(CN) --- In early January 2020, LeAnne Tan received a text message promising a free gift of La Pura anti-wrinkle cream in exchange for completing an online survey.
The text purported to be an ad from Amazon and only stipulated a small $4.94 shipping fee. Spurred by this assurance, she took the survey and clicked the link to receive her free gift.
Tan was taken to the La Pura website’s order page, where she saw that two more products had been added to her shopping cart. There was no option to remove them, but she still clicked the “complete my order” box, believing she would only be charged $4.94 in shipping for her “free gift.”
Tan immediately received an email from La Pura saying her credit card would be billed from three separate merchant accounts: “beautifullyremarkableh,” “beautyhealthremarkable” and “skincarehealthybeautygroup.”
But rather than the expected $4.94, Tan was separately charged $88.46 and $84.37, for a total of $172.83 for three products --- La Pura Wrinkle Freezing Moisturizer, La Pura Instant Lifting Eye Serum, and La Pura Instant Tightening Serum.
Alarmed by the charges for products she didn’t want, Tan contacted La Pura’s customer service number. Tan was unavailable for an interview about her experience, but a transcript of the conversation indicates Tan grew increasingly vexed.
After some back and forth with the customer service agent, she secures a 70% refund and a promise that she won’t be charged again — a less than satisfying outcome. “You know, honestly this is so wrong, you guys should be reported,” Tan told the agent.
Instead, she filed a federal class action against some 60 entities that market and brand La Pura products and operate merchant accounts that bill customers’ credit cards. In her complaint, she claims the La Pura defendants “maintained hundreds of such merchant accounts under a host of shell companies, using them in a churn-and-burn scheme” to evade detection by credit card companies and banks who keep lists of high risk merchants in order to decline suspicious transactions.
All of these merchants share the same registered agent whose address leads to a back alley in downtown Sacramento.
It’s an all too common scheme according to consumer protection experts, where an unwitting consumer is lured in by the promise of a free product in exchange for the cost of shipping.
Across the internet, affiliate marketers are paid to post fake celebrity endorsements of various products like La Pura skin cream, enticing consumers to visit phony product landing pages and sign up for a free trial, only to be enrolled in an automatic, high-cost monthly “subscription.”
"None of this surprises me. This is a very lucrative business and they are very sophisticated about who they market to,” said Ira Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates. Most people wouldn’t click on an ad for face cream “endorsed” by Joy Behar, Rheingold said, but it only takes a few.
In scheme like this one, Tan says in her complaint, the La Pura scammers set up a hidden landing page to show the banks that Tan had consented to the free trial — a false-front website that Tan had actually never seen.
Tan’s attorney Kevin Kneupper said he’d been investigating consumer scams for years with his law partner. In a phone interview, he said it’s not about the product. For this type of scheme, the only goal is to get ahold of the consumer’s credit card.
“The product changes over time with whatever the fad is,” Kneupper said. “I've seen people do this with CBD. I’ve seen them doing it with flashlights. I've seen them doing this with skin creams and Keto diets and açai berries. Any time there’s a fad, there’s a new type of website, and a lot of them are copy/paste jobs. They use the same templates.”