According to Wikipedia, ‘between 75% and 90% of women develop stretch marks to some degree during pregnancy.’ Now I’ll admit that ‘some degree’ can involve a range of severity of marking, but nonetheless you would think that the high prevalence of this would make people more accepting of it.

Sadly, many women feel compelled to go to great lengths to remove these marks, with plastic surgery and laser surgery being two options for those with money to spend. For women with less money to burn on these treatments however, the only real choice remaining is to run the gauntlet of internet oils and potions, most of which are dubious and some of which descend into outright quackery.

If you are looking for such products, you should be aware that the wonderful scammers that brought us those acai berry scams and those single mom teeth whitening scams are back with a vengeance.

True to form they have set up a number of blogs purporting to be real life stories of women who have benefitted from these supposed remedies. Just like the blogs on the other scams, the women’s names change each time. They seem to be set up so that wherever you are viewing from the woman in question appears to be relatively local, presumably to set you at ease.

Despite this, accessing these sites from the UK it is obvious that these women aren’t from around here, with their American spellings and references to Oprah (which, ok, we’re familiar with but it’s not exactly the same phenomena over here as it is in the U.S.).

As per usual, the products are ‘as seen on TV’ and each blog is littered with fake comments to make it seem more real. If this doesn’t scream scam at you then the fact that these ‘blogs’ only ever carry one story should!

The set up is basically the same as in the teeth whitening scams. The ‘blogger’ claims that they have used a combination of two products (in the case of the blogs I looked at, the products were Cosmetyn and the tongue-twisting Resveratrol, but I’m guessing that they might switch these products up from blog to blog) which have totally removed their stretch marks. Even better, the two products have free trials, so you can try them out for next to nothing.

I won’t belabour the point but suffice to say the free trials turn out to be not so free. Essentially when you sign up to the free trials you have a certain amount of time to cancel (usually around 14 days). After this they’ll take approximately $80-$90 or so every month from you until you cancel. Sometimes they don’t even bother to send you anything, sometimes they take arbitrary money from you just for the hell of it.

If this wasn’t bad enough they make it extremely difficult or outright impossible to cancel. They do this by making it hard to find a contact number, by making you wait on hold for ages, by putting you through to someone who doesn’t speak intelligible English or by just flat-out ignoring you. As you have to cancel two separate products the whole process is doubly difficult.

As with the other scams, if you do find yourself caught up in this the best advice is to cancel your card, otherwise they will keep taking money from you for as long as they can.

One last point. As a man, I think any bloke worth his salt can get over a few stretch marks, especially if acquired in the ‘line of duty’ giving birth to his child! I’m not saying you shouldn’t look into any of the stretch removal products out there, just that they won’t make you feel better about yourself if you are determined to see the worst parts of your body when you look in the mirror. Most importantly, don’t let yourself be deceived by promises of quick and cheap fixes because sadly they don’t exist.