Yesterday morning (Veteran’s Day holiday), I saw on email that Michelle had posted a link to me on the social networking site we’re both members of. Along with this link is a message:

Lets quit our jobs and do this wow
http://twitter.com/luca_barese/status/5614193356

I trusted Michelle and was interested, so I clicked the link. It led to a Twitter page that had another link, which I then clicked on. What followed is a “weight loss blog” purportedly written by a married mother who gained weight and found no way to lose it until she discovered two particular products that worked miraculously for her when used together. Separate links are posted for each of the two products, both of which are pills. This was not written like a weight loss blog, more like a 1-post advertisement. A loooong advertisement.

I was hoping that Michelle wasn’t falling for this crap, so I messaged her back. I wrote that it is very evident to me that the “blog” is fake. The whole thing is an advertising page written by the products’ advertisers. The writing itself is too organized commercially speaking for a layperson to have composed it, and they threw in some dumbing-down to make it seem more like some average girl wrote it (“I don’t know all the medical words and stuff, I just know it worked,” etc). If she’s educated enough to compose an ad like that with bullets and strategic point outlines, she wouldn’t have made the “dumbing down” remarks and some word choices that she made. Even the comments on the post seem fake, like more advertising with others’ fake “testimonials,” which I deduced from the type of spelling errors juxtaposed with the lack of common spelling/syntax problems (telling me the former spelling errors were “planted” in an attempt to, again, seem like an average person’s real testimonial) and overly commercialized enthusiasm. These “comments” also served as the convenient conveyance of FAQs, such as how long delivery takes, whether men can use the products, whether older people can use the products, etc. And what’s more ridiculous, the before/after photo at the end of this diet site, supposedly of this girl giving the testimonial, is one that I recognized from a late-nite infomerical that advertises an under-clothing bodysuit which slims down fat rolls immediately to fit you better in smaller clothing sizes. Both photos are taken deliberately in the same location with the same clothes and the same hairdo to show that this was immediately before and after using the bodysuit. It is not meant to be a photo of a girl before taking diet pills and 2 months later showing weight loss.

It just seemed to me like the site was written to appeal to an audience of not-too-smart, too-lazy-to-exercise-and-diet-properly, low-income gullible women trying to regain their youth while not taking responsibility for losing control of their weight to begin with, looking for an easy magic pill shortcut while being unwilling to research and invest time in actual health-inducing activities/changes. And I wrote exactly that in response to her posting.

Mr. W’s eyes bulged when I told him all this over breakfast. “That’s harsh,” he said. “What if she really believes in this stuff? What if SHE’S advertising for this stuff?” So then I checked and felt a little bad when I realized she’d posted the same link on a bunch of other people’s networking pages, altho with different comments, like “Does this look like a job you can do?”; “A great Sunday business read.” I didn’t understand how this to her meant a business project, so maybe she WAS interested in selling the pills. Hmm.

This morning, I heard back from Michelle, but her answer was nothing of what I’d expected. “OMG, I really didn’t post that! I haven’t been on [the site] for days! I really don’t know what happened!” She soon discovered that the link, along with a similar message, had been posted on the sites of ALL her networked friends, including her own site. I told her to change her password immediately, which she did, but maybe it’s not an active person hacking her account as much as a stupid cookie or psycho embedded program, which kills even more credibility for that “diet blog.” Michelle had to send an email to all her friends to apologize for the link posting and to say it really wasn’t from her even tho it was sent from her networking account, and then she went to ALL of our pages and manually deleted all these messages and links. Whew! What a lot of work! How ANNOYING. And, illegal?

You could say that the fact that I’ve now posted the same link on my public access blog here is free advertising for the site and hence gives these jerks exactly what they want, but I’m hoping that people would look to research a little before falling for that crap, and then find and read this post. It worked for the post I wrote about the psychic scams I got in the mail.