There’s something about the summer, that brings the fake cart brands out running. Time to put on our “fake cart detective” hat and catch them all! Today’s black market THC vape cart is “Push carts,” a “brand” that flirts with search term ubiquity but has nevertheless saturated the market.

We see Push Carts sold by the usual fake cart accounts

The interesting thing with fake cart plugs is that they all advertise in a storm of hashtags for as many brands as they can think of. We were looking over the #muhameds tag on Twitter and ran across this:

Twitter_Push_Carts

The line “something your plug doesn’t have” sounds like this must be a new brand, doesn’t it? The trouble is that “pushcart” is also a common word for a physical cart, so searching the #pushcart hashtag by itself doesn’t turn up much. However, we do find Push on scam sites as well:

scam_site_Push_Carts

Any time you see a full gram for $20 online, there is no way that’s a legit offer.

Push Carts flood the Reddit vape community

Reddit has a gift for encountering fake brands of THC vape cartridges.

Push_Cart_packaging_1

Push_Cart_packaging_2

Push_Cart_packaging_3

Red flags: Cannabis products advertised as “organic.” The USDA certifies the “organic” label, and the USDA does not rate cannabis products at all. “1100MG” is ridiculous.

Rumor has it that there is a real “Push” company brand out there

Several members of the vape community counter that Push carts are either a central-source street brand or a real brand that is being counterfeited. We’re not going to rule the possibility of a real Push out there somewhere, but here’s why this is a dubious claim:

    1. You’d have to have rocks in your head to try to do business under the brand name of “push.” That’s like opening a store called “Shop.”
    1. Too many users are finding them and asking about them for them to be the central sources.
    1. Packaging red flags as we mention above.
    1. The one website we find raises other red flags

We find “OfficialPushProduct.com,” however, there is no evidence of a license for this company, which is registered on an anonymous GoDaddy domain. The “retail partners” list is blank, labeled “coming soon,” and yet here we have photos of end consumers holding the product.

The Instagram account linked from that site goes to your standard fake cart account. It’s set to private and cries “not for sale – good vibes only!” Real businesses do not do this.

Then there’s this:

weird_battery_error_message_Push_carts

When you see text like this, think “a bot scraped it.” Bots, as in web-enabled automated scripts, will grab the text verbatim out of context and dump it onto the page unedited. A human would know not to put “out of stock” in a title tag.

Again, we will not rule out completely that there could be a real company called “Push” which may or may not be related to our Push carts here. Maybe they’re just really sloppy. But as we point out on brands like Big Chief, sloppy management just makes your brand easier to fake.

Unlicensed, unregulated brands like Push Carts may contain anything

There is a deadly epidemic of lung illness tied to black market cart usage. Vaping-associated pulmonary injury has so far claimed 64 lives and hospitalized more than 2700 users. This was the main health story in the news before COVID-19 cases pushed it off the front page, but people are still getting sick off boof street carts. Unregulated vape carts could contain heavy metals like lead, pesticides, cut such as Honey Cut, or simply bunk. Or they could be fire if you’re lucky. But there’s a lot of people in the hospital right now who weren’t lucky.

Readers, we don’t have to tell you where to “push” Push carts!

Push them off the table into the trash can, then go get your THC vape cartridges from a real dispensary!

Comments below, forum thataway, you know the drill.

 

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