If you’ve looked into colon cleansers at all in the past couple months, chances are that you’ve heard of Bowtrol. It’s currently one of the newest and most heavily marketed colon cleansers around. Is it everything that the advertisements say it is? Unfortunately, no. Bowtrol turns out to be much like the other scams that are floating around the internet. This review will give you a glimpse of the product itself as well as the company behind the product.
Bowtrol, as a product, actually looks about average. They provide a full list of their ingredients (thank you Bowtrol), which more than I can say for some other companies in this industry. Even more, Bowtrol actually gives a little bit of information about each ingredient that is included. This was a pleasant surprise. As mentioned, the ingredients to be your average colon cleansing ingredients so it should be relatively effective (but certainly not more effective that the other products on the market).
This is where the review goes south. Bowtrol uses the classic free trial to take advantage of consumers. They offer a free trial, hope that you don’t read the fine print that explains that you will be enrolled in their autoship program, and 21 days after you order they start charging your credit card $89.90 every two months to mail you new shipments of the product. You have those 21 days to cancel the program, but some have posted on compliant boards that they experienced difficulty getting a hold of the company and cancelling the autoship. This is the classic autoship scam in all its glory.
But it gets worse. When looking through their fine print I found their not so private privacy policy. If you look long enough, you’ll find that they reserve the right (and will) sell all of your personal information to basically anyone that they want to. So in short, unless you want your junk mail and telemarketing calls to sky rocket, don’t give them any information at all.
The Bowtrol guarantee is better than some, but has it’s downsides as well. It’s full 90 days which is really good. Where it goes downhill, however, is when they charge you a $10 restocking fee and only allow you return unopened bottles. You also need a return authorization which you can only get if you request it online (there’s a higher likelihood of them not granting your authorization).
As I always do, I checked with the BBB to see what rating they were giving the company. To my great surprise, they were given an A- and no complaints had been filed with them. Puzzled, I began to dig more and found that company has only been in existence (filed with the state of California) since 1/8/2009 (on a few month). Obviously, this isn’t enough time for many people to file with the BBB. I suspect that this rating will drop drastically in the coming months.
To wrap up this review, Bowtrol is little more than a scam. The product itself seems decent with a good amount of ingredients. But the business practices of the company are more than enough to convince me to stay away from the company. Unfortunately, there will be a lot of people that still get scammed by Bowtrol. At least you can now make sure that you’re not one of them.
