It was bound to happen, but we had our first ever incident of TrustPointe COAs being falsified. It’s unfortunate that some business owners would be unethical, and use our name and likeness without permission in order to pass along false information to their customers.
In this case, some of the results they listed were not even possible values for the test. But in all cases, they removed the QR Code and the link from the COAs that would allow customers to verify that the COA is legitimate.
Protecting yourself is pretty easy:
- When reviewing a COA, the first thing that should be done is to look for a way to verify that the COA is legitimate – either a link, key, or QR Code.
- That should take you to the laboratory’s website, not a third party website. If you follow the link and it does not take you to the laboratory’s website (URL), it is likely falsified.
- Finally, verify that the information on the COA provided matches the COA on the laboratory’s website. People who falsify COAs cannot access the laboratory’s website, so they are unable to alter the original COA.
- Lastly, if you still have any questions, reach out to the laboratory and ask them to verify the result for you. That is how we discovered that someone was falsifying our COAs.
TrustPointe has QR Code / Link in the upper right corner of all of our COAs that will take you to our LIMS website and allow you to verify that the COA was not altered.
Fortunately these bad actors are usually found out pretty quickly, but not before scamming people and making a quick buck. When you purchase product, make sure you follow the steps above to verify the testing you were provided is legitimate.