Shafted by Safe Personal Alarm

Leave a reply

Total score; -3. A cute gadget to show off to your friends; and it could make a nice zipper-pull. Get a pair on Amazon to save boo koo bucks.

How to contact Safe Personal Alarm:

Safe Personal Alarm
2315 CALIFORNIA ST
San Francisco, California 94115
(833) 501-2920
Email: support@safepersonalalarm.com

Clones of this offer include Safe Alarm Defense, GC4Women.org, SafeLifeAssociation and many more.

January 23, 2019: There may be nothing illegal or wrong with the following business practices.  But they suggest that the seller is not to be trusted. I’m using my Trustworthy scoring system; -1 means true (bad), +1 means false (good), and 0 means undetermined.  I penalize the seller for statements made by shills.

Ridiculous claims: TRUE (-1).

  • “Paul Davidson began work on the device a few years after his daughter went missing.”  But Alibaba (supplier of gadgets to many scammers) has tons of personal alarms, several of which are much cuter than these.
  • “His voice trails off. It’s clear that his daughter remains heavy on his mind. Then he wipes his eyes, offers a firm handshake, and is off. Paul Davidson has a Women Against Violence meeting to attend.” A very moving passage, especially in view of the fact that Paul is not an actual person. See “Lying And Deception” below.

Suspicious location: UNDETERMINED (0): The address listed above is a nice little SF townhouse. But it’s the address of the Privacy Compliance Officer, and he/she might not be Paul Davidson, but merely an agent. I don’t see any other businesses using this address.

Onerous terms: FALSE (+1). Terms and Conditions are mostly about use of the website. All I can find relevant to the offer is mild compared to many sites:

  • They don’t guarantee that the alarm is suitable for any purpose, nor that anything they say is true.

Ads, spam, robocalls: FALSE (+1). Mild compared to many sites. They’ll spam you; you can opt out.

Sweet! But they’re just clip art.

Lying and deception: TRUE (-1).

  • The photo of “Paul Davidson and his daughter Christine” is clip art, for sale on Shutterstock.
  • The photo of customer Angela Kelly is also for sale on Shutterstock.
  • “Police are also noticing a trend when the Safe Personal Alarm is used.” But I couldn’t find any discussion of personal alarms in any Police forums.
The police are not talking about personal alarms.

Obfuscation: TRUE (-1)

  • A countdown timer suggests that you don’t have time to make a careful decision.
  • Messages about random people snapping up alarms keep overlaying the page.
  • If you try to leave the order form, you get a spin-the-disk game and a chance to win a discount.

Phony reviews: TRUE (-1). I see lots of enthusiastic “forum posts.” The posters are real Facebook accounts. Maybe they’re hacked? Some clones of this offer use identical posts. But their authenticity doesn’t matter; more than three testimonials are automatically suspicious.

Crummy product: UNDETERMINED (0). 24 Amazon customers rated it an average 4.4 stars.

  • “I got these for myself to have as a precaution. I normally don’t go out alone but everyone once in awhile I have to. The alarm is loud enough to definitely make anyone take a second to pause.”
  • “I’m not sure about this personal alarm. Two alarms were in the box, as described, but there are no instructions. All the reviews say the alarm is very, very loud, but I’m afraid to try it without any instructions. The reviews also mention having to change the battery after a certain amount of usage, but it is not clear how to do that.”

Overpriced: TRUE (-1). Safe Personal Alarm is offering two alarms for $40, claiming that they’re giving a 50% discount. Amazon sells what sure looks like the same alarm, two for $15.

Bad service: UNDETERMINED (0). I couldn’t find any complaints.

Unauthorized charges: NOT SCORED.   Safe Personal Alarm doesn’t accept payment via PayPal; that doesn’t look good. However, I found no complaints about fraud.

Are personal alarms any good? Suppose the attacker restrains the victim’s hands to avoid getting beaten about the head and shoulders; now what? It’s hard to find any information about personal alarms that isn’t coming from companies that sell them. ReviewoPedia advises, “They may be not the best defense on their own, but if combined with some other self-defense method, they are extremely effective and can give you the advantage by distracting and confusing your attacker.”

Any ads you see here are how WordPress publishes this blog for free. I have nothing to do with them!

Leave a comment