The Voice - Consumer's Voice

Dear Consumer’s Voice #1

Please assist me, I bought a product (Vaseline lotion 400ml) at a store on 3 September 2013 afternoon at value P37.95, only to find out this morning that they have an advert dated September 1-7, 2013 with the price of the same product at P24.95 and the promotion is valid from 19 August to 8th September 2013.

How may you guys help me.

Let’s count the number of ways in which this store has breached the Consumer Protection Regulations.

Section 13 (1) (e) of the Consumer Protection Regulations says that a "supplier who offers a commodity or service to a consumer fails to meet minimum standards and specifications if [...] the advertisement or representation of a commodity or service is made with the intent not to dispose of the commodity or service as advertised or represented."

Section 15 (1) (d) says that "A supplier of a commodity or of a service shall fail to meet minimum standards of performance if [...] the commodity or service is advertised with intent not to supply reasonably expected public demand, unless the advertisement discloses a limitation of quantity in immediate conjunction with the advertised commodity or service".

Section 17 (1) (a) says that "The following deceptive methods, acts or practices shall constitute acts of unfair business practice [...] making false or misleading statements of fact concerning the reasons for, existence of, or amounts of price reductions".

So at least three breaches of the Regulations. I suggest that you take the product back to the store and explain to them the error of their ways. If they don’t give you either a full refund or the difference in price then let me know!

Dear Consumer’s Voice #2

How legal or ethical is this? I applied for a store card, where you can just purchase goods and pay for them later. I met all criteria but my application was declined, the reason being I don’t have a credit history in any retail store. In short, I always buy "small things", furniture included, for cash. They do not consider how I serviced my car loans, mortgages and personal loans as they only use history from retail shops not financial institutions. It has been more than 10 years since I became financially independent. They are not willing to be the first ones to start my "credit" history. Can I get any help anywhere??

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this. People with no history of bad payments are denied credit because they don’t have any history at all. It’s one of the ironies of store credit that someone with a poor history is more likely to get credit than someone with none. Obviously stores prefer people with a good credit history but those like you who have been prudent and sensible are disadvantaged because of that.

However I think that you should rejoice to be disadvantaged and instead of applying this card you should continue to be prudent. Continue to avoid credit agreements and always avoid store cards. They might seem convenient but they’re a very expensive way of obtaining things.

By doing so you’ll also avoid the variety of deceptions that are so often associated with store credit. You’ll avoid the failure to show you the contract before you sign it, you’ll avoid the perils of repossession if things go wrong and you’ll avoid paying more than double the cash price of the item. Above all you’ll avoid the risk of financial ruin.

Maybe you should thank the store for helping you avoid all of this? It might be the best thing they could have done for you!

More on "Divinenoni"

A couple of years ago a product called "Divinenoni" was being heavily marketed on Facebook. We were told that it was "Now available in Botswana" and that it could help us to feel young and stay healthy.

What was worrying is that it's proponents made a series of remarkable claims including that it was able to cure cancer and that it should be used INSTEAD of orthodox medicine. Dangerous stuff.

Unfortunately this bogus stuff is still around despite there being no real evidence that it does anything except cost you money.

A reader emailed us about it today:

Good morning, i would like to understand this Noni medicine as most of my colleagues are having it. It is said to be detoxifying so i googled it all to find a message from CONSUMER WATCHDOG, i hope to have not understood it. I think your message was that the sellers are over exaggarate what actually the medicine is doing. Is it worth purchase this product even when not sick maybe to detoxify your body or maybe to deal with issues of constipation???

I will be thankful for your advice.

This was my reply.

My feelings about the Divine Noni product are simple. Their claims are so extreme that you have to question the product and business in general. As you can see on the piece I wrote about it they have claimed in the past that it can cure cancer and that it should even be taken instead of real medicine. That's incredibly dangerous. Given that there is NO evidence for any of the claims they make I think you can safely assume that the products is of little or no value. What effects users might relate are almost certainly either confirmation bias, the placebo effect or just wishful thinking.

Also there's the issue of "detoxification" as a whole. The detox industry is, I'm afraid, based on a lie. The lie is that products can remove toxins from your body. Your body is perfectly well equipped to remove toxins itself, so long as you eat healthily and drink lots of water. The detox industry exists for one purpose only: to sell products, mis-educate consumers into buying worthless products and to make lots and lots of money. See the entry on the Skeptic's Dictionary about detox therapies for more background.

Please don't waste your time and money on products that don't actually do anything and about which miraculous claims are made. Instead spend the money on fresh fruit! it even tastes better I'm told.

The Abortion Clinic - Action, better late than never?

We reported on The Abortion Clinic, the South African pedlars of probably fake abortion pills as far back as April this year.

This crook claims to be selling Misoprostol, a heavy-duty "morning after" pill. Misoprostol is not something you fool around with. According to RxList Misoprostol (also known as Cytotec) is heavy-duty material and in a large warning says:

"UTERINE RUPTURE HAS BEEN REPORTED WHEN CYTOTEC WAS ADMINISTERED IN PREGNANT WOMEN TO INDUCE LABOR OR TO INDUCE ABORTION BEYOND THE EIGHTH WEEK OF PREGNANCY"

He offers to deal with "un wanted pregnancies,womb cleaning in a private enviornment". It didn't take much work to establish that he's not a real doctor at all. He's a traditional quack.

According to reports in the Sunday Standard today it seems like the forces of Law and Order have finally caught up and are taking an interest.

Sorry if this sounds pompous and gloating it's not meant to, but we told the authorities about this in April. You heard it here first.

Better late than never?

Ask questions

I was taught that in business there are no stupid questions. There are plenty of stupid answers but rarely a stupid question.

I was taught this because I was in a job where my primarily responsibility was to understand certain parts of our clients’ businesses. Only when I had a proper understanding could I possibly be expected to suggest things to them, identify weaknesses and come up with ideas to make things better.

But that occasionally required some stupid questions. Why, I once had to ask, do you have an unwritten rule that you only recruit people who went to this groups of schools but never from that group of schools? The answer was that the first group were known to be Protestant schools, the latter were Roman Catholic. This particular wing of this international company didn’t like Catholics. Guess which country that was?

One much closer to home involved the number of meetings we were having during a project. Why, I asked repeatedly, am I being invited to so many meetings? Most of the time I have nothing to contribute. I eventually discovered that it wasn’t my popularity, it was that I was the only member of the team that wasn’t actually employed by this organisation. I was an outsider. This organisation’s rules stated that if I was present at the meeting they were entitled to order refreshments. No me, no biscuits. My resulting unpopularity, when I started to refuse the meeting requests, was luckily short-lived.

More often than not the answers aren’t that specific. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve asked managers of a company why they do something only to be told either “We’ve always done it that way” or, more often, “I’ve no idea”.

The problem all organisations face is that decisions were often taken in the past without any record of why they were taken. Usually the person who decided has long since left and their legacy was one of ignorance.

More importantly consumers should be asking questions of suppliers. Questions like “Can I see a copy of the contract before I’m asked to sign it?”, “Can I take it home to show my Mum before I sign it?” and “Why have you printed it in such small characters and do you have a magnifying glass I can borrow?”

The problem is that consumers don’t always know the questions they should be asking. Most of us aren’t experts in complex areas like banking, insurance, credit and technology so it’s very easy for salespeople to confuse us with technical language. Or sometimes just language that is deliberately pompous. I saw recently a letter from an insurance company that demanded that the victim of an accident in a supermarket “let us have your quantum of damages for consideration”. Seriously. I’m sure you know as well as I do what “quantum” means but does everyone?

Luckily the law provides us with some protection. The Consumer Protection Regulations forbid suppliers from “taking advantage of a consumer's inability reasonably to protect his interests by
reason of disability, illiteracy or inability to understand the language of an agreement presented by the other party to the transaction who knows or reasonably should know of the consumer's inability”. In other words, don’t use unnecessarily complicated language.

Another part of the Regulations forbids suppliers from “causing a probability of confusion or of misunderstanding as to the legal rights, obligations, or remedies of a party to a transaction”. Think store credit agreements. How many of them actually explain what happens if you have problems with your repayments? How many of them explain what will happen if your goods are repossessed? How many of them explain what will happen if the goods are faulty or never actually delivered? None of them of course.

So it’s up to us to ask questions before we sign anything.

Just as importantly we should be asking more and more questions of the regulators. I know there are some that do a good job despite the challenges they face, regulators like NBFIRA, the Bureau of Standards and BOTA, but many others are sleeping on the job. They have awesome powers to control their areas but seem to lack the willingness to get their hands dirty.

We should be asking the others, the ones with the power to stop pyramid schemes, Ponzi schemes, foreign exchange schemes and all those suspicious “We’ll teach you how to trade on the stock market” schemes, what they’re doing to protect us because at the moment it looks like they’re doing nothing at all.

Here’s another question we should be asking.

What do you think about your bank?

We're about to start a MAJOR survey on banking in Botswana. The time has come to ask bank customers what they think about their bank, what they like, what they dislike, what they can improve. To do this we need volunteers to share their feelings with us, as many of you as possible. The more data we get, the more convincing the results will be. The more convincing the results are, the more the banks will be forced to take notice.

If you can spare 15 minutes we'd like to interview you over the phone, any time of day or night, in your office, at home, in the bath, wherever you feel most comfortable. Email us your name, which banks you bank with and the phone number we can use to call you on. Please also say what time of day is best for you. If you can "volunteer" your friends or relatives (please ask them first) that's even better.

What's more, everyone who volunteers and who is interviewed will enter a competition and stands to win a prize. We can't afford anything too extravagant but there'll be Consumer Watchdog pens, t-shirts, even some restaurant vouchers.

If you can spare the time email us your details to bankingsurvey@bes.bw and we’ll be in touch. This is your chance to be part of a step towards improving the service they give us in return for all the money they take from us.

The Voice - Consumer's Voice

Dear Consumer’s Voice #1

I just saw your column in The Voice and I was shocked.

I am worried sick about my husband’s bank account because of these people X-FOREX, they are calling me everyday. I started communicating with them last week Tuesday and they asked me to give them the last 3 digit at the back of my ATM card and I told them that I don’t use Visa card, then he asked me if my husband doesn’t have a visa card. I told him yes he does and he said its okay because we use the same surname. I gave him the last three digits and the other long numbers in my husband's card. Immediately after 5 minutes he called and told me that there is no money and asked when he can check the money.

I was so shocked how he managed to access the account and tell me there is no money. Now he is been trying to call me since yesterday even today, but I have not taken his calls. Please help me because maybe they will try the account until they get something. I haven't told my husband yet. I am afraid.

I called this reader as soon as I received this message and my advice was simple. She must call her bank IMMEDIATELY and warn them that husband’s card had been compromised. She then has to have a frank conversation with her husband and tell him what she’s done.

I mentioned XForex a couple of weeks ago. They claim to be able to help people make fortunes by trading foreign exchange but that facts are simple. It’s simply not possible.

Their behavior in this case is further evidence that they can’t be trusted. Please stay far, far away from XForex and anyone who says you can make loads of quick money either with Forex or the stock market.

Dear Consumer’s Voice #2

We heard about another fake loan company this week. This time a company calling itself “Campion Financial Service (Pty) Ltd” wrote to a reader offering a fantastic loan opportunity. They claimed that they had “offered Loans in excess of R50,000,000.00 in our 9years of existence”. They said that our reader could borrow anything from R10,000 to R5 million over periods varying from 6 months to 10 years “at incredible interest rate of 2.5% per annum”.

Incredible indeed. It’s incredible for a number of reasons. Firstly real lenders don’t send out emails blindly offering to lend money to total strangers. Real lenders don’t do everything by email and have proper email addresses, not ones that are based in Thailand. Real lenders have landlines, not just cellphones. Real lenders don’t lend millions to people at a mere 2.5% interest per year.

It’s obviously an advance fee scam but this particular scammer is as clever as the one we featured last week in The Voice. There really is a company called Campion Financial Services in South Africa, a genuine lender that’s a real company, with a real office and phone lines and is even registered with the necessary regulatory bodies. But this letter is nothing to do with the real company. I know because I called the real company and asked.

Just for fun I called the scammer on his cellphone. Like all scammers I’ve spoken to it took him a while to realise that didn’t believe a word he was saying. He seemed genuinely confused when I suggested that he was a liar and a cheat. When I pointed out that I’d spoken to the real Campion Financial Services he just hung up.

So the lesson is simple. Don’t ever trust anyone who approaches you out of the blue offering money. But I think you knew that already, didn’t you?

Store credit - what are they hiding?

We all know that store credit is a dangerous business, dangerous for consumers and not the stores that offer it. One of the key dangers is the secrecy surrounding the agreements that customers sign with the stores.

We found a few months ago that not a single store was prepared to allow potential customers to read their credit agreement before they were required to sign it. Clearly they don't want people to know what the agreement say.

So this is what we need.

Will you send us a copy of any credit agreement you've signed in the last couple of years? It'll be entirely confidential and just for our information.

Either email a copy to watchdog@bes.bw or fax it to +267 3911763.

Why Zeek Rewards Was Such a Successful Scam, by Kasey Chang

"Why Zeek Rewards Was Such a Successful Scam"

An excellent piece on the psychology of scam victimhood by Kasey Chang, the MLM Skeptic.

It's specific to the Zeek Rewards Ponzi scheme that was shut down by the US Securities and Exchange Commission last year but the ideas are universal.

Read it and learn.