Sunday, September 14, 2014

Theos Medical Systems & Chummie Involved with Substantial Fraud with Paid Reviews on Amazon.com - Update


More outrageous information about Chummie (Theos Medical Systems) continuing illicit and outright fraudulent activities on Amazon have come to our attention.

Below, we post a print-screen of an Amazon page sent to us by an outraged Amazon customer about Chummie's abusive behavior on Amazon in general, and against DryBuddyEZ specifically in this case. 





  "Jim" wrote a comment about "Micheal's" "review" of DryBuddyEZ on September 12, 2014.
As the print in the above screen shot is not easy to read, but important for viewers to read, I have reproduced it below:

Jim says:


I have found, without doubt, that a nasty competitor of DryBuddy has been attacking DryBuddy for years. Literally.  Google search for "bedwettingalarmsdeceitcatcher" to understand how serious this gets. This competitor has posted a slightly earlier malevolent and fake "review" under the name of "Lito." The subsequent 1-star "reviews" by Drowen, Michael, and Toan Doan are all fake and intended to abuse DryBuddy and its DryBuddyEZ product. These three people are established "reviewers" who provide a horde of 5-stars reviews to a large number of affiliated person. See Micheal's review history. As of the moment he has 53 reviews from September 1 through today. Yes, 53! And ALL 5-stars except for the single 1-star awarded to DryBuddyEZ at the competitor's request! And Micheal's products overlap with others here and on an exhaustive list of fake reviewers used by this competitor. Why can Amazon not adequately control abuse of their review system? Is there someone in Amazon's reviews monitoring area who has some sort of allegiance with this competitor? These are matters that perhaps Mr. Jeff Bezos (the top executive at Amazon) should be informed of and requested to address.

 I would urge readers to ignore these bogus reviews, and Amazon to remove them. This competitor is manipulating Amazon's review system to his advantage and the disadvantage of Amazon and Amazon's customers. I do want to point out that on another major site which competes with Amazon (the number 2 site?) since August 1st the DryBuddyEZ has outsold ALL of this competitors products added together by a factor of almost 3 times! This shows how manipulating Amazon reviews can falsely affect matters on Amazon. I am making a copy of this Amazon page with my comment here which can be part of a package that DryBuddy and Mr. Bezos may receive from me.

For the people in Amazon's Reviews department who are supposed to monitor reviews and remove inappropriate reviews that violate Amazons policies (such as the reviews and reviewers mentioned above), I would recommend google searching for "site/fraudonamazonreviews" which lists about 150 of these exhaustive 5-stars "reviewers" which have been used by this nasty competitor to boost his product reviews on Amazon within the last 2 months.

Jim is correct. We have verified what he says above. As laid out in 


Micheal is one of approximately 150 "paid" reviewers who post 5-stars reviews for their subscribers. These are 150 that Chummie has used to fraudulently boost his "Review Ratings" on Amazon. Assume that there are others. Apparently, Chummie figures out that if such parties can be used to fraudulently boost ratings for their patrons, they can also be used to bad-mouth and lower ratings for victims of their subscribers. So he is now indulging in this dumping 1-star reviews on competitors that he fears and.or bears a grudge against.

We agree with Jim and strongly believe that Chummie has used three of these sponsored reviewers to post 1-star ratings for DryBuddyEZ. Add the review that Chummie has probably done himself as "Lito" and you have further desecration of Amazon's reviews system. As has been suggested earlier, this behavior by Chummie (and probably other as evidenced in the multiple 5-stars reviews posted by these miscreant reviewers) Amazon is sustaining a continuing fraud against its customers.

We also want to point out Chummie's change in strategy to draw in high-ranked reviews. They have now switched almost completely to using Amazon "Vine Reviewers" where Amazon gives them the free product (donated by Chummie). Although the reviewers may be ethical individuals, they are undoubtedly biased in their reviews because they never paid for this free gift. They also want to remain in this "free gifts" program and feel that poor reviews (and the corresponding NOs cast on these reviews by the supplier) may cause them to be excluded from the program. We have read a comment from at least one such Vine Reviewer commiserating about this. And this comment was soon withdrawn.

So we still believe in looking at reviews from Verified Purchasers as being most accurate. Although this too can be abused by Chummie buying its own product from Amazon under false names, it would be more expensive. We estimate that such purchases of the Chummie Elite would cost Chummie between $15 and $20, while donating a freebie to a Vine reviewer probably costs less than $10, and paying one of the fraudulent reviewer to post a review costs much less, especially in the substantial quantities that Chummie purchases.

Amazon certainly could help to reduce fraudulent reviews from the seller by making them more expensive for the seller. They could re-introduce the simple rule that reviews are only accepted from Amazon Verified Purchasers, which they changed and became more lenient about a few month ago.

The extent to which Chummie is being forced to abuse Amazon's review system though very many fraudulent reviews becomes very evident when one look at eBay, where Chummie and DryBuddy sell their products. As verified by Catch Fraud on

from August 1st, 2014 through the first half of today, these are the sales numbers from eBay:

Chummie Elite: 16

DryBuddyEZ:    71

DryBuddyEZ is outselling Chummie Elite by better than 4 to 1 over the most recent month-and-a-half period. And these buyers are people who use their brains instead of listening to Chummie's propaganda.

As we have been saying for well over a year, Chummie exists on hyping its products and bad-mouthing its competitors. Truly a sad and sorry state of affairs for Chummie. And as long as Amazon allows it, it may well continue. As Jim has suggested in his comment above, we also wonder 

Is there someone in Amazon's reviews monitoring area who has some sort of allegiance with this competitor? 

We have run into many situations ourselves where Chummie's preferential treatment on reviews and comments can only be explained by such an illicit connection within Amazon. Will Amazon wake up and actually do something?    ???

And so we continue with this long saga of Chummie's farcical behavior and total lack of ethics.

 













No comments:

Post a Comment