Post Xmas Canadian Dietfraud Rush 2006 Is Underway!

As has been the custom in Canada every year since 2000, the post Christmas period brings a new rush of diet fraud ads to the marketplace. Most of the lastest diet fraud ads reported to us are not new ones, but some of these oldies have expanded to new territories.

Here are the latest reported ads:

Ciren 12: This promotion, out of Terrebonne just northeast of Montreal, has re-surfaced on the 12th of January 2006 with ads in the entertainment magazine "24 Hours", and on Sunday January 14th throughout Canada in the Sun newspaper chain. "24 Hours" is an entertainment magazine, and is also published by the Sun publishing group, and is available in both Toronto and Vancouver. At this point we are not sure if both Vancouver and Toronto are seeing "24 Hours" with the latest ads.

We have also had reports of personalized direct mail outs with this promotion.

The ads continue to report a non-existent company called Canadian Centre For Weight-Loss as the company behind the promotion with an address at a shared office complex in North York (which simply collects mail). All of this leads to a business in Terrebonne that just happens to be in the adult video business.

PapayaPlus: This is the longest running current Canadian diet fraud, and is clearly coming from Montreal. For the last 3+ years, it has been running out of mailboxes in Cornwall and Montreal.

In the January 14th 2006 edition of the Sun newspaper chain, the coupon insert "Shop and Save" contains the latest Canadian version of PapayaPlus. These latest ads are again using the Cornwall MBE mailbox.

As well, since early January 2006, Rainbow Investigations has been contacted by alert California residents to report PapayaPlus ads in newspapers there. These ads have been showing up in newspapers in San Jose, San Francisco and other California states.

These latest U.S. ads are giving an address of 858 W. Armitage Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. This is the address of a UPS store there, and the suite number is the rented mailbox number. This latest development in the PapayaPlus scam is different than what we have seen in the past with PapayaPlus, but this has all the makings of similiar Montreal based diet scams.

Neo-Form 3000: We have had no new reported complaints with this south Ottawa based scam.

Liposvelt: We continue to receive complaints with this scam; this one is also based, in Canada, out of the same mailbox location as Neoform 3000. The U.S. side of this operation uses a New England mailbox. This one operates with a Montreal based 800 number.

SupraSvelt Drops: We have not heard as many complaints about this Montreal based scam which is run out of a Michigan based UPS store which is not far from a fulfillment location. What complaints we are receiving, continue to be from direct mail-outs, and are pretty well widespread all over the U.S.

While this latest January blitz of Canadian dietfruad ads is not entirely unexpected, as this has been the trend in Canada for the last 6 years, it again shows how ineffective our compliance units are in Canada.

So that is the latest we are hearing - keep us informed consumers, whenever you see one of those full page ads that are simply too good to be true, send us an email.

Ron Reinhold.

Date of Story: Saturday, January 14, 2006
Story Posted By: Ron Reinhold
Source: Ron Reinhold

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