- Report: #1104790
Complaint Review: Secret (TM) Minerals from the Dead Sea - Phoenix Arizona
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Author Confirmed
Why?
Secret (TM) Minerals from the Dead Sea
3344 E. Camelback Rd, Suite 100 Phoenix Phoenix, 85018 Arizona, USA
Phone:
877-680-9622
Web:
http://seacretdirect.com/
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Secret (TM) "Minerals from the Dead Sea" National multi level marketing company makes wild "snake oil" claims, defrauds customers and screws its own sales agents Phoenix Arizona
SEACRET is a Phoenix, AZ company appparently actually based in Israel that sells various spa and home "rejuvination" beauty and other youth restoration products both through Multi Level Marketing as well as direct to consumer through several websites and on-line distributors. They do business under a couple of DBA's and website names with some documents pointing to apparently non-existant corporations.
Despite claims of being unique, they are but one of dozens of companies that dig up salt and mud from the Dead Sea in Israel and re-process it into various "miraculous" beauty products. They claim that they have supposedly proven their products in clinical studies and further claim to hold three patents with four more pending. However a registered US patent agent was unable to find any patents valid in the US that were assigned to any company with "Seacret" in its name. Similarly, no record could be located of any controlled clinical studies demonstrating efficacy of Dead Sea mud or other products that could be linked to Seacret. Written requests to the company for guidance as to where these patents and studies could be found were intially met with misdirection, then hostility, then silence. In the absence of any such evidence, one has to assume it's wildly overpriced mud being sold as some sort of snake oil solution to skin issues better treated by a doctor.
Like nearly all MLM schemes, agents do not make as much money servicing customers, as they do by recruiting new agents who are forced to sign contracts set in faded tiny type that is impossible to read and with abusive and illegal looking language and then made to buy large quantities of over-priced "starter" products. But wait, how can one tell that they are over-priced? Easy, because the company itself circumvents its own agents by selling products through its websites directly to consumers at a fraction of the price that they sell the same products to their agents; who of course have to them mark them up to cover their costs much less make a profit.
So no matter how hard they work, their sales agents (mostly earnest housewives trying to make a couple of bucks on the side) can't readily sell any products to people for prices that are many times what that customer can find it for on the Internet. Unlike legitimate distribution plans such as Mary Kay, when a customer contacts the company, instead of directing them to the website of a nearbye company trained sales agent, Secret simply sells product directly to the customer, therebye screwing their own sales people. Those sales agents are then stuck with inventory of product they paid more to buy than they could have gotten for themselves retail on the web, and of course Seacret refuses to accept returns of any kind.
Nice folks.
