Brian
Manhattan Beach,#2Author of original report
Wed, April 01, 2009
Dear Sandi: First, please know I am so sympathetic to your plight. To advance the discussion I want you to know you are wrong about one thing, Diamonds International is not the way it is because of a big mean unsympathetic corporate culture. I can well imagine that because of their unbending policy it might seem that way. The company is family owned as an LLC or closely held corporation. It is a big company though, and does, according to one of their reps I spoke to this morning, Isaac H., possibly Issac Hecht, about One Billion Dollars in annual gross sales. The names of the owners almost never come up in any of the many places to find complaints (Rip-off Reports is just a small tip of the iceberg.) Also, try Complaints.com, Complaints board.com, Cruisecritic.com, Jewelryblogger.com (Jewelry News), NYTimes.com Anemona Hartocollis staff writer, Rapaport News,Tripadvisor.com and others. In fact, just Google, Fraud Diamonds International New York and see the above-listed results and many other forums reporting the same pattern you see here. I don't know when it happened, but in my opinion, at some point making money and succeeding in America changed. The business model in America became not about service to the communityIt became about enticing people into bad decisions. Look at the sub-prime mortgage industry as a prime example. The richest most successful entrepreneurs in America sell candy of all sorts. The scammers exploit the fact that, although we all want candy, too much injudicious consumption is not good for you. Almost all bad decisions about finances have two things in common-- greed and trust. Trust carries with it riskscan anyone say, Madoff made off with the money easily due to blind trust.? This trend is one reason Rip-Off Reports is so valuable. Let's take the diamond industry and the world in which DI operates for a second. A definition of service in this industry would be providing good quality at reasonable prices-not getting people in a captive setting and enticing them to overspend on inferior products. The former is old America; the latter is the new America. How so? What does the biggest most successful diamond company in the Caribbean do? It leases space on booze cruises with Carnival Cruise Lines, etc., through a company called PPI Sleep Services, gives classes in diamond buying on board and then advises of recommended stores (to avoid being taken advantage of) at various ports of call. The intermediary that leases the cruise ship space for the classes creates a legal buffer for the cruise line. Many people complain to Carnival but for the most part, it can disavow making a recommendation or falsely advertising or guaranteeing the reputation of the merchant. You see legally, its not really the cruise line making the recommendation-it's the companies they hire out space to on the ship. Those companies are basically name- dropping the cruise line operator because the customers don't appreciate that the recommendation is not coming from the cruise lineit is just being made on the cruise.