Warning: A Long Read
It takes a lot of courage for people to take an activist stand and fight for the rights of consumers and/or to engage in customer advocacy.
Ashy Bines = Waste of $ is a consumer community which provides evidence and information on how clients can obtain refunds, how they can find alternative health solutions and we also focus on the unethical conduct of ABBBC (
Ashy Bines Bikini Body Challenge) having regard to the high volume of customers who are unhappy with the product Ashy Bines is selling and / or the service received by her.
The Primary Issues:
- The Ashy Bines Clean Eating Diet Plan is not a diet plan, it is only guidelines but it is still advertised as a diet plan which misleads clients into believing they are receiving a structured meal advice program. They are not receiving such a diet plan, they are only receiving guidelines. A 28 page .PDF!
- The Ashy Bines Clean Eating Forum is un-moderated by professionals which has led to individuals selling banned substances that are categorised as offences both under the Federal Crimes Act and the Customs Act and which contain dangerous ingredients banned in this country at this time. (see previous blogs).
- The Ashy Bines customer service offers 24/7 access to forum with professionals yet individuals have to wait 24/48 hours for a response some wait longer and in some circumstances the advice is negligent, demonstrated as an example on one of our blogs relating to the advice given to a pregnant woman which was reviewed by Diet Chat Accredited Dieticians which demonstrates the advice given by Ashy Bines was negligent.
The service sold by ABBBC of 24/7 moderated forums is a furphy.
Ashy Bines claims that she is Australia's Leading Transformation Specialist and Body Training Specialist, and has awarded herself an award entitled
Best Female Health and Fitness Program in Australia, yet there is no such award which has been provided to her nor does this award exist.
Ashy Bines claims she received qualifications from the
UK, fact, she never attended this course, it has to be attended in person at the college in the UK, and we verified this fact by email and telephone contact. Thus this is also unethical misleading but lacking integrity from a corporate director of ABBBC Pty. Ltd.
The FAQ’s state once off fee of $69 yet when you arrive to pay you receive the additional cost of GST which also tends to mislead the client. A qualified dietician does not charge GST for a diet plan they are exempt.
Link.
The “no refund policy” which has been altered three times in the last three months is a breach of consumer laws. You cannot say that a person is never entitled to a refund.
ABBBC engages in
misleading and deceptive conduct.
The
Ashy Bines Bikini Body Challenge = Waste of $ is not a forum to bully Ashy Bines, it separates the individual, from the corporate brand Ashy Bines and ABBBC and we stand for potential customers having access to information to lodge appropriate complaints, make applications for refunds if required and we try and direct them to alternative health solutions which offer a free service.
We support
Diet Chat because they are accredited clinical dieticians, because they offer a free health forum and advice to women and tailored meal plans for $19.00. We do not and are not affiliated with them. We respect their Accreditation and their innovation in the health sector.
We also support
Red Rocket because it is a free group which provides a nutritionist, qualified PT’s and personal advice. We are not affiliated with them.
We also support
Clean Eaters Group. Why? Because we believe clean eating is a great concept when monitored because the administrators of this group engage in sensible practices which excludes illegal drugs, and inappropriate dietary advice which can lead to ill health.
We have nothing personal against Ashy Bines the person. We do not know her and we are not interested in her personal life. We are intelligent enough as a community to not only separate the person from the corporate brand but to then seek answers and demand accountability for some transformations which we have proven to be non-members of Ashy Bines Clean Eating coupled with a complete failure to provide the service/product delivery promised to her customers.
Further by offering a blanket guarantee that a person can lose weight fast ‘guaranteed’ we say this is also a breach of ACL legislation, not only does it not qualify as ‘puff’ it falls into the category of conduct which tends to induce women to believe that her diet will guarantee results.
Now, people have to take some responsibility and do some research that is why there is a GOOGLE function, but when you are talking about the vulnerabilities of women who are desperate to lose weight and who see, on a daily basis, photo shopped photos and some fantastic inspirational stories, the emotionality takes over and common sense seems to dissipate thus why when there are 35,000 members in the Ashy Bines Clean Eating Group and 11,000 unhappy customers ( not counting those who have passed through our service and moved on once we have assisted them with resolution processes).
Now you have to ask the question what is ABBBC doing wrong? Why are they not listening and are they just promoting an unsustainable lifestyle which has resulted in a backlash of thousands of unhappy customers, when they receive the product and question “what is this?” “I expected a book!” “I am shocked by the presentation and information.” "I expected a diet plan!”
Is Ashy Bines being bullied?
One has to differentiate between what is bullying as opposed to what is consumer adovacy. Here is the definition of
cyberbullying. Just hover your mouse over the bold text word for the link.
We focus on using information which we research and then obtain evidence to educate women and former and potential customers about ABBBC Pty Ltd and the brand Ashy Bines, not Ashy Bines personally, so please make that distinction.
We do not remove comments in the sense that people are (as per our disclaimer) responsible for their own comments) however our Mission Statement makes it clear what our objectives are and what we are trying to achieve. We will however remove hateful comments which are a breach of
Terms and Policies of Facebook if we see them.
We believe that ABBBC and the Brand Ashy Bines lacks ethics and integrity when engaging in the conduct of its business. We are not saying that there are not success stories nor that the bootcamps are not successful and well run, our focus is the points previously outlined. Hence we do not believe we are engaging in conduct which is categorised as bullying when we use facts and investigate issues and post information to rebut what has been said and or stated by third parties associated with ABBBC and the brand Ashy Bines.
The page has evolved from its creation to a factually researched information/whistle blower activist community.
We object to the exploitation of women’s transformations for the purpose on-selling more product/service when some of those women’s photos are subject to abuse and are vulnerable to viral uploading without the person being properly versed or vetted nor explained how their transformation could lead to hurtful hate comments and then be exploited to being downloaded from the fanpage and end up all over the world. We note one of those
customers ended up on an unsavoury sexual deviancy advertisement in the UK.
The rest of the broader issues are discussed on the actual advocacy page.
How Ashy Bines Supporters Treat Us: An Example
The admins and other members of the advocacy page are constantly under attack with the most hateful and disgraceful comments, or with comments which are made, then allegations that the opposite has occurred on another page in order to try and discredit members of the admin team. We work very hard to give everyone a voice and we do not want to publish most of the horrible and cruel posts which have been posted but in this latest example (which is not as emotive nor particularly offensive), we were the subject of falsehoods and vitriol, and once the person was caught being dishonest, not only did he report the posts which demonstrated his lack of integrity but he removed his own post and alleged he was blocked when that was absolutely incorrect.
To be fair, his partner was blocked, a number of people reported her post, it spammed and blocked, and as soon as I realised she had been blocked she was immediately unblocked so she was given a right of reply.
We try not censure people’s right to express their opinion as long as it is respectful.
I will not name this poster because unlike many people, this young woman was a real victim of cyberbullying and suffered a great deal at the hands of a vexatious and obsessed woman, so her identity will be protected. I believe her passion in defending Ashy Bines, stems from her own experiences of being a victim, and as tragic as it is, she has never really taken the time to really look at how the page conducts itself, which has, since August, worked hard to promote evidence based information.
A valid point, there are a lot of dangerous products in the market place, but this page is a consumer advocacy page for ABBBC customer service issues, and clearly neither him nor the person who he calls his partner read the actual links which explains what we were saying about Oxy and Jack3d, including that ABBBC or Ashy Bines would not be advocating for the sale of this product on their closed facebook forum given Ashy Bines ‘the brand’ and personal views on Duromine.
It is a clean eating forum, and until the ingredients of these substances are changed, ABBBC could be held vicariously liable for the sale on their company forum in the event that the posts continue to be unmonitored.
Yet these products continue to be sold and further should a customer become ill or have severe side effects, the liability falls not only on the seller but because its in the context of the ABBBC forum, then it poses some ethical and potential civil liability litigation risks given that ABBBC have employed moderators to monitor the facebook forum.
What happened next? He was not banned, nor was his comment spammed. Its still up at 5:15 pm
And still there over 3 hours later.
What happened next? He removed the posts, and reported the account of the admin in order to block her account. Why? When he was still liking posts after 9:38 pm and still remains un-banned...
After reporting Cathy Brophy’s account to Facebook, when he was caught lying about how the page respected his post and left it untainted without removing nor banning him, his report attempts to hide the evidence and the fact that he has made a public post which is demonstrated as misleading and ill conceived.
There were no breaches of Facebook Terms and Policies, Brad was caught in a lie, removed his own post, cheekily came back at 9:36 pm to 'like' a post after he reported the posts which demonstrated his lack of credibility and integrity.
We are using this as an example of what we have to put up with every day. We respected Brad’s point of view and debated the issue with him. We do not ban people without a warning or unless the behaviour is outrageous it crosses all boundaries of acceptable societal norms.
For the record, we are not lazy, hateful, overweight, fatties who hate or hate on others. We are an educated team who spend the time doing research and try our best to provide feedback and information to our members.
We listen to what they have to say, and we accept constructive criticism. We may not agree but we have at times conceded when we have made an error of judgement and we take responsibility for it.
We do not get paid, we do not ask for recognition we are activists for a collective of women who need assistance with a program whereby they feel as though they did not get what they paid for and the conduct and or business practices of ABBBC leave some questionable issues which have been canvassed.
Whilst we took the time to blog about the dangers of banned substances it seemed to make no difference to the moderators on the facebook forum, as after our blogs were written the following posts were made by desperate women seeking banned substances to increase weight loss fast!
Accordingly, despite the fact that we wrote the blogs, that it is against the rules of the forum, there are still posts selling illegal drugs! Some members are sensible but these posts do not comply with ABBBC rules of their forum so why is it un-moderated? They could be held vicariously liable for facilitating the sale of banned substances which involves offences listed under the
Criminal Code Act 1995 and the
Commonwealth Criminal Code.
This is not bullying, this is a very serious topic about the importation of a currently banned substance. We raised the issues, including ingredients and side effect in the following:
Blog 1 and
Blog 2.
We created these only to educate people of what the product is, its ingredients, its functions and its side effects.
