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Activist Facebook Group Shuts Down Marketers Selling Dangerous 'Magic Dirt' on Facebook (nbcnews.com) 204

Posted by EditorDavid from the dirty-business dept.
NBC News tells the hair-raising tale of Black Oxygen Organics (or "BOO" for short). Put more simply, the product is dirt — four-and-a-half ounces of it, sealed in a sleek black plastic baggie and sold for $110 plus shipping. Visitors to the Black Oxygen Organics website, recently taken offline, were greeted with a pair of white hands cradling cups of dirt like an offering. "A gift from the Ground," it reads. "Drink it. Wear it. Bathe in it." BOO, which "can be taken by anyone at any age, as well as animals," according to the company, claims many benefits and uses, including improved brain function and heart health, and ridding the body of so-called toxins that include heavy metals, pesticides and parasites. By the end of the summer, online ads for BOO had made their way to millions of people within the internet subcultures that embrace fringe supplements, including the mixed martial arts community, anti-vaccine and Covid-denier groups, and finally more general alternative health and fake cure spaces.... "Who would have thought drinking dirt would make me feel so so good?" one person in a 27,000-member private Facebook group posted, her face nuzzling a jar of black liquid....

Teams of sellers in these private Facebook groups claim that, beyond cosmetic applications, BOO can cure everything from autism to cancer to Alzheimer's disease.... But there may be an incentive for the hyperbole... Participation in multi-level marketing (MLM) boomed during the pandemic with 7.7 million Americans working for one in 2020, a 13 percent increase over the previous year, according to the Direct Selling Association, the trade and lobbying group for the MLM industry. Wellness products make up the majority of MLM products, and, as the Federal Trade Commission noted, some direct sellers took advantage of a rush toward so-called natural remedies during the pandemic to boost sales. More than 99 percent of MLM sellers lose money, according to the Consumer Awareness Institute, an industry watchdog group...

The secret to dealing dirt seems to be Facebook, where sellers have created dozens of individual groups that have attracted a hodgepodge of hundreds of thousands of members.
NBC News had a bag analyzed by a professor of soil and environmental science at Ohio State University. It found two doses per day "exceeded Health Canada's limit for lead, and three doses for daily arsenic amounts." Growing concern among BOO sellers about the product — precipitated by an anti-MLM activist who noticed on Google Earth that the bog that sourced BOO's peat appeared to share a border with a landfill — pushed several to take matters into their own hands, sending bags of BOO to labs for testing. The results of three of these tests, viewed by NBC News and confirmed as seemingly reliable by two soil scientists at U.S. universities, again showed elevated levels of lead and arsenic. Those results are the backbone of a federal lawsuit seeking class action status filed in November in Georgia's Northern District court. The complaint, filed on behalf of four Georgia residents who purchased BOO, claims that the company negligently sold a product with "dangerously high levels of toxic heavy metals," which led to physical and economic harm.

Black Oxygen Organics did not respond to requests for comment concerning the complaint.
The anti-MLM forces also formed Facebook groups, monitoring Facebook's pro-Boo sales groups and even documenting sales and company meetings — then filed official complaints with Amreica's product-regulating Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration. And it all ended badly for Boo... According to BOO President Carlo Garibaldi, they had weathered the FTC complaints, the FDA seizures, the Health Canada recalls and the online mob. But the "fatal blow" came when their online merchant dropped them as clients....

Members of anti-BOO groups celebrated. "WE DID IT!!!!!!" Ceara Manchester, the group administrator, posted to the "Boo is Woo" Facebook group. "I hope this is proof positive that if the anti-MLM community bans together we can take these companies down. We won't stop with just BOO. A new age of anti-MLM activism has just begun."

In a separate Zoom meeting unattended by executives and shared with NBC News, lower-rung sellers grappled with the sudden closure and the reality that they were out hundreds or thousands of dollars.
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Activist Facebook Group Shuts Down Marketers Selling Dangerous 'Magic Dirt' on Facebook More

Activist Facebook Group Shuts Down Marketers Selling Dangerous 'Magic Dirt' on Facebook

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  • Magic Dirt (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 05, 2021 @07:25PM (#62050515)

    Damn! I was hoping they had something on Trump!

  • Also being used as a COVID cure (Score:5, Informative)

    by JoshuaZ ( 1134087 ) on Sunday December 05, 2021 @07:29PM (#62050523) Homepage
    Not explicitly mentioned in the summary (although they mention it going around covid-denier groups) but this also being sold as a preventative and cure for covid. I've seen at least one claim that taking this magic dirt with ivermectin will make it impossible to get covid.

  • Fine, shut them down, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Sunday December 05, 2021 @07:36PM (#62050537)

    You know, at some point, people have to take responsibility for their own ignorance and stupidity. Who exactly buys a $110 bag of dirt? How is society supposed to protect such people from the next scam that pops up? Are we supposed to idiot-proof the entire world for these folks?

    • Are we supposed to idiot-proof the entire world for these folks?

      Two approaches. Either yes or we find some way to mass prune them from the tree of life. Generally the latter is seen as inhumane and might actually affect more of your close contacts than you imagine (e. g. a few cousins, parent, or grandparent)

      • Too late (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Crashmarik ( 635988 ) on Sunday December 05, 2021 @08:05PM (#62050589)

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        Kornbluth's the marching morons.

        These people at least are only killing themselves. Unlike those that have gained control of society and want to kill everyone including themselves.

        • Unlike those that have gained control of society and want to kill everyone...

          This is exactly what the "elites" in the story did.

          including themselves

          Pretty sure the current crop believes they'll get out unscathed.

          • They were a cognitive elite, but they didn't actually control society. One of the points of the story was if they tried to directly enforce their will the masses would destroy them. They also were aware of the immorality of what they were doing and did take out the architect of their final solution.

      • I don't see that it's genetic though, so pruning the people won't work, it's the ideas that support such beliefs that need pruning. My own experience:
        My parents believed in several sorts of woo, and I managed to not inherit the beliefs by being very interested in scientific experimentation. I wanted to test everything, or find out about how others had tested things, and found that things like divination, homeopathics and ESP just didn't work. I went through a period of fascination with ghosts, UFOs and alie

        • Pruning a tree is not a one and done but I agree with your main point.

          As I said pruning would likely require us to accept the loss of family members, including my parents though generally they are the group too uneducated to use the internet the way described here.

          I think we can be interested in mysticism and supernatural while wanting to find the facts. Kundalini Yoga is a good example in my life. Yoga can't cure cancer but it's role in strengthening the immune system is real. Kundalini and chakras can be

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      Are we supposed to idiot-proof the entire world for these folks?

      Not the entire world, but we can do a lot of good by giving them a decent education.

      Or we could start selling lead powder to help them protect their testicles from the microwave rays from Hollywood satellites. Either way.

    • Re:Fine, shut them down, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Brain-Fu ( 1274756 ) on Sunday December 05, 2021 @09:11PM (#62050769) Homepage Journal

      Unfortunately, everybody is born ignorant. Some people have a higher intelligence potential than others, but, until they actualize that potential they are straight-up ignorant.

      Our brains evolved to be quite good at making snap-judgments, based on very incomplete information, that are right most of the time, in a small tribe. This context has changed, as now everyone is in contact with distant strangers who have no loyalty to them whatsoever. The social environment that made our ordinary way of evaluating truth "good enough" is absolutely not good enough in the modern environment full of planet-wide markets.

      So, it actually takes quite a lot of education and experience to retrain the right mental responses. You can't just "distrust everything," as it is impossible to survive without relying on others to provide reliable products and services. So you have to actually work to sort all this out, both in cultivating the right mental techniques for assessing truth, but also in actually applying them to practical matters.

      People who have accomplished this can easily forget what it was like beforehand. It is very tempting to get super elitist and declare that those who haven't had the same opportunities and experiences are less-than-human and deserve to be lead to the slaughter. But many of those ignorant fools are going to work every day doing jobs that YOU depend on, so we can't simply write them off. Regardless of how or why they are so vulnerable to these scams, doing what we can to protect them from it is not only morally lofty but it has a reciprocal benefit in the form of a more stable economy for everyone.

      Like it or not, we really are all in this mess together.

      Oh but still the best way to help them is to educate them as much as possible, including keeping the opportunities open and using every opportunity to socially-engineer the idea that thoughtful, educated, critical-thinking is rewarding and worth the effort.

      • Re:Fine, shut them down, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by UpnAtom ( 551727 ) on Sunday December 05, 2021 @11:05PM (#62050971)
        What you haven't explained is being willfully ignorant.

        Why the egoic attachment to nonsense?

        Trump encouraged much of this. “Media are the enemy of the people” and “alternative facts”. And trolling the libs is more important than having the faintest idea what you're taking about.

        • I think I'm slowly catching on to this.

          A lot of people are losing these days. They look back 20-30 years and either imagine they're worse off, or they are actually really worse off. And they wonder why. Now, since it cannot be their own fault (and frankly, in this case it probably not even is, at least not directly), they need someone to blame.

          So people notice they have been lied to by someone. But whom? Well, the media are a pretty good target here, simply by virtue of being one of the main sources of info

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          This has happened plenty of times before, e.g. with audiophiles who will pay for a literal bag of rocks (google "brilliant pebbles").

        • Re:Fine, shut them down, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by fazig ( 2909523 ) on Monday December 06, 2021 @06:34AM (#62051477)
          I do have an hypothesis about the Why.
          Because it's convenient and it provides you with a support group of people who think likewise.
          To quote a phrase from a movie franchise: Apes together strong

          For an independent thinker this tribalistic "us vs. them", which is a very strong unifying factor for social groups, isn't as strongly pronounced. As a result you'll often be standing alone for a while, because if you adhere to the principle you're not simply going to agree with others before researching the evidence. And even once you've reached a conclusion that is backed up by others they might have moved on and, there's potentially plenty of other stuff to disagree on.
          You can observe it constantly here in the comments on Slashdot, where the same people sometimes agree and sometimes strongly disagree, while others when faced with a strong polarizing (which also serves to be unifying) factor like "Trump" then pigeonhole themselves into one of two groups where circle-jerking takes place.


          As someone who has a dysfunction when it comes to this, evolutionary drive of peer pressured banding together into groups, I'm observing this a lot in modern day society. I'm fairly sure that it has been always this way, but with the internet providing everyone with a megaphone that can be heard around the planet, visibility of the phenomenon has increased by orders of magnitudes.
          The observation is that despite the strong polarization and hatred that can arise from that kind of tribalism people appear to find emotional security in such groups that'll back. Out of fear of losing that kind of security a lot of people are willing to go to some lengths of what they'd otherwise recognize as bullshit.
          The cohesion of such a group usually persists until the unifying/polarizing factor is gone, which can take a very long time as those who are in control of such groups tend to continuously come up with other boogeyman and enemies.


          Here in Germany after we've had German citizens who joined ISIS to fight in Iraq and Syria were returning 'home' where they had to face the judicial system for what they've done, there's been some work done into figuring out how ISIS could convince German citizens, to leave the relative social security that the nation provides and move to Syria or Iraq, to either die for their masters in combat or become breeding stock.
          The findings were that they use exactly those recruitment techniques to a degree of perfection where people get gradually radicalized into doing their bidding.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        "Our brains evolved to be quite good at making snap-judgments, based on very incomplete information, that are right most of the time, in a small tribe."

        The most primitive part of our brain did, and for some arbitrary definition of "quite good" and "right most of the time". Also it should be noted that "our brains" evolved in this manner far before there were any humans, as this evolution is shared with many living things. Shared so prominently, in fact, that it is commonly referred to as our "lizard brain"

    • You know, at some point, people have to take responsibility for their own ignorance and stupidity. Who exactly buys a $110 bag of dirt? How is society supposed to protect such people from the next scam that pops up? Are we supposed to idiot-proof the entire world for these folks?

      Nope, you can't idiot proof life. There are and always have been people who are more or less idiots, and they will believe and do stupid things. People drank radium water (almost insanely stupid, and brushed their teeth with asbestos toothpaste, despite the ancient greeks knowing it caused lung disease - but the abrasiveness made teeth so white.

      Magnets, all sorts of dodgy cures. Goat testicle implants, lobotomies.

      This is why I'm not quite as hand wringing as some about the Covid 19 anti vaxxers - They

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by SirSlud ( 67381 )

        This is just how nature gets rid of the idiots.

        This isn't how any of this works, and I find it ironic that it's idiots that seem to believe this. They're living proof that they're wrong.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Rayfield k. ( 8918519 )

      Who exactly buys a $110 bag of dirt?

      Probably the same people that pay $20 for a bag of corn starch chunks then wonder why they have anemia and iron deficiency.
      Seriously. Just google "corn starch chunks".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sjames ( 1099 )

      I have a back yard full of dirt, but I don't eat it.

    • Are we supposed to idiot-proof the entire world for these folks?

      FBI has no dedicated anti-fraud branch or division. [fbi.gov]
      Maybe it's time they stop referring people to American Association of Retired Persons [fbi.gov] for crimes that "victimize millions of Americans each year and generate losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars" and instead...
      I don't know... Be more dedicated to their job?

      • Dude, wtf. The APRP is a fraud scheme that targets senior citizens. Way to not only be entirely lazy, but the FBI is directing people right to one of the worst organizations that victimize old people.

        Probably better off to direct them to watch videos by Jim Browning [youtube.com] the angel of death of tech support scammers.

    • You're suggesting protecting fraudsters/criminals? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Somervillain ( 4719341 ) on Monday December 06, 2021 @12:59AM (#62051093)

      You know, at some point, people have to take responsibility for their own ignorance and stupidity. Who exactly buys a $110 bag of dirt? How is society supposed to protect such people from the next scam that pops up? Are we supposed to idiot-proof the entire world for these folks?

      I think you're framing it the wrong way. Should I protect someone determined to buy $110 bag of dirt? Eh, not really. However, why protect the ones selling $110 bags of dirt? They provide no value to society. They're scammer and criminals. I don't need justice for the victims, just to eliminate those criminals.

      The world is a shitty place. People get scammed. We can't stop it. However, it doesn't seem very smart to me to just do nothing and incentivize criminals. This is a rational crime? Someone is making good money poisoning the stupid. Why should we tolerate it?

      Also, please consider that your cynical darwinism isn't really doing the world any favors. You probably think you're being clever when you call them idiots and probably think having people become darwin awards is a useful function of nature. I have a sister who is just fucking dumb and falls for MLM scams. Why? She's poor and desperate. She thinks it's a way to get herself out of poverty. There's something wrong with her. Why are we letting scammers get rich off swindling the poor and desperate?

      In your mind, you're probably thinking, well fuck her...she's not my sister...the world is better without one less idiot. The unfortunate reality is idiots are good at reproducing. Most darwin award winners have children or other loved ones who depend on them. Her kids would love to be with their mother and have her be happy and not lead-poisoned.

      Survival of the fittest does kind of work in the long run, but not as well as just enforcing existing laws. Darwinism is a simplistic option even a dumbass can understand and maybe that's why you find it appealing, but it's far from the best solution. Darwin award winners don't go quietly. Their peril is messy and tends to impact more than them. It's like the anti-vaxxers. How many people did they infect with COVID while they were shoving ivermectin up their ass thinking it was a COVID elixir? Wouldn't the better outcome be for those dumbasses to get the vaccine and not fill up an ICU ward and take ventilators away from people who come in from non-self-inflicted ailments?

      Whoever is selling poisonous dirt as a cure for illness is a fraud and a criminal. We shouldn't protect them. We should eliminate all criminals, even if they only prey on those dumber than us. They provide no value to society and we shouldn't incentivize them to prey on the stupid, which you're basically suggesting.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        This is the only post needed in this entire thread. More perspective, please.

        "We shouldn't protect them. We should eliminate all criminals, even if they only prey on those dumber than us. They provide no value to society and we shouldn't incentivize them to prey on the stupid, which you're basically suggesting."

        Yes, proportionately and compassionately of course. The purpose of society is to make our lives better. Government is a fundamental way this occurs. Laws are the manner in which this happens. It

    • You're supposed to provide a functional education. Apparently the USA is unable to provide that to a concerning large amount of people.

      • That's been the case for decades, mostly because we have a major political party that is hell-bent on gutting education funding, and shitting all over "academics" who are just trying to help people make good decisions, or increase humanity's knowledge about the universe in which we live. How dare they!

    • > Who exactly buys a $110 bag of dirt?

      I don't know, but damn, if I could find them, I could be a millionaire! My back garden's full of the stuff - hell, they can even have my home made compost which is my "most valuable soil". Maybe I could say it's been touched by His Noodly Appendage or something.

      As much as I like to laugh at the stupid people who fall for this stuff, I also realise that I'm not clever enough to think of these ideas, much less have the balls to follow through with them. If I had, I cou

    • Who exactly buys a $110 bag of dirt?

      The same people who go to Tractor Supply and buy horse paste thinking that it will do anything at all about Covid, and that it's exactly the same as a pill you get from a pharmacist with a doctor's prescription.

    • Who exactly buys a $110 bag of dirt?

      My wife bought a small jar of skin treatment that promised a variety of benefits. I think it cost her $50. Ingredient(s): Bentonite Clay. That was it.

      I can buy an 80 pound sack of that stuff at the home center for $20.

      Even high-end cosmetics are just rocks and grease run through a concrete mixer.

  • The hilarious thing is (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Sunday December 05, 2021 @07:41PM (#62050549)
    these guys couldnt even be bothered to sell clean dirt. I mean, why buy your dirt from walmart or grab it from the middle of a clean forest, when you can scoop it off the nearest abandoned industrial site? I dont know whether to be horrified or to be impressed by the watermelon-sized cahones on these guys.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 )

      Getting it from the middle of a forest is probably illegal fwiw.

      • Getting it from the middle of a forest is probably illegal fwiw.

        Isn't selling heavy metal laden dirt for consumption also illegal?

        We don't mind scamming people, poisoning and killing them. But we have to draw the line somewhere.

        • Why do we? A fool and his life are easily parted, and I fail to see the problem in that.

          • It was clumsy and not very clear.
            Read the second part in the voice of the people selling the dirt.

            • Yes, why do we have to... oh, right, if we kill the dupes, who's gonna pay us?

              Then again, every day another one gets born, it's not like stupid dupes is a limited resource.

          • Why do we? A fool and his life are easily parted, and I fail to see the problem in that.

            Because one of the defining traits of civilization is helping those in need.

            It doesn't matter if someone is in need of a kidney, a job, a hand getting a fridge up some stairs, someone to watch their kids for an hour, or protection against predators. If you can't see the societal value in that - especially when that help costs you nothing - then there's a word that may apply to you that also starts with "soci".

  • ...according to who gets the highest quality information. If you get your info from Fox & Facebook... come to think of it, just about any US media companies these days, you're doomed.

    Perhaps the USA needs a little less preaching about magical beings & a little more teaching about how the natural world really works?

  • I wouldn't try to shut these guys down. I have no sympathy for somebody who pays $110 to eat dirt.

    • The venn diagram horse paste users and magic dirt buyers is one circle.

    • Ever eat a raw carrot? You've eaten dirt. It is relatively common for pregnant women to feel a desire to eat dirt, possibly because it improves their microbiome. Kids eat dirt. Cats and dogs roll in dirt then lick it off. If the dirt is not contaminated with pollution it can be a good thing. The fact that these people didn't even test the dirt they were selling is unforgivable though. I would not eat just any random dirt, and the people who bought this dirt for $110 probably thought the dirt had been

    • I regret not thinking of it first. Monetizing morons is magnificent as they're an inexhaustible resource.

  • ridding the body of so-called toxins that include heavy metals, pesticides and parasites.

    The FTC should come down like an earth-shattering hammer on these fools for making blatantly false claims. Removing "toxins" is a nebulous non-specific claim but removing heavy metals, pesticides, and parasites from the body is specific and unfounded.

    Depending on how farspread this operation is, It might be harmful enough to warrant criminal charges from the DOJ.

  • Captain Jack Sparrow:

    I've got a jar of dirt! [youtube.com]

  • I'll probably cop some flack for this but blaming MLM for this is the wrong target, there are bad actors in all business models, painting *all* MLM because of the action of this company seems a little excessive.

    • MLMs are trash. They're essentially pyramid schemes, but they can get away with it because they do actually sell some products. That's just a cloak though, to obfuscate that what they're actually selling is unattainable dreams of financial freedom to suckers.

      • Generalisations are never a good thing, looking at MLM purely from a business model perspective, if it is done 'correctly' there is nothing wrong, it's when bad actors get involved who don't know the rules, (or chose to flout the rules veema.

  • I'll be more impressed if these folks take down one or more of the "essential oils" pyramid schemes. Those are some really entrenched MLM participants drinking up some very heavy kool-aid. If these folks can shut them down, they can color me impressed at that point.

    • What I don't understand is why are MLM organizations still legal? They provide no value to society, they make the poor even poorer by duping them into get-rich-quick schemes. If the statistics in this article are true, 7.7 million Americans are working for MLM organizations during a time of epic labor shortages. Society needs as many of these people as possible to take productive jobs rather than blowing their savings on pyramid schemes.

  • So the purchasers are Black Oxygen Organics Buyers?

  • Part of his future history was a time when the US went through widespread loss of contact with reality.

    One of the headlines he wrote to illustrate just how far gone people were during the Crazy Years was about a fad for eating dirt.

  • Even heavy users of this stuff probably won't experience much in the way of side effects. Nevertheless, it probably deserves a place in the same sewer as horse de-wormer, anti-vaxxer propaganda and other methods for thinning the herd.

  • DSA? (Score:2)

    by splutty ( 43475 )

    Should that not be the Direct Scamming Association? I think there's a typo somewhere.

    I'm still extremely confused why MLM is even legal.

    • Because making a profit from marking up a product, and paying commissions (or finders fee) is not illegal I'm guessing...

  • Not uncommon (Score:3)

    by PuddleBoy ( 544111 ) on Monday December 06, 2021 @12:17AM (#62051037)
    There is a long history of Geophagy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] .

    While hardly common in humans, many animal species engage in it, in an effort to obtain minerals that may be otherwise lacking in their diet.

    Having said that, it's still BS that BOO is making money selling contaminated earth to gullible people. And maybe it's just Darwin at work...

  • There seems to be a group of people who will believe literally anything you tell them, no matter how stupid, incredible or outright impossible ... except the truth.

    Why?

  • So I'm just working this through in my head... antivaxxers are primarily concerned about putting unknown substances in their bodies but seem to be ok with taking unknown/dangerous substances that are NOT vaccines eg bleach, animal worming medication or magic dirt. Basically anything that has come from a source other than a scientist or doctor? The fact that magic dirt is actively harmful rather than just merely a waste of money is pretty ironic!

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