The Evolution of Spam

I received an email last week with a stern warning:

“Mark Honeychurch, STOP drinking water”

The email continued:

_Hello Mark Honeychurch,

Don't drink another drop of water until you read this. New research from the University of Illinois has found by drinking the recommended 10 cups a day of water actively increases the hormone ghrelin (the hunger hormone!) ... slowing your metabolism and making you FATTER!

You'll also discover a new method to lose from 1 to 2½ pounds of fat in 24hrs (that doesn't involve 10 cups of water a day)_

Of course, this sounds too good to be true, but my interest was piqued. What is this product? I clicked on the link, and was taken to a blog that was being used as a stepping stone for this spam, new-exipure.blogspot.com. The website told me they had a “5 second exotic hack” that melts 59lbs (27kg) of fat. It then had a link for me to “ORDER NOW”. Before I clicked any further, I started off by reporting the blog to Google (the owners of Blogspot) for spam content.

Next I wanted to find out more about Exipure, so I typed the product name into google. I was greeted by pages of links to articles on news websites about the products. As I clicked on the links, a few things became apparent.

Firstly, the news headlines all started with the words “Exipure Reviews”, which presumably helps with getting a good google ranking for the keywords people usually use. Along with this, the titles all sounded negative. Given that the weightloss market is filled with nonsense products, this wasn't too surprising.

  • Exipure Reviews: What All Customers Must Know Before Buying Online!
  • Exipure Reviews: What are Customers Really Saying? Critical Updates!
  • Exipure Reviews – Do Not Buy These Weight Loss Diet Pills Yet!
  • Exipure Reviews – Fake Hidden Dangers or Real Tropical Fat Dissolving Loophole?
  • Exipure Reviews: Does It Work? What Customers Must Know! (May 2022)
  • Exipure Reviews: Urgent Investigation Exposes Critical Customer Results!
  • Exipure Reviews - Scam or Real Tropical Loophole Weight Loss Pills?
  • Exipure Reviews 2022 – Fake Weight Loss Promises or Real Customer Results?
  • EXIPURE REVIEW: NEGATIVE SIDE EFFECTS OR EFFECTIVE PILLS?

I found the same thing on YouTube, with lots of videos with titles such as:

  • BUYER BEWARE!! - Exipure Weight Loss Supplement
  • WARNING NOTICE 2022! Exipure Weight Loss Supplement
  • WARNING FOR ALL! Exipure Weight Loss Supplement
  • BE CAREFUL! Exipure Weight Loss Supplement
  • HEED THIS WARNING! Exipure Weight Loss Supplement

I first checked the news websites, and although some of them looked like they might be fake, a lot of them were legitimate American news outlets, usually local papers, like:

  • The Courier-Herald
  • Juneau Empire
  • Bellevue Reporter
  • San Francisco Examiner
  • The Daily World
  • Tacoma Daily Index
  • First Post
  • Washington City Paper
  • Maryland Reporter

Then I noticed that most of these articles were marked as “Sponsored Content”, or just “Sponsored”. Basically, this means that the articles are adverts. I was intrigued by the fact that these paid adverts, dressed up to look like legitimate articles, had headlines that were not glowingly positive, but seemed to be somewhat skeptical. So I started to read the articles themselves. I quickly noticed that the articles were all similar, although not identical - including listing the main ingredients:

  1. Perilla leaves
  2. Amur Cork Bark
  3. Quercetin
  4. Kudzu root
  5. Oleuropein
  6. Propolis
  7. Holy Basil
  8. White Korean Ginseng

The articles all made unsupported claims about the medical uses of each of the ingredients, with talk of their ability to:

  • improve brain health
  • boost the immune system
  • treatment for alcoholism
  • used to treat osteoarthritis
  • reduce stress
  • reduce high blood pressure
  • anti-aging properties
  • boost your metabolic rate

Of course, none of this has been proven - there's either no evidence for the claims, or maybe mention of a single preliminary study. But despite these claims, elsewhere in the articles there were some seeds of doubt:

_Since Exipure is relatively new, it has not completed any clinical trials or research yet.

is it too good to be true about Exipure results?_

The makers of Exipure provide limited information about how their formula increases brown adipose tissue within your body

Sadly these few sentences of good questioning were drowned out in the articles by claims of efficacy, assertions that it's an amazing product, and testimonials from supposed users of the product who have seen “great results”. And it's the same with the videos - despite the titles talking of “warning” and “beware”, the thousands of Exipure videos online are all just positive puff pieces made by hundreds of Exipure customers. I'm guessing that customers are probably offered a discount if they make promotional videos.

Many of these videos are hosted on just a few Youtube channels, and from what I can tell they are using a recent trick spammers have started employing. These channels used to be owned by legitimate content creators, in this case musicians, but they have been hijacked or stolen by spammers - because stealing these accounts means that the spammers end up with an instant audience. In this case the most used channels were Diego Diesel, Bass Sertanejo and Roger DJ (with 182, 213 and 501 thousand subscribers respectively). Google has an abysmal track record of giving these stolen accounts back to their original owners, so for now it remains a popular tactic for spamming - and is often used for selling NFTs.

I dutifully reported the accounts to YouTube:

Speaking of the videos, here's Vanessa, an Exipure customer, talking in a video titled “ALERT [DOES] EXIPURE WORK 2022” on Roger DJ's YouTube channel:

All the articles and videos, as we just heard in that clip, go to great pains to stress that you should only buy your Exipure from exipure.com - my guess here is that this scam company is already fighting off other scam companies that are trying to steal their business by redirecting potential customers to their websites that sell fake versions of this useless product. I know this is a bad pun, but to me it seems that by being ripped off like this they're getting a taste of their own medicine.

This astroturfing is a clever tactic - Exipure has used sponsored articles in lots of small online newspapers, along with getting their customers to flood Youtube with positive videos, to a) make it look like there's positive buzz about their product and b) drown out any legitimate criticism. And using clickbait style negative sounding titles for these articles and videos makes people think that they're trustworthy and honest reviews, when in fact they're simply advertising in disguise. In fact, this flooding of internet search results was so good that after a few minutes of googling I couldn't find a single independent review of the company or their product.

Sadly, they've done a good enough job in this instance that I think many people will end up with a false impression that this miracle diet pill actually works. I think the last word should go to Exipure, who wrote a nice skeptical comment in one of their sponsored adverts:

There's no shortcut to weight loss. To lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you consume. The best way to maintain a caloric deficit is through dieting and exercising.