Before people took to Yelp! to complain about a business, consumers aired their grievances to the Better Business Bureau. Finding out that you got a bad review in the BBB was the nail in the coffin for a business at one time.
While you don’t hear their name as much, that does not mean they haven’t been working. They just did some great work to expose fake pages online posing as weed stores.
Per High Times
The Better Business Bureau (BBB), founded in 1912 to provide consumer protection and industry self-regulation, was a reaction to “medical quackery and the promotion of nostrums and worthless drugs,” according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).
So here we are, 105 years later, and the BBB has gone back to its original motivating objective.
Having received a tip through its own ScamTracker, the BBB stepped up to the plate and warned it was investigating two web-based businesses—Denver Marijuana and Denver Smoke Buds.
Their investigation found that the fake companies claimed to be selling a large variety of substances like bath salts and “research chemicals,” as well as marijuana products.
They checked out the business addresses, which didn’t compute and their hyperlinks led to false addresses.
“One huge red flag for us is when there is no link to registration with the Colorado Secretary of State,” explained Krista Ferndelli, director of marketing and communications for the BBB of Denver, in a press release. “Both of these places show no owner, no managing staff, and have some sketchy information about where they are based.”
Denver Smoke Buds, for instance, claims in some places on its site to be based out of Atlanta, Georgia, while on other pages, it claims to be based in Denver.
“Whenever we called them, they would deliberately hang up. They also list themselves as winners of fake awards on their website,” Ferndelli said.
The BBB reminds consumers that mail-order weed is illegal on both the state and federal levels.
“The BBB can always be a good way to check if a business is legitimate,” Ferndelli suggested. “Make sure to listen to other people in the marketplace and try to understand the laws surrounding marijuana.”
The real moral of this story is, stop trying to buy weed off Instagram.