial accounts who use bots to follow every blog they possible can in hopes of more exposure for themselves.
Just in case you were wondering, this is a scummy thing to do, right up there with spam-bombing other people’s blogs with backlinks to your own scummy commercial blog.
“Followers” who liked one of my recent posts. This is just skimming off the cream, there were many others.
I have over 1700 followers, and I’ll bet that I don’t have more than a couple of dozen who are really interested in my content. The rest are simply using tricks to improve their own rankings and drive web traffic to their sites. I don’t really care about numbers, since I have no intention of monetizing this blog, but a lot of my focus is trying to reduce spam, scams, and fraud, and warn people about how to avoid being taken advantage of. And this kind of thing is just like a burr under my saddle.
I had to delete about 20 of these, clearly produced by a robot.
If you’re a blogger, don’t do this. Don’t use bots to “like” or “follow” everything in site in order to boost your own presence. It stinks, and it makes you look cheap and disreputable.
When I was 10 years old, my mom brought home a box of Life™, a new brand of cereal produced by Quaker Oats. I fell in love with it at once; it was sweet but not too sweet, crunchy but not too crunchy, with a little hint of softness to it, and it had a unique flavor that I found completely appealing.
Life is still out there, even though it has been reformulated a few times. But the worst change came in 1997 when Quaker introduced a “new, improved” Life, and then the world collapsed around their ears. I, like many other aficionados, wrote to Quaker screaming, “You’ve ruined my life!” It was completely different, nothing like the original, and it failed so spectacularly that the company went back to the original formulation and sent out an apology letter to those who had complained. Since then, except for the introduction or trial of a few additional flavors, their product has remained pretty much the same. But I wish I could have the original formula back.
Now we come to Tums™. I’ve suffered heartburn for a long, long time and always had to have a supply of something or other around to put out the fire (this was in the days before the beta-blockers and PPI’s.) Originally I used Rolaids (which absorbs 47 times its weight in excess stomach acid!) but always found it a bit too chalky for my taste, ultimately switching to Tums as an alternative.
I carry around this little jawn on my keyring that would hold 5 or 6 Tums of the 750mg variety, and was partial to the assorted berries flavor. I would buy them at WalMart, but for the last year or so they stopped selling these in favor of the 1000mg strength, which didn’t fit my keyring doodad.
So I was delighted to find a bunch of the 750 strength at RiteAid’s website, and bought 10 bottles, thinking that this would last me probably for the rest of my life. To my horror, they are nothing like the Tums I used to know. Chalky, bland, and with a flavor that made me think they had scooped up a bunch of the blue stuff you find in airplane toilets and turned it into tablets. The aftertaste was even worse.
Here’s a rundown of what changed:
Tums old and New Formulas
So essentially they added crospovidone, dextrose, magnesium stearate and maltodextrin, and dropped the mineral oil and sodium polyphosphate. No way to tell what changed in the “flavors” category, because they never tell you such things. But in all honesty, the result is the abomination of desolation, and now I’m stuck with 10 bottles of a product that makes me want to gag. I’d rather go back to Rolaids than keep using these.
I called Glaxo Smith Kline at their customer service number, and politely expressed my unhappiness; I’m aware the agent has virtually nothing to do with such things, but I was gratified that the agent had the honesty to tell me I’m not the only one who has called in to express dissatisfaction with the new formula. So it’s not just me.
Playing in the World Game 