slamboard

According to the low carb boards, in the past day or two at Kimkins.com there have been bannings, with and without refunds, of members who have questioned or criticized Kimmer’s lack of forthrightness about her identity and pictures.

It seems that other members have had their passwords changed and did not receive new passwords when they requested them.

Some members say that they have requested refunds and have been turned down. Apparently the Kimkins.com terms of service were changed just this morning, without notice, and are now far more restrictive in terms of member behavior and refunds.

There are many avenues of recourse for dissatisfied customers, and this very helpful post at Weight of the Evidence lists several, including FTC complaints and complaints to the Attorney General’s office and Better Business Bureau.

Unhappy members can also complain to PayPal or contest the charge with their credit card company.

EDITED TO ADD: People have expressed curiosity about when Part IV of the Kimkins series is coming out — look for it in the next couple of days. I’m still pulling the details together and want to make sure it’s absolutely accurate.

As the doubts swirl about Kimmer’s identity and pictures, a very damning (if true) new story has emerged.

According to a post today on the LowCarbFriends.com board, Christin, the Kimkins.com member whose weight loss success was featured in the recent Woman’s World cover story, really wanted to meet up with Kimmer while she was in California for the cover shoot, but she was brushed off:

“When Christin went to CA for the WW shoot, she wanted to meet Heidi, since she was going to be right there, but Heidi declined.. Christin even offered to rent a car and drive to see her, but again she said no.. Then all of a sudden Heidi had an emergency dealing with a foster kid in Utah.. Apparently she drove from CA to UT took care of it and was back home in no more than 24 hours, thus, making it impossible for Christin to even try again to meet her..”

Christin, is this true? Did you request a meeting with Kimmer, only to be turned down? Jimmy, what about asking about this during your telephone podcast interview?

Read my series about Kimkins.com, the mysterious Kimmer, and the growing controversy here.

By all accounts, low carb blogger Jimmy Moore is truly a nice guy. He lost an astounding amount of weight following a low carb diet and started blogging about it in April 2005. He has made many public appearances.

Bloggers and Internet marketers could spend days examining Jimmy’s blogging, linking, and marketing techniques and it would be time well spent. The man is a brilliant natural Internet marketer who has built a huge following of dieters — targeted, motivated, repeat customers for the businesses Jimmy promotes.

My wife Catherine MacDonald, who was a founding partner of Kimkins.com, has a great deal of respect, admiration, and affection for Jimmy. As she and Heidi Diaz were dissolving their Kimkins.com partnership, Heidi attempted to smear Catherine’s management of the Kimkins.com affiliate program to Jimmy, and Catherine has never forgiven her for it.

Jimmy Moore’s association with Kimkins.com stretches back nearly to the beginning. Catherine, aware of Jimmy’s pull, contacted him about Kimkins.com as the site was launching and arranged for some links back and forth. Jimmy expressed interest in an affiliate relationship, and so when the Kimkins.com affiliate program was launched Catherine invited him to sign up right away. He did, and a successful affiliate relationship began. Using his very effective “pre-sell” marketing techniques, Jimmy routinely had conversion ratios of 1:30 to 1:40 on the traffic he sent Kimkins.com’s way.

Catherine’s association with Kimkins.com and Heidi Diaz ended in September 2006, and so I have no direct knowledge of the recent affiliate sales numbers. However, judging from his search engine rankings, the ramped up marketing blitz associated with his own switch to the Kimkins diet, and the hype that resulted from the recent Woman’s World article, I would conservatively estimate that Jimmy has pulled in at least $15,000 in affiliate commissions from Kimkins.com.

Yesterday, after I revealed the facts about his Kimmer interview here on the blog, Jimmy stepped up to the plate and openly admited that his first Kimmer interview was done through email, not in person or on the phone. He says that he had a long telephone call with “Kimmer” yesterday and they have a telephone interview scheduled for his podcast late next week — a case of strike while the iron is … uh, cold and with a well-prepared story. Jimmy asked Kimmer for an in-person interview to help clear up the controversy about her identity and weight loss claims, but she once again declined. To my knowledge, nobody interested in the Kimkins.com debate claims that they have met Kimmer/Heidi Diaz/Kim Drake in person.

If Kimmer/Heidi Diaz is truly who she says she is but for whatever reason will not participate in public appearances or video appearances, why not agree to meet Jimmy in person for an audio interview? She could show him some ID to prove that she is in fact Heidi Kimberly Diaz, and let him describe the meeting and vouch for her authenticity. They could have a no published pictures agreement, and Jimmy could be the first person who could say that yes, he has met Kimmer in person and she is everything she claims to be.

Jimmy is an astute marketer and is playing this whole thing very well — but as a decent guy with substantial integrity, he’s got to be having some serious doubts about Kimmer himself now.

Yesterday, Catherine wrote to Women’s World seeking their comment on the Kimkins/Kimmer controversy, and asking what fact checking they did, if any, about “Kim Drake” (aka Kimmer/Heidi Diaz) and her weight loss claims when they were writing their recent cover article.

Today, she received an email from the chief senior editor of Woman’s World herself, Amanda Barbour. Disappointingly, Ms. Barbour’s email contained no comment whatsoever on the substantive issues raised in my series — just a cease and desist letter demanding that I stop using the thumbnail-sized image of the Woman’s World cover of the issue in question. This, in my opinion, is a bully tactic — the cover thumbnail is obviously fair use.

Interesting.

This post is third in a series (you can find the first post and the table of contents here, and the second post here) about the multimillion-dollar Internet diet marketing phenomenon that is Kimkins.com — and its controversial diet guru, a mysterious woman known to most people only as “Kimmer.” My wife, Catherine MacDonald, was a founding partner of the Kimkins.com startup, and I’m sharing the story of this business venture as a case study in business partnerships.

SEPTEMBER 2007 UPDATE: We now have real pictures of Kimmer. As many people suspected, she is a morbidly obese woman — not the svelte 118-pound diet success she has claimed to be. See the pictures here: Kimmer surveillance picture, Kimmer at the Kimkins.com mail box, more surveillance Kimmer photos.

In 1993 — almost 15 years ago — New Yorker published what has become one of its most famous cartoons. One dog, sitting at a computer keyboard, says to another dog, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

This post is about the topic that is at the root of the raging Kimkins/Kimmer controversy. Who is Kimmer? Did she really lose 200 pounds and is she really slim now? Why are there only four known “after” pictures and why do they all look different?

This is also about the way that the Internet has changed how people do business. My wife Catherine founded Kimkins.com with a woman she had never met before, and has never met to this day. This is not unusual — in the information age, people routinely enter into contracts with one another without meeting and sometimes without even talking on the telephone.

Kimmer has always been secretive and evasive about her personal information and photographs. As a private individual posting at the LowCarbFriends.com boards, it was reasonable for her to defend her right to privacy. However, she now uses her story and what she claims are her photos to market a million-dollar weight loss business. There are a disturbing number of unanswered questions and inconsistencies, and a growing number of consumers and dieters are demanding the truth.

Although the recent Woman’s World cover article names the creator/owner of Kimkins.com as “Kim Drake,” (a pseudonym Kimmer had once told Catherine to use for publicity purposes) we’re quite certain that the real name of the woman known as Kimmer is Heidi Kimberly Diaz:

• Heidi Diaz is the name Kimmer gave Catherine and the name she used on their Kimkins.com partnership contract.
• Heidi Diaz is the name that was on the PayPal account to which Kimmer’s share of the website profits were deposited.
• Heidi Diaz is the telephone directory name associated with the phone number Kimmer used for telephone calls with Catherine and has listed on press releases — (951) 808-0482. USSearch.com databases associate the name Heidi Kimberly Diaz, age 49, with the telephone number and telephone directory address.

The pictures below show one of Kimmer’s “before” pictures on the left and a picture on a Classmates.com profile under the name Heidi (Miller) Diaz. They are clearly the same woman on the same day:

In the five or so years that Kimmer has been discussing her weight loss success and acting as a role model and mentor, she has published only two “before” pictures and four “after” photographs. The after pictures are remarkably different from one another:

The second photo is Kimmer’s original LowCarbFriends.com “after” photo (which she was still using at the launch of Kimkins.com). Kimmer came up with the third photo about a month after the Kimkins.com launch after much pleading for recent after pictures from Kimkins.com members. The final picture on the right is a recent picture from the Woman’s World article, and it is now the only “after” photo on the Kimkins.com site. Bizarrely, a Kimmer before and after combo with an “after” of a heavily-airbrushed woman in a leopardskin blouse (I am unable to post the picture here because of copyright issues) was also published in the same Woman’s World article.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody who has interacted with Kimmer online claims to have met her in person. Whenever Kimkins.com members have requested seminars or get-togethers, Kimmer has declined. There is a Kimkins sea cruise being planned for February 2008, but no commitment that Kimmer will be onboard. This is odd behavior for a woman who trades on her personality and life experience to provide motivation to her customers.

Questions have been raised about well-known low carb diet blogger Jimmy Moore’s interview of Kimmer — did he interview Kimmer in person? The answer is no. This interview was arranged by Catherine, via email, and conducted between Jimmy and Kimmer also by email. Jimmy sent his questions to Catherine, who forwarded them to Kimmer, and Kimmer then emailed the answers back to Jimmy. This interview fueled Jimmy’s successful affiliate relationship with Kimkins.com which is still ongoing. It’s worth noting that the old Kimmer “after” picture (seated black blouse shot) Jimmy used to have on his site has entirely disappeared, replaced by the red dress “after” shot.

As I write this, the “who is Kimmer?” question is being hotly debated on several diet message boards including LowCarbFriends.com. There are a number of people who are aware of Heidi K. Diaz’s address, contact information, and other personal details, and I suspect that investigative journalism or private investigation will soon bring about the disclosure of new information about her identity and the authenticity of her weight loss claims. On the Internet in 2007, it’s no longer possible to hide behind a monitor like the New Yorker cartoon dog.

UPDATE: Jimmy Moore confirms that his Kimmer interview was conducted in email and announces an upcoming podcast telephone interview. Once again, “Kimmer” declines a personal appearance.

Next: Kimkins.com Part IV - The Kimkins.com Early Days

This post is second in a series (you can find the first post and the table of contents here) about the multimillion-dollar Internet diet marketing phenomenon that is Kimkins.com — and its controversial diet guru, a mysterious woman known to most people only as “Kimmer.” My wife, Catherine MacDonald, was a founding partner of the Kimkins.com startup, and I’m sharing the story of this business venture as a case study in business partnerships.

Around 2002, a regular poster known as “Kimmer” started to develop a following of dieters on the low carb diet forum LowCarbFriends.com (LCF). People were impressed with her weight loss success story — according to her, an incredible 200 pound loss in 11 months. How did she do it? A low carb, low fat, and very low calorie diet consisting mostly of diet soft drinks, chicken breast, eggs, water-packed tuna, and a negligible amount of salad: a diet that was eventually dubbed “Kimkins.” That the restrictive diet works, if followed, is indisputable. Dozens of LCF posters lost substantial amounts of weight, at least temporarily, following Kimmer’s advice.

In 2004, Catherine joined LowCarbFriends.com and and became a faithful daily reader of the forums. She watched as a groundswell of interest in Kimmer and Kimkins continued to build. My wife’s impressions of Kimmer were of a straight-shooting — but extremely polarizing — charismatic writer. Kimmer had a knack for summing up her thoughts and advice in concise, consistent catchphrases.

By 2006, Kimmer was conducting her own extremely popular “Ask Kimmer” threads at LCF in the midst of vocal opposition from “the Kimkins naysayers,” as she called them. Her detractors cast doubt upon the safety or advisability of the very low calorie diet championed by Kimmer. They pointed out that Kimmer only had a single out-of-date “after” photograph; it was implied that she might not even be telling the truth about her dramatic weight loss.

Catherine had been involved in online marketing for years and recognized an opportunity in Kimmer’s mushrooming popularity. She knew that Kimmer did not have the technical know how or the capital to build the infrastructure necessary to market “Kimkins,” so she wrote to Kimmer and, in exchange for a 50% interest, offered the money, programming, marketing, and technical support necessary to launch a diet site — Kimkins.com.

Kimmer accepted the offer. The terms of a contract were hammered out and a site was built, all in just a couple of weeks. Catherine worked 18-hour days assembling content and programming. The workload only increased with technical support for a rush of dozens of paid members who joined the moment the site launched in April 2006 — the result of a purely word-of-mouth viral marketing campaign conducted by Kimmer’s fans. Not even the LCF board owners’ ban policy, meant to silence any mention of the new competing site, could keep the news of Kimkins.com from spreading.

The site launched with a $14.95 membership fee, and the $300 of out-of-pocket expenses for the Kimkins startup was covered within hours. It was apparent within the first day or two that the site had a good chance of becoming a business success. In the buildup to launch, Kimmer had repeatedly expressed concern to Catherine about whether or not Kimmer’s time would be adequately compensated by her share of the site’s revenues. The clear early indications of profitability were good news.

Then, out of the blue, Kimmer did something that shocked Catherine and took her completely by surprise. Apparently stung by criticism of the membership fee, Kimmer publicly announced that all her share of the proceeds from Kimkins.com was going to go into a fund to help the foster kids who were placed in her home. Not only did Catherine feel that this unexpected announcement discounted the value of the very real work that she and Kimmer were putting into the site, but it appeared to contradict Catherine’s earlier understanding of Kimmer’s plans for the income should the site become a success.

How can one criticize such generosity? Catherine bit her tongue. The doubts had only just begun.

Next: Kimkins.com Part III - Kimmer: Who Is She Really?