To whom it may concern:
A common strategy with questionable businesses is the name change.
I did a little digging, found out that EcoQuest was formerly Alpine.
I then found and/or was made aware of all of the following and subsequenlty sent it to my coworker:
CNFT
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Consumer Affairs official website,
[
consumeraffairs.com]
the television program "Dateline" aired a report that questioned the core technology of its EcoQuest purifiers. The NBC program noted that the Minnesota Supreme Court had ruled against the company a few years earlier in a case that charged Alpine with making false and misleading health claims for its products.
In an unusual twist, Alpine sued the Federal Trade Commission, claiming it was "harassing" the company. The FTC, in turn, sued Alpine and the company was fined $1.49 million on the health claims charges. The proceedings also unearthed evidence that Alpine owed a significant amount of back taxes to Minnesota and Tennessee.
Interestingly EcoQuest did not deny that it is an MLM or multi-level marketing system.
There's a vast amount of information about EcoQuest at this link, and most of it looks bad.
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The Better Business Bureau of Tennessee,
[
www.knoxville.bbb.org]
where EcoQuest is from, had eight complaints that people actually took the trouble to share with the BBB of TN. There could be others there and in other states that I didn't research. The BBB's entire report regarding EcoQuest in TN is available at the TN BBB link above. Minnesota's BBB had nothing to date regarding EcoQuest.
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The Federal Trade Commission,
[
search.ftc.gov]
has about four links each critical of EcoQuest and its previous name Alpine at the above link. The FTC considers it an MLM or multi-level marketing.
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The cult research resource [
culteducation.com] (an excellent site to research a group if someone recommends it to you)
I particularly like this site since it strictly sticks to the scientific definition of cults and cult-like organizations as opposed to certain evangelical Christian sites that have the misfortunate habit of labeling *anything* that they don't approve of as a "cult," being intellectually dishonest, and thereby losing credibility.
And so I trust Rickross.com to be accurate when it doesn't--yet--consider EcoQuest to be a cult or cult-like; however, Rickross.com does represent Alpine (EcoQuest now) as a multi-level marketing and/or pyramid scheme at the following link:
[
www.culteducation.com]
And in general Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) is plagued with complaints, lawsuits and financial losses.
[
www.culteducation.com]
It is most often the system itself and not the participants, which causes failure within many MLM schemes.
See [
www.vandruff.com]
This research paper explains the inherent structural and marketing flaws that cause so many MLM participants to lose money.
Also see [
www.mlmwatch.org]
This is a Web site that monitors such schemes.