The Mom Club

In my search for the best diet pill, I came across a site that was blatantly promoting a diet pill called Phenhermin. At first I thought it was a prescription diet pill, but after doing a little digging I reallized that it is nothing more then an $80 hoodia gordonii vitamin. Then I did some further digging and not only were all of the products being promoted as the best diet pills sold by the same company, they were all hoodia gordonii. It also seems that they were all knock-offs, or trying to capitalize on using strange spelling variations of the prescription diet pill Phentermine. They have products called Phentramin, Phentirmine, Phenhermin, Phenhermine and the list goes on. I have read reviews on websites where customers thought the were getting a prescription diet aid. What a bust.

Phenhermin and Hoodia Gordonii

In an article titled “Hoodia fraud: Counterfeit hoodia gordonii weight loss pills dominate the market” the author speaks as to how consumers are getting ripped off by hoodia companies. He states:

So, you have these two camps. Camp one is the honest camp, and camp two is the con camp. Now, the question for you as a consumer is how do you tell the difference between these two camps?

Again, you might think that’s easy, but it’s not. It’s actually very, very tricky. If you’re a con artist and you’re running a hoodia business and you’re in camp two, your job is just to convince people that you have the real thing, and that’s very easy to do. All you have to do is get one sample of genuine hoodia, bottle it up and send it off to one of the two laboratories doing the testing in the United States. Once you get a lab test result that shows it to be genuine, you post that result on your web site, and that’s the last thing you do with genuine hoodia.

From that point forward, you just buy adulterated hoodia, or counterfeit hoodia, and you fill all your bottles with that substance, which could include sawdust, cellulose, ground up leaves or any other plant material. Then it looks to the world like you’re selling the real thing, because you have this certificate, and you have lab tests that show it to be genuine.

Of course, all these con artist web sites have text on them that says, “We’re the only ones with real genuine hoodia, and everybody else is counterfeit.” That’s how you play this game if you’re a con artist, and I guarantee you that every con artist out there selling hoodia is doing this exact same thing.

Counterfeit documentation
The second thing a con artist does is post a counterfeit CITES certificate, which is a certificate of export from South Africa that covers the exportation of protected plant species. Genuine hoodia will always be accompanied by a CITES certificate. Real hoodia cannot be exported out of South Africa without this certificate.

So what do hoodia con artists do? They download the certificates that have been posted by legitimate companies, and then they do a little Photoshop photo editing to modify the original information on this certificate. Then they post the altered image on their own web site, and all of a sudden, it looks like they have their own CITES certificate, and they have lab test results showing their product to be genuine. They appear to have two pieces of documentation “proving” that their product is real, while, in fact, they know it to be counterfeit.

The consumer, of course, is clueless in this situation because if you visit one of these web sites, it all looks real. They might even have testimonials that are real or fictitious, and it looks like a good deal, because it’s a lower price, perhaps, than some of the other web sites where you’ve seen hoodia. People buy into this, and this happens over and over, thousands of times a day across this country and around the world.

I really don’t know why people would go to such lengths to even promote Hoodia Gordonii. It has never been scientifically proven to help anyone lose weight.

Phenhermin costs a crazy $80. Definitely not a bargain considering I just saw Hoodia Pills at Target for $15. If you are buying in to the Hoodia Hype, then I would recommend going to a drug store, Wal-Mart, Target or GNC to find it. $50, $60, $80 is way too much to spend on Hoodia and it is too much to spend on Phenhermin.

Posted by: admin In: Diet Pills

31 Jul, 2009