Is Chummie's Hype Machine Failing? Chummie Cannot Compete with DryBuddy in Fair Competition!

We wonder what trouble Theos Medical Systems (Chummie) may have got themselves into. And we are not talking about their continuing attacks on competitors, misrepresenting other persons and organizations (both private and government), or the usual balderdash that they are well known for. That's normal and what is expected of Theos. We are talking about their latest sub-par device that they are trying to foster on a hype-bound part of the public that they may have successfully fooled in the past.

Yes, we are talking about the much-hyped Chummie Elite which Chummie introduced on Amazon about the beginning of July, 2014 for $74.99 . And it obviously did not sell.

Look at its record on Amazon, based on reviews. These are recorded and summarized by Catch Fraud (very appropriate name when used here) on

https://sites.google.com/site/fraudonamazonreviews/

Till early September, almost all of the reviews were from paid shills (see this above-mentioned site for substantial details, including the records of the 5-stars giving shills). And, across all Chummie products, we have over 150 such paid shills in this little more than a month period !

Then, through the present, we have hordes of "Vine Reviewers" who get the devices to review as freebies, and usually give 5-stars so that they can keep on getting freebies.

As of September 15, 2014 just for the Chummie Elite, Catch Fraud had counted (and registered)

54           Definite Paid Reviewers who were also Not Amazon Verified Purchasers, and

39           Freebie Reviewers

Plus others.

Out of a total of 82 Total reviews for this item through September 15.  Figure that out!

And Theos should not have been able to use Amazon Vine Reviewers as they can ONLY be used for products that a SOLD by Amazon, which the Chummie Elite is not. Another oversight by Amazon? Another lets-do-whatever-we-can-get-away-with by Theos? Oh yes. There were also 5 genuine reviewers (Amazon Verified Purchasers) of whom 3 gave bad reviews and 2 gave good reviews.

And in this same period of August 1 though early-mid September, Chummie had used about 150 paid shills (confirmed) to give Chummie's products 5-stars. So now you know that Chummie's high Amazon ratings come from paid shills and people given freebies. No credibility, and only tolerated on Amazon!

Now you may understand why Chummie is getting desperate.

So what do they do? They turn to eBay! They offered some Elites from an unknown source (one of those names like "flyhighwithme" or anything else you can think off) for under $65 and including accepting offers lower than that. Perhaps they should offer it for much less. Knock yet another $35 off, so it sells for under $30, and now you are truly competing against the DryBuddyEZ, which is knocking off Chummie's socks (er, urine alarms) on eBay where they cannot be hyped as Chummie so thoroughly does on Amazon!

Catch Fraud lists their sales by Chummie and DryBuddy on eBay from August 1 through September 21, 2014:

Chummie Elite:                 16 units

DryBuddyEZ:                   78 units

And Chummie still has not faced up to the reality of the new DryBuddyFLEX, truly wireless, with magnetic sensor, remote control, and a variety of options. $99.99 for a complete wireless system as just described. And genuinely new technology, not the hyped up rubbish that Chummie claims when comparing its devices to devices that are 20 or 30 years older. Why would any intelligent person aware of their options spend $75 to $95 for a technically obsolete Chummie, which only Chummie's continuing hype keeps alive? 

DryBuddyEZ is selling at almost five times the rate of Chummie Elite. 

Yes, we expect Theos/Chummie to have another of its daily eruptions upon reading this. Maybe a Krakatoa is what Theos really needs for itself!

Theos Medical Systems & Chummie Involved with Substantial Fraud with Paid Reviews on Amazon.com - Update

More outrageous information about Chummie (Theos Medical Systems) continuing illicit and outright fraudulent activities on Amazon have come to our attention.

Below, we post a print-screen of an Amazon page sent to us by an outraged Amazon customer about Chummie's abusive behavior on Amazon in general, and against DryBuddyEZ specifically in this case. 

  "Jim" wrote a comment about "Micheal's" "review" of DryBuddyEZ on September 12, 2014.
As the print in the above screen shot is not easy to read, but important for viewers to read, I have reproduced it below:

Jim says:

I have found, without doubt, that a nasty competitor of DryBuddy has been attacking DryBuddy for years. Literally.  Google search for "bedwettingalarmsdeceitcatcher" to understand how serious this gets. This competitor has posted a slightly earlier malevolent and fake "review" under the name of "Lito." The subsequent 1-star "reviews" by Drowen, Michael, and Toan Doan are all fake and intended to abuse DryBuddy and its DryBuddyEZ product. These three people are established "reviewers" who provide a horde of 5-stars reviews to a large number of affiliated person. See Micheal's review history. As of the moment he has 53 reviews from September 1 through today. Yes, 53! And ALL 5-stars except for the single 1-star awarded to DryBuddyEZ at the competitor's request! And Micheal's products overlap with others here and on an exhaustive list of fake reviewers used by this competitor. Why can Amazon not adequately control abuse of their review system? Is there someone in Amazon's reviews monitoring area who has some sort of allegiance with this competitor? These are matters that perhaps Mr. Jeff Bezos (the top executive at Amazon) should be informed of and requested to address.

 I would urge readers to ignore these bogus reviews, and Amazon to remove them. This competitor is manipulating Amazon's review system to his advantage and the disadvantage of Amazon and Amazon's customers. I do want to point out that on another major site which competes with Amazon (the number 2 site?) since August 1st the DryBuddyEZ has outsold ALL of this competitors products added together by a factor of almost 3 times! This shows how manipulating Amazon reviews can falsely affect matters on Amazon. I am making a copy of this Amazon page with my comment here which can be part of a package that DryBuddy and Mr. Bezos may receive from me.

For the people in Amazon's Reviews department who are supposed to monitor reviews and remove inappropriate reviews that violate Amazons policies (such as the reviews and reviewers mentioned above), I would recommend google searching for "site/fraudonamazonreviews" which lists about 150 of these exhaustive 5-stars "reviewers" which have been used by this nasty competitor to boost his product reviews on Amazon within the last 2 months.

Jim is correct. We have verified what he says above. As laid out in 

sites.google.com/site/fraudonamazonreviews

Micheal is one of approximately 150 "paid" reviewers who post 5-stars reviews for their subscribers. These are 150 that Chummie has used to fraudulently boost his "Review Ratings" on Amazon. Assume that there are others. Apparently, Chummie figures out that if such parties can be used to fraudulently boost ratings for their patrons, they can also be used to bad-mouth and lower ratings for victims of their subscribers. So he is now indulging in this dumping 1-star reviews on competitors that he fears and.or bears a grudge against.

We agree with Jim and strongly believe that Chummie has used three of these sponsored reviewers to post 1-star ratings for DryBuddyEZ. Add the review that Chummie has probably done himself as "Lito" and you have further desecration of Amazon's reviews system. As has been suggested earlier, this behavior by Chummie (and probably other as evidenced in the multiple 5-stars reviews posted by these miscreant reviewers) Amazon is sustaining a continuing fraud against its customers.

We also want to point out Chummie's change in strategy to draw in high-ranked reviews. They have now switched almost completely to using Amazon "Vine Reviewers" where Amazon gives them the free product (donated by Chummie). Although the reviewers may be ethical individuals, they are undoubtedly biased in their reviews because they never paid for this free gift. They also want to remain in this "free gifts" program and feel that poor reviews (and the corresponding NOs cast on these reviews by the supplier) may cause them to be excluded from the program. We have read a comment from at least one such Vine Reviewer commiserating about this. And this comment was soon withdrawn.

So we still believe in looking at reviews from Verified Purchasers as being most accurate. Although this too can be abused by Chummie buying its own product from Amazon under false names, it would be more expensive. We estimate that such purchases of the Chummie Elite would cost Chummie between $15 and $20, while donating a freebie to a Vine reviewer probably costs less than $10, and paying one of the fraudulent reviewer to post a review costs much less, especially in the substantial quantities that Chummie purchases.

Amazon certainly could help to reduce fraudulent reviews from the seller by making them more expensive for the seller. They could re-introduce the simple rule that reviews are only accepted from Amazon Verified Purchasers, which they changed and became more lenient about a few month ago.

The extent to which Chummie is being forced to abuse Amazon's review system though very many fraudulent reviews becomes very evident when one look at eBay, where Chummie and DryBuddy sell their products. As verified by Catch Fraud on

sites.google.com/site/fraudonamazonreviews

from August 1st, 2014 through the first half of today, these are the sales numbers from eBay:

Chummie Elite: 16

DryBuddyEZ:    71

DryBuddyEZ is outselling Chummie Elite by better than 4 to 1 over the most recent month-and-a-half period. And these buyers are people who use their brains instead of listening to Chummie's propaganda.

As we have been saying for well over a year, Chummie exists on hyping its products and bad-mouthing its competitors. Truly a sad and sorry state of affairs for Chummie. And as long as Amazon allows it, it may well continue. As Jim has suggested in his comment above, we also wonder 

Is there someone in Amazon's reviews monitoring area who has some sort of allegiance with this competitor? 

We have run into many situations ourselves where Chummie's preferential treatment on reviews and comments can only be explained by such an illicit connection within Amazon. Will Amazon wake up and actually do something?    ???

And so we continue with this long saga of Chummie's farcical behavior and total lack of ethics.

 

Theos Medical Systems & Chummie Involved with Substantial Fraud with Paid Reviews on Amazon.com - Update

We have been looking at https://sites.google.com/site/fraudonamazonreviewsin which the author has dissecting Chummie’s Amazon sales in August. The results are truly awesome!

On the page

https://sites.google.com/site/fraudonamazonreviews/analysis-of-amazon-5-stars-reviews-for-chummie-products-starting-august-1-2014

the author analyzes the period starting August 1. This is a reasonable current stretch of time.

As of August 31, 2014 Chummie has shown 171 reviews across its six products listed on Amazon. And, of course, the Amazon stars are superlative.

But Chummie is now seriously caught in its well of deceit and outright lies.

We are taking the liberty of outright copying from the important conclusions from the site

https://sites.google.com/site/fraudonamazonreviews :

The Amazon Reviews system is being flagrantly ABUSED by Chummie. Chummie's 5-stars Reviews on Amazon are mostly FAKE!

Chummie's "high" stars rating is obviously ridiculously high in reality, and deserves a very low stars rating.

Chummie, well known for its hype and falseness, has been cheating Amazon customers by buying 5-stars reviews for its products on Amazon! There can be no doubt about Chummie's deceit!
Of ALL Chummie product reviews on Amazon over the period starting August 1, 2014 64% are definitely FAKE!

Amazon, Please pay attention to the above data and analysis.

Your customers are being deceived by a very unethical seller!
Amazon's reputation is being ruined for allowing such fraudulent Reviews.

https://sites.google.com/site/fraudonamazonreviews/ contains substantial verifiable data downloaded from Amazon to confirm its conclusions. We encourage the reader to look at this wealth of evidence about Chummies fraudulent self-promotion on Amazon.com .

We have been pointing out for a long time that Theos Medical Systems, the owner of Chummie products, has been living of self-promoted hype and deceit. Now we have substantial evidence that its high “stars points” on Amazon is fake! Chummie’s true Amazon rating would be bad!

Let us look beyond Amazon for actual Chummie performance, since we have absolute proof that Chummie’s Amazon rating is very false. The most complete site where Chummie cannot easily give itself reviews and where sales are spelled out is eBay.

Looking at eBay for this same period of 8/1/14 through 8/31/14 which is analyzed for Chummie on Amazon, we see the following unit sales:

Chummie Premium                     3

Chummie Elite                            9

Chummie Pro (mat)                    2

And for Chummie’s major competititors:

DryBuddyEZ                              43

Wet-Stop3                                 28

Obviously, Chummie is completely outclassed by smart buyers who purchase superior products at lower prices when they are not overwhelmed by Chummie’s bogus hype and fake reviews!

We continue to believe that you cannot change a tiger’s stripes. Or a zebra’s. Theos Medical Systems’ entire culture, and particularly its Principals’ is so imbibed with overwhelming customers and competitors by whatever means that we doubt that they even have the mind-set or ability to compete by fair and ethical rules.

As stated before, we have had a very negative opinion of Theos Medical Systems and its Chummie products since we started this blog over one year ago. Our opinion only gets worse.

Theos Medical Systems & Chummie Involved with Substantial Fraud with Paid Reviews on Amazon.com

We have been looking at https://sites.google.com/site/fraudonamazonreviews in which the author has been dissecting Chummie’s Amazon sales in August. The results are truly awesome!

On the page

https://sites.google.com/site/fraudonamazonreviews/analysis-of-amazon-5-stars-reviews-for-chummie-products-starting-august-1-2014

the author analyzes the period starting August 1, 2014,
(Updated 8/21/14) This is a reasonable current stretch of time, when Chummie has shown 153 reviews across its six products listed on Amazon. And, of course, the Amazon stars are superlative.

But Chummie is now seriously caught in its well of deceit and outright lies.

We are taking the liberty of outright copying from the important conclusions from the site

https://sites.google.com/site/fraudonamazonreviews :

The Amazon Reviews system is being flagrantly ABUSED by Chummie. Chummie's 5-stars Reviews on Amazon are mostly FAKE!

Chummie's "high" stars rating is obviously ridiculously high in reality, and deserves a very low stars rating.

Chummie, well known for its hype and falseness, has been cheating Amazon customers by buying 5-stars reviews for its products on Amazon! There can be no doubt about Chummie's deceit!
Of ALL Chummie product reviews in Amazon for the period starting 
August 1, 2014  49% are definitely FAKE! 

Amazon, Please pay attention to the above data and analysis.

Your customers are being deceived by a very unethical seller!
Amazon;s reputation is being ruined for allowing such fraudulent Reviews!

https://sites.google.com/site/fraudonamazonreviews/ contains substantial verifiable data downloaded from Amazon to confirm its conclusions. We encourage the reader to look at this wealth of evidence about Chummies fraudulent self-promotion on Amazon.com .

We have been pointing out for a long time that Theos Medical Systems, the owner of Chummie products, has been living of self-promoted hype and flagrant deceit. Now we have substantial evidence that its high “stars points” on Amazon is fake! Chummie’s true Amazon rating would be bad!

Let us look beyond Amazon for actual Chummie performance, since we have absolute proof that Chummie’s Amazon rating is very false. The most complete site where Chummie cannot easily give itself reviews and where sales are spelled out is eBay.

Looking at eBay for this same period of 8/1/14 through 8/19/14 which is analyzed for Chummie on Amazon, we see the following unit sales:

Chummie Premium                    1

Chummie Elite                            6

Chummie Pro (mat)                    2

And for Chummie’s major competititors:

DryBuddyEZ                             29

Wet-Stop3                                13

Obviously, Chummie is completely outclassed by smart buyers who purchase superior products at lower prices when they are not overwhelmed by Chummie’s bogus hype and fake reviews!

We continue to believe that you cannot change a tiger’s stripes. Or a zebra’s. Theos Medical Systems’ entire culture, and particularly its Principals’ is so imbibed with overwhelming customers and competitors by whatever means, that we doubt that they even have the mind-set or ability to compete by fair and ethical rules.

As stated before, we have had a very negative opinion of Theos Medical Systems and its Chummie products since we started this blog over one year ago. Our opinion only gets worse.

Theos Medical Systems & Chummie Involved with Substantial Fraudulent Paid Reviews on Amazon.com

We saw a very interesting news item on https://sites.google.com/site/fraudonamazonreviews . 

The news item is called

Fraud & Collusion by Sellers to favorably stuff their Amazon Product Reviews.

Intriguing title, so we looked at it. We have found a “simpatico” who is concerned with fraudulent reviews on Amazon, and looks at what Theos Medical Systems is doing with their Chummie products’ reviews on Amazon. Apparently Theos has developed a reputation for bad ethics.

There is an extensive table of names used by reviewers on the Chummie product reviews. These have been extensively identified as “names” that write 5-stars reviews for many products on Amazon. In the case of these people writing reviews for Chummie,

1.       None are Amazon Verified Purchasers, which suggests that their review experience of the product could be zero.

2.       Many products are covered, and many of these bogus reviewers overlap on the same products.

3.       As pointed out “The probability of so many people in Amazon’s huge buying population buying similar products with substantial overlap is essentially zero. This has to be the result of complicit action by the review writers.

In https://sites.google.com/site/fraudonamazonreviews it is also pointed out that payment for these dishonorable services can be:

1)        Payment in Cash: Paid cash by the sellers to post fraudulent and false 5-stars reviews to inflate the Amazon reviews position of the sellers, or
2)        Payment in Kind: Participating in a scheme to provide each other with 5-star reviews for their mutual benefit.
Consequently, payment may be in Cash or Kind. We believe that most payments for reviews are in cash.

Reading other internet articles about fraud on Amazon reviews, it is well established that there are many persons who will write 5-stars reviews for a small fee. Theos definitely has availed himself of their services.

Looking at the table presented, here are some simple conclusions relating to the fraudulent paid reviews:

       1.   For the Chummie Premium bedwetting alarm, starting from 7/21/14 through 8/13/14, there are fourteen (14) fraudulent 5-stars reviews by such paid reviewers. One fake reviewer “Clay” even reviewed both the Chummie Premium and Elite alarms on the same day (8/13/14). Unbelievable, and only from Chummie!

      

     2.  For the Chummie Elite bedwetting alarm, starting on 7/17/14 through today (8/13/14), there are fourteen (14) fraudulent 5-stars reviews by such paid reviewers. This is a very large percentage of the total 36 reviews being shown for this alarm today (8/13/14). Chummie is really pushing to make this alarm “popular” even though he is obviously using dirty methods and is in serious violation of Amazon policies.

     3.   For the Chummie Comfy Armband three (3) out of six total reviews come from these fraudulent paid 5-stars reviewers in one week from 7/22/14 though 7/28/14.

     4.   For the Chummie Luxury Overlay five (5) of eight total reviews come from these fraudulent paid 5-stars reviewers in one week from 7/23/14 though 8/5/14.

     5.   For the Chummie Pro Bed-Side bedwetting alarm, five (5) fraudulent paid 5-stars reviewers in 7/22/14 though 8/11/14.

     6.   For the Chummie Potty Training ladder, four (4) fraudulent paid 5-stars reviewers in 7/21/14 though 7/26/14.

      These above numbers do not include numerous non-Amazon Verified Purchasers who ONLY have a review for that specific item. Obviously, these could also be fakes.

It is very obvious that Chummie is making a very determined effort to raise his ratings for all of his Chummie products. Unfortunately his method is to try and “fool” Amazon’s customers into a false sense of how great his products are. For a fee, and the right illicit connections, anyone could do it. And if Amazon is willing to remain blissfully ignorant of what should be very obvious to them, then Chummie can continue to make suckers of all of the people that they can trick.

We have had a very negative opinion of Theos Medical Systems and its Chummie products since we started this blog over one year ago. Our opinion only gets worse.