“Beauty Essentials is no longer located at Briarwood Mall. We are not able to share details on former tenants at the center.”
That’s the response, by way of a PR firm that does “crisis communications,” to a series of questions the Observer posed to the mall’s general manager, Erica Chappell. The questions concerned complaints from the adult children of elderly people who’d been lured into the store overlooking the mall’s center court.
They allege their parents were coerced with high-pressure sales tactics to purchase wildly overpriced skin care products and devices. One man, who asked not to be identified, said his father, an Ann Arborite with dementia and sciatica, paid them more than $42,000 while walking in the mall for exercise between mid-December and mid-February.
Local photographer and teacher Michele Anliker says her social media posts led her to about twenty others who had similar experiences. “I think part of why this works is that there’s the stigma of it, right?” she says. Her mother, visiting from Switzerland, was charged about $5,000 on New Year’s Eve.
“My mom told me that she tried to leave. She told them, ‘I need to think about that.’ And she was getting up and trying to find her coat, and they had put it somewhere and she couldn’t see it.”
Hers was the rare case in which a full refund was eventually issued after extensive efforts to involve mall management and the police. Anliker continues to coordinate with other victims and even distributed warning flyers at the mall until Beauty Essentials shut down in April.
Cheryle Grounds reports that her eighty-four-year-old father was charged $9,858 on three different cards on New Year’s Day. A former farmer and millwright from Clinton, “I don’t think he’s ever applied a product to his face in his life,” she says. Declining a partial refund, she initiated a fraud investigation by the Ann Arbor Police Department and a complaint to the state attorney general, also receiving pro bono help from an advocate for the elderly with Legal Services of South Central Michigan.
Beauty Essentials was part of a long-standing, shadowy network operating similarly under various names throughout the U.S. and beyond, with many complaints online (search “skin care store scam elderly”). Among the questions the PR firm didn’t answer were how Briarwood screens potential tenants and whether it has a policy against aggressively soliciting business by placing staff near store entrances.
Grounds says no charges have been filed to date in response to her criminal complaint.
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They scammed my mom out of $5300.and it’s been a nightmare trying to get any closure.