It all began with a tip. A colleague of mine had a friend in Ann Arbor who needed help. When I called her, she told me her elderly mom had been walking through a mall when a salesperson approached her with an eye cream sample. She went into a store called Beauty Essentials in Ann Arbor, Mich., and came out with $5,000 in skincare products she didn’t want, tried to refuse, and couldn’t return. But, she said, it wasn’t an isolated incident. She posted on Facebook and connected with more than 30 people with complaints about the store. She asked me to look into it.
And so began an investigation that took place over more than a year. My reporting partner, Caley Fox Shannon, and I found similar complaints all over the country. We followed the trail, and found a network of mall skincare stores that systematically targeted older adults and people with disabilities across the United States. There was a link between them: one company, the California-based Mazal Group.
Over the past year, we spoke with more than 50 people, including customers who say they were taken advantage of, their family members and former employees. We looked at state and federal court lawsuits, hundreds of online reviews and nearly 500 consumer complaints we got through Freedom of Information Act requests. We went to stores selling products from Mazal Group in Virginia, Maryland and California, as well as the company’s Chatsworth, Calif., headquarters.
You can read about what we found in NPR Investigations’ whole report here, watch our documentary or listen on Consider This. | 
