"1-800-a-new-you and 1-800-my-vision are effective, affordable, and can help your practice maximize your advertising response rates while increasing orders and referrals. Thanks and we'll phone you back shortly."
In other words, 1-800-A-NEW-YOU was nothing but an answering service. It was an outfit for hire to all clients-whether "plastic surgeon, dermatologist or eye care specialist"-who might want to lease a phone number for their "orders and referrals."
Moreover, the number 1-800-A-NEW-YOU, which that the Institute's website provided, was not even the Institute's direct number. It was a number leased to the Institute and shared by other clinics. In short, the Institute did not have a single phone number of its own.
Such a setup would not have set off alarm bells for PEP had the Beverly Hills Surgical Institute been a small, fledgling, stand-alone operation. After all, a cottage-industry operation may actually find it cost-effective to pay an answering service, instead of applying for a line of its own to be manned by its own paid staff. But the Institute is not supposed to be small. Its own website had boasted that the Institute was present "throughout Southern California." That had to be big time.
PEP asks these questions: How could such a huge operation, on top of having no address whatsoever, not have a single direct line? And in a totally wired country like the U.S., too! If the clinic did have both an address and a phone number but was simply not giving them out, why not? What business did it have enticing clients to trust the Institute with the surgery of their faces and bodies when the Institute could not trust them with their address and number?
EMAIL EXCHANGES. On December 14, 2007, PEP, through managing editor Karen Pagsolingan, decided to get in touch with the Beverly Hills Surgical Institute via email.
She clicked the "Click to Email Here" tab in the Institute's www.weknowbeauty.com website and asked these questions:
1. Do you have a branch outside the U.S.?
2. Are you affiliated with Beverly Hills
6750 here in Manila?
Five days later, she received email from a certain Tom Oseransky, who introduced himself as the "VP of Operations of Beverly Hills Surgical Institute." Tom's email read:
"Ms. Pagsolingan,
"Dr. Shin asked me to respond to your questions regarding David Bunevacz. At this time we do not have an office outside the US and yes we are affiliated with the BH 6750 office in Manila."
Karen then sent another email to the same address, requesting more information about the Beverly Hills Surgical Institute: "Thank you, Mr. Tom. Is it possible to request for a brief Company Profile? Or even just the address of your clinic in Beverly Hills or Long Beach?"
She got a reply, also via email, on December 27, 2007. But the reply came, not from Tom Oseransky with whom PEP was communicating, but from David Bunevacz. His email read:
"Karen,
"Just for your information Tom Oseransky and Dr. Shin had 3 or 4 clinics running at the same time at the time we signed our agreement, we had even sent one of our dermas to their clinic to train. It was only a few months after we signed our agreement had Dr. Shin separated from his partners and went on his own, then recently, as in the past few months have they shut down their other clinic because of financial problems that they had. Please just make sure you do a very detailed and thorough research before you write anything as would any responsible journalist as I know that you are. [Bold highlight ours.] Thank you. David."
Bunevacz admits that "only a few months after" he-with his partners?-signed the agreement with a Dr. Shin, the latter discontinued his links with the Beverly Hills Surgical Institute. Bunevacz also says that he-with his partners?-did not drop the agreement with Dr. Shin, but that Dr. Shin's operations closed down "recently, as in the past few months."
If Dr. Shin was no longer affiliated with the Institute, and it was Dr. Shin with whom Bunevacz continued to have an agreement, why did the Bunevacz couple and their partners continue to drumbeat 6750 as an affiliate of the Institute?
