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Product Scams and False Advertising: ccc Net Detective
Product Scams: False Advertising, Misrepresentation,
Exaggerated Claims and Products that are not "fit for purpose"
Net Detective
You may have received a spam email with an advertisement for "Net Detective" or seen it online. It looks professional enough, but after receiving a complaint, we did some checking and found dozens of websites listing it as a scam, and quite a few other facts that don't add up right.
See the complaint below, followed by our investigation, which caused us to label this as a scam!
Complaint against Net Detective, presented verbaitim:
See this page for the original source.
This site is promoting product that doesn't work! When confronted, they make a suggestion (like use Internet Expolorer to run their product instead of AOL), and that doesn't work either. When asked for a credit, they say you have to print out and mail (by US Mail) a long form with many questions. When that is done by others (I haven't yet - I disputed my credit card payment instead), credit is still not issued! This company is unethical and defrauding consumers!!
Please take action against them
Investigation
Looking at their website, the first thing that struck us was "endorsed by the national association of independent private investigators TM".
Oddly, there was no link to click on to go the "NAIPI" website. We searched in Google for "national association of independent private investigators" and "NAIPI". All we found we links back to net Detective and Shills hawking NetDetective. We found NO credible evidence that the "national association of independent private investigators" even exists.
Of course, by now we suspect that Net Detective is, in fact, nothing more than a scam, so we took the next logical step: Enter "Net Detective scam" and search. We found dozens of websites with many more complaints. A few a listed here:
Conclusion
From the complaints we saw and information available to us, this appears to be either a scam or else a very, very poorly run business.
We would not recommend it!
Further Information
Copies of the documents mentioned in this news release are available from the FTC's Web site and from the FTC's Consumer Response Center, Room 130, 600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20580. The FTC works for the consumer to prevent fraudulent, deceptive, and unfair business practices and to provide information to help spot, stop, and avoid them. To file a complaint in English or Spanish, click here or call 1-877-382-4357. The FTC enters Internet, telemarketing, identity theft, and other fraud-related complaints into Consumer Sentinel, a secure, online database available to more than 1,600 civil and criminal law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and abroad.
- MEDIA CONTACT:
- Frank Dorman,
Office of Public Affairs
202-326-2674 - STAFF CONTACT:
- Karen Jagielski,
Bureau of Consumer Protection
202-326-2509
To see a list of other product cases click here.
