Continued Confessions
as life goes on
I don’t think I’ve ever had occasion to use the word grifter before (although obviously it is becoming much more useful these days). However, I now have to warn everyone of yet another conman in our midst.
First, a little background because you may not be aware that my eyesight is deteriorating rather rapidly with the kind of dry macular degeneration that becomes geographic atrophy, a leading cause of blindness in the elderly. So given my nature of researching everything I can, I have been studying what is happening to my beautiful green eyes—I mention their color because I learned that the disease is more prevalent in light eyes unfortunately for me. Anyway, obviously some nasty algorithm has been tracking my online research and feeding the information to the aforementioned grifting conman.
Recently my feed was presented with a pop-up which offered to help with my eyesight. I then spent 45 minutes following the spiel of the person who purported to have had the same symptoms and to have found a miraculous “sight saver” which of course led to him expounding on all the ingredients and the scientific studies supportting their use (by the way the AREDS vitamins are indeed recommended and they should be started quite early in the journey but he claims to have added other miraculous ingredients). Anyway, he sports a lab coat and says he is an optmetrist but also a patient. His name is David Lewis and the company is Sight Care out of Dallas, Texas. At the end of the interminable video, we are told that these fabulous vitamins often run out of stock but of course they are available today. The price is initially touted as $269, but then he incrementally slashes it until reaching $69, which by then seems like a bargain. But of course you have to act fast before they run out again.
Well, I still have enough of my marbles to adhere to the adage that if it sounds too good to be true . . . so I closed down his site and went to Google to ask if it is a scam. Of course, the first reference that appears is my question being answered by none other than the original company. But a little further down in the stream I found my fave Dr. Joe Schwarz giving me the real skinny. OF COURSE IT’S A SCAM! Please read Dr. Joe’s takedown for all the sordid details. I just hope that anyone who is losing their sight has enough left to read the truth and call this bastard out. We are all susceptible at our most vulnerable moments but to prey on our fears is despicable.
And that leads me of course to today’s sham of a political party led by the biggest grifter conman of them all. And if you think I’m going to let the huckster pill-selling Dr. Oz be in charge of my Medicare, just know that I’m not going down without a megaphone. Please take care out there to avoid what has become an insidious war of feelings over facts.
I’m going to end my rant this morning with a quote from my Page-a-Day Great Quotes calendar. The world famous author John Steinbeck is quoted as having replied to someone who had asked him for advice: “Sorry—if I had any advice to give I’d take it myself.”
POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
RESIST ALWAYS!
TTFN
I hate all those sites claiming miracle cures in a bottle. A friend of mine fell for a scam last year from a company focused on ayurvedic medicine. He was in need of a kidney transplant and they claimed with their protocol he would be returned to health. Needless to say (and $15 000 later) it did not work and thankfully he received a transplant. I chased the company to no avail. It was a wall of silence.
Dr Oz indeed! I am sure he left Oprah's Xmas list a few years ago:))
Every time I run into one of those interminable videos, I check for an end time. There is never one and I bail. I'm learning to recognize them earlier but they are all grifters.