My Investigation into Tru Green Coffee Bean – The Response

[Update 9/13/12 - if you are looking for my thoughts on Tru Raspberry Ketones see this post]

Guys something super exciting happened to me tonight (besides wordpress deleting my first draft of this post just before I hit submit… thanks for that) – I got spammed by someone closely connected to the company which distributes the Tru Green Coffee Extract pills (Healthy Body LLLC)!

You may think that it is strange that I am excited about this, but to me it says that my post has had a real impact in educating people about this issue and they felt the need to fight back with a misinformation campaign! I’m writing this post to provide you guys with the evidence that I acquired which I believe demonstrates that this is what happened, and also so you guys can be aware of this kind of thing happening in the wider world of online product reviews. If you don’t want to read on to see my evidence, then long story short is that in my opinion this product will not do what it advertises, and if you were debating purchasing it, I wouldn’t. If you are interested in my rationale you can read about it in my previous post here.

Earlier this evening I received an email alerting me that someone had posted a comment on my blog, and being that I haven’t yet built up the kind of community where comments are a regular occurrence (though we are getting there folks!) I was really excited to see what they had to say. I was a little bit disappointed when I read the following:

My disappointment came from the fact that the post jumped out to me almost immediately as being spam. The story was too neat and the wording just made me suspicious (too many exclamatory positives “pounds fly off”, “same great results”). It also struck me as weird that the comment referenced the clinical trial, because I have discussed it in previous posts and it came across sounding like an advertisement honestly. The clinical trial referenced, by the way, has a lot of problems with its methodology that I wont go into right now, but you can read an excellent discussion of them on this Science-Based Medicine blog.

My other clue that this was probably a spam comment was the email address listed for the commenter, which consisted of a seemingly random combination of letters and numbers at yahoo.com. As far as I am concerned that is the digital equivalent in some ways as a burner phone (though not entirely fool proof).

Being the techy geek that I am (and proud of it), I decided to go about trying to determine the identity of the commenter. I knew that the owner of the company was based in Idaho, so my first thought was the see if the IP address provided with the comment tracked back to Idaho. I plugged the IP into a GPS locator at WhatIsMyIPAddress.com and received the following treat:

Not only did this track back to Idaho, but it tracked back to Nampa, Idaho – which I immediately recognized as one of the listed addresses for the only Adam Hagaman (owner of Healthy Body LLLC) in Idaho. As far as I was concerned this pretty much was a dead giveaway that Adam, or one of his associates, had written this fake positive review in an attempt to counteract the “bad press” from my earlier post.

I also remembered that the post was written by “Sheila” and when I did a whitepages search for Adam, a Sheila Hagaman was listed as a known associate, and vice versa as shown below:

My conclusion is that the comment, which I think we can safely say is a fake positive product review, was posted by either Sheila (whom I believe to be Adam’s wife) in a misguided attempt at defending her husband’s business, or by Adam using his wife’s name. Either way this sort of practice is unethical and gives me further confirmation that this is not a product which I would want to be using, much less ingesting, if this is the integrity of the company.

I wish I could say that this practice is rare, however that is not the case. You may have seen recently that 50-70% of President Obama’s followers on Twitter have been discovered to be fake or inactive (by the way… 90% of my followers on Twitter are good according to this Fake Follower Checker! oh and … follow me). Many of the fake accounts on Twitter or other social media sites are created for one purpose – to covertly advertise for a product, brand, or person. There are whole companies dedicated to this kind of social media influencing strategy. What this means for you, dear reader, is that you have to be vigilant, do your own research, and if it sounds too good to be true… well, you know the rest.

Speaking of which – if you guys ever come across another product or claim which you aren’t sure about, send it my way (email, comment, tweet)! I can do the digging for you, and post it for everyone to see and learn from; good or bad.