Scam or not?? Very hard to tell!

cormie

Hi,
Usually scam sites are pretty clearly scam sites, this however I'm not sure about. I was scouring Google for a site that would ship Frontier Peppermint Oil (official site: http://www.frontiercoop.com/products.php?ct=ssbfbf&cn=Peppermint%20Flavor) to Ireland and wasn't having a lot of luck. As you can see from the official site, the 16oz bottle is much better value than the 2oz so I was looking for that. Found a few different sites that would ship to Ire but they all just seemed to have the 2oz.

I tried amazon.com then and I saw the 16oz there, now from what I know, amazon.com won't ship to Ire, I went to the page http://www.amazon.com/Peppermint-Flavor-Org-oz-Frontier/dp/B0012BULBY/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&s=hpc&qid=1268127941&sr=8-9 and there you can see it says "2 new from $24.59" I clicked this and there I saw another reseller "Herbal Love Shop" (90% positive over the past 12 months (2531 ratings.) 10607 lifetime ratings. from Amazon it appears). So I googled herbal love shop and first result is http://www.herballoveshop.com/, same logo and everything as is on the Amazon page. Now it appears to be much more than just peppermint oil they sell, they seem to sell medicines to help with sexual dysfunction, and there's even a "penis enlargement" tab in the menu which reminded me of the thousands of spam mails I get with that crap.

They have the peppermint and other food flavourings I want too, and buying the 16oz and having them shipped over works out not ridiculously cheaper, but about $40 cheaper after shipping so it didn't seem "too good to be true" just a bit cheaper than the rest and they have the 16oz which would go towards it being cheaper too rather than buying 8 2oz bottles.

I did some googling and didn't find much by just googling their site, but when I put in scam with the search, I got this: http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/herballoveshopcom-c297313.html#comments and then some other results from yahooanswers saying that the stuff they wont help problems being posted about etc. I just want some organic food flavouring though which is from a legit manufacturer/brand so no case of "not working" to worry about.

So I went back to the amazon page and see in the profile that it says their website is http://herballovemall.com, I went here and they don't even have the peppermint oil and the site looks a lot worse than the other one.

If you look at the whois for each site, there seems to be connections with all 3 sites and also with the herbolove site mentioned in the complaintsboard page above:

http://whois.domaintools.com/herballove.com
http://whois.domaintools.com/herballoveshop.com
http://whois.domaintools.com/herballovemall.com

So I'm a bit confused as to the legitimacy of this.

Any feedback would be appreciated here

jor el

Apart from the fact that most of what they seem to be selling is basically snake oil, I don't see any other form of scam. It doesn't look like a scam site, in the sense that you'll never get your order (because the products don't exist), but what you'll get will probably be sub standard rubbish.

cormie

Thanks for the input. I was kinda thinking that myself and since all I want off them is organic food flavourings, brands of which I know and trust, I'd say I should probably be ok. I doubt they'd go to any lengths to counterfeit food flavourings

cormie

Forgot to mention that on their site they have a mcaffee approval thingy which does indeed link to the mcaffee site saying that it's approved!

jor el

cormie wrote: »

I doubt they'd go to any lengths to counterfeit food flavourings

I don't know. Pretty much everything gets copied at some point.

If the price looks like it's too cheap, then it's probably not going to be a genuine product. Things will probably be cheaper in the US, where this site is based, so compare with what US prices should be.

cormie

Yeah, I actually rang the manufacturer of the peppermint oil in the US and although they don't deal with the website directly, they did say that they could have just got it from one of their suppliers and that the price didn't look too far off. Think I'll just give it a go and hope for the best