The Rachel Ray, Oprah, and Forskolin diet emails

Dieting options are all the rage. The emails about various celebrities who have lost weight (and usually gained it back) are inundating email inboxes. Whether we’re talking about Oprah, Rachel Ray, or Dr. Oz’s carb-killing super-ingredients and carb blockers, those emails sent to your inbox have one purpose in mind, lure you to a website where you’ll give up your precious information.

How Rachel Ray dropped four dress sizes or what Dr. Oz has to say about belly types or Forskolin is not the point of this post. Every person’s body is different and the weight-management solution that works for one person may not work for another. That part, you have to figure out on your own. What this post is concerned with are the attempts by scammers to make money off of consumers who are either desperate for a solution and will try anything or who don’t recognize email scams when they see them.

The email comes in looking something like the one shown here. It offers a chance to try “Rachel’s secret pill” for free. What could you lose? In the worst case, the answer would be, how about your identity? The link for the email shown here goes to a website registered to Lawrence Phelps. So does the domain used for one of the Oprah diet emails. And the one for “The Doctor’s Slimmer.” And, and, and . . . Are you starting to see a pattern?

There are other players in this diet email game. The domain owners all have one similar mode of operation. They inundate email inboxes with a variety of “miracle diet pills.” The sites I checked were not listed as hosting malware or as phishing sites. However, they did redirect to a common server, which makes this little universe of emails smack of appearing to be nothing more than spam used to sell a product that may not even be legitimate.

The bottom line is that you should not trust the emails. It took me about a minute to turn up a couple of safe websites where they have information about two of the plans I discussed here. If you really want to know more about the Rachel Ray diet, try this post by Prevention Magazine. For information about Forskolin, ywdiet.com covered it here. You can find additional information on the web about almost any diet plan, but be careful where you surf to avoid being scammed.