Counterfeit doTERRA Products

Many of you may know that doTERRA products are unfortunately counterfeited. We also receive enquiries about this issue, and recently one of our customers fell victim to it. On the Vonia website, every doTERRA product is 100% genuine and sourced from the original manufacturer, doTERRA. In this article, we try to help you understand what may give you reason to be suspicious if you find the lowest prices somewhere other than with us. 

Our customer's story

One of our customers recently contacted us because she had received a counterfeit Lavender 15 ml oil from another seller. A relative had bought it for her as a gift, choosing the cheapest online source on a marketplace, which we will not name. She asked what she could do. 

First, we helped examine what had happened. Here is what we found. On the marketplace, the seller was a French company registered with a French address and company registration number, but with a Chinese phone number (+86 country code). That alone may already be suspicious. The listed bank account number pointed to the Irish branch of a Luxembourg bank. Of course, when paying by bank card, most people would not notice this. On the marketplace, however, you can easily access this information by clicking on the seller's name, so you can pay attention to it in future. Simply copying the company name into a search engine immediately brought up English-language reviews about counterfeit products and their sellers. By checking the seller's registration number in the company register, we found that it was founded in 2020, so unfortunately it cannot be described as a newly established company.

We also examined the packaging that arrived, where the label showed a German sender. When checking the German company, we saw that its owner had a Chinese name and the company had been founded in 2016, so this was not a new company either. The return address provided was an address in Budapest. 

Comparison of original and copied doTERRA products

We placed the counterfeit and the original product next to each other in the photos above so you can see the differences. Someone who does not see doTERRA products every day could easily confuse them. On the left you can see the counterfeit product, and on the right the original.

Let us go through the differences we discovered. In the image below, we circled in red the differences we noticed without opening the product. We emphasise that the original product is a doTERRA Lavender 15 ml oil that we received from doTERRA in the days when this article was written. However, packaging may be changed by the manufacturer. 

1. Perhaps the first thing you can notice is that the original product only has the word “Lavender” on it, while the copy says “Lavender oil.”
2. Behind the doTERRA logo, the original product shows the TM marking (trademark), while the copy shows the ® symbol (registered trademark). 
3. Before the product volume, the original product has the letter “e”, which refers to the English word “estimated”, meaning the estimated fill quantity. The copy does not include the “e” marking.

What can an unlucky buyer do? If, before opening the product, you believe you have received a copy, exercise your right of return and withdrawal. If you have opened the product and only then notice that it is not of the quality you are used to, make sure you report to the marketplace or webshop that you likely received a counterfeit item.

In our case, the customer noticed after opening the product that its scent did not match the usual scent. By then she had also discovered the external differences. The counterfeit product was only a few hundred forints cheaper than ours, but unfortunately, due to lack of experience, the warning signs were not noticed.