This morning I received this short, but desperate, email.
The person who wrote it had emailed me a couple of weeks ago and I had sent him general information about my services for providing licensed generic Hep C medicines including prices.
Of course, he shopped around and found a site that sold Hep C meds cheaper than the prices I quoted. This is the email I received this morning:
“Hi Greg,
I believe that I just got scammed by India Mart Care Exim. Do you know of them...?
Please help me.
T### ”
Now the first thing here is that there are hundreds of websites offering Hep C meds for sale. There are cheap sites and expensive sites. Often multiple sites are run by the same people. Price is not the factor that will tell you is someone is running a scam.
Scammers are cunning, they understand how to work the Internet and how to manipulate Google.
They have honey tongues, will lie, provide fake references etc. etc.
Some of scam websites I have seen put up celebrities and “patrons” and have pages and pages of fake references. Of course the celebrities don’t know their image is being used and the fake references are well constructed non-entities.
Because these people have no ethics lots of people get scammed every week.
So what is the solution?
There are many public forums that will provide lists of reliable suppliers.
On Facebook there is the Facebook group that I was involved in founding, Hepatitis C Treatment w/o Borders, on the internet there is Dr Freeman’s FixHepC.com.au, there is David Cowely’s Facebook group Hep C World Generic Treatment. All these sites can link people up with reliable suppliers.
Yet people still get scammed.
So the solution is simple. Check on reputable public forums with large memberships, talk to real people. Never rely on references provided by the person you are thinking of buying from. Get third party information.
It is very unfortunate and very frustrating for me… but devastating for the people who lose their money.
