EAGLE MOUNTAIN \u2014 Lisa Swearingen ordered several bottles of pills that were touted as a science-backed method of weight loss.<\/p>\n
“There are four ingredients in this,” Swearingen said the advertising told her. “Himalayan pink salt, quercetin, mountain root and burnt berberine.”<\/p>\n
But when those bottles showed up, she says she discovered the primary ingredient was turmeric \u2013 a common spice \u2013 and very little else.<\/p>\n
She paid more than $400 for this shipment of supplements, which she thought came with a powerful endorsement. The one and only, Oprah Winfrey!<\/p>\n
“There are many videos of Oprah on TikTok and on Reel,” Swearingen said.<\/p>\n
She says she called the number on the shipping label and was told she can send the product back. But she’s not satisfied and asked Matt Gephardt to investigate.<\/p>\n
“I received a fraudulent product,” she said.<\/p>\n
He reached out to the company behind the supplement, Prozenith, to inquire about this matter. He did not hear back.<\/p>\n
Digging deeper, it’s clear that Lisa Swearingen is not the only frustrated customer.<\/p>\n
The Better Business Bureau has logged numerous complaints in its Scam Tracker \u2013 many of them centered around turmeric instead of ingredients touted in testimonials.<\/p>\n
Speaking of testimonials, the real Oprah, not some AI deep-fake, took to social media to warn people that her name is being used to pitch weight loss products. Though she doesn’t name Prozenith specifically, she does say several different brands are using her likeness without her consent.<\/p>\n
“I have nothing to do with weight loss gummies or diet pills,” she said in a social media post.<\/p>\n
Lisa Swearingen tells KSL\u2019s Matt Gephardt she paid over $400 for a supplement she thought was endorsed by Oprah Winfrey but turned out to be a common spice. (Photo: John Wilson, KSL-TV)<\/p>\n
“It made me mad,” Swearingen said about the moment she discovered her bottles of Prozenith were chiefly turmeric.<\/p>\n
She said she’ll ship the very expensive turmeric back in the hopes of a refund. But she hopes sharing her experience with me will help other Utahns.<\/p>\n
“I feel like lots of people might get taken on this,” she said.<\/p>\n
Under federal law, if you order a product and pay with a credit card, and what shows up is not what was advertised, you can dispute the charges.<\/p>\n
The tricky part can be proving it. In Swearingen’s case, for example, she cannot track down the original ad that talked about the four “magic” ingredients.<\/p>\n
As for the seller’s website, it seems almost deliberately vague about what Prozenith actually is.<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EAGLE MOUNTAIN \u2014 Lisa Swearingen ordered several bottles of pills that were touted as a science-backed method of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":143070,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[64,419,418,2436,4219,210,421,420,425,50,1182,422,423,62,399,314,67,132,68,424,313],"class_list":{"0":"post-143069","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nutrition","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-cars","10":"tag-classifieds","11":"tag-consumer","12":"tag-crime","13":"tag-health","14":"tag-homes","15":"tag-jobs","16":"tag-local","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-nutrition","19":"tag-radio","20":"tag-salt-lake","21":"tag-sports","22":"tag-television","23":"tag-traffic","24":"tag-united-states","25":"tag-unitedstates","26":"tag-us","27":"tag-utah","28":"tag-weather"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115022927284029708","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143069\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}