Vitamin Sales Pitch a Tough Pill to Swallow, Buyers Say

A law enforcement task force seized records of a vitamin company in Brea Tuesday after some consumers complained that the firm was not paying off on promises of prizes ranging from new cars to bars of gold in exchange for vitamin purchases.

Omni Pharmaceuticals, on Tamarack Avenue, has been operating three shifts of at least 20 telephone sales workers a day, Orange County prosecutors said after the raid. The company began operations in 1983.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Patrick S. Geary said the owner, Gary Allan, whose address was not available, is under investigation for possible fraud and grand theft charges.

The raid was conducted with a search warrant by a task force made up of personnel from the district attorney’s office, the Brea Police Department, the state attorney general’s office and the U.S. Postal Service.

Geary, who heads the district attorney’s fraud division, said that Omni provided its sales people with consumer phone lists. Then, those called were allegedly told that they had won one of a number of prizes, which included new cars, gold bars or even large cash certificates.

“What everybody got in actuality was a cheap reproduction of a lithograph that was allegedly a work of fine art--turns out they bought these for about $10 each,” Geary said. “To get the prize, these customers had to buy approximately $400 worth of vitamins from Omni.”

Allan could not be reached for comment, and no one answered calls to the Omni offices.

While the operation was not shut down, the company stopped making its telephone sales calls after the police search Tuesday, Geary said.

Geary said he did not have a dollar value on the vitamins, but he said that each sale included a “high degree of profit” which easily covered sales commissions, the cost of the vitamins and the cost of the lithographs.

Hundreds of Calls Made

Geary also said that he doesn’t know how many thousands of dollars in vitamins were sold but that the phone calls made each day, according to records, numbered in the hundreds.

“The people would send this money not because they needed vitamins, but because they had been led to believe that they had won some fabulous prize,” Geary said. “We had an insider working there who told us that nobody wins the car, nobody wins the gold bars. Everybody wins these cheap drawings.”

Some documents seized show that Allan was attempting to start a similar operation on Staten Island in New York, Geary said. He said that authorities there were contacted by Orange County officials.

Geary said the investigation was done by a “boiler room task force” set up more than a year ago. The term “boiler room,” Geary said, refers to a “high-pressure, telephone sales operation in which either investment schemes are sold, such as non-existent oil wells, or COD frauds, where people send in hundreds of dollars for products which are worthless or (worth) much less (than) what they are sold for.”