Just over a year ago, I wrote about the curious marketing of addiction treatment centers online, which used what I believed to be deceptive marketing practices.
The email that arrived on Oct. 2, 2013 piqued my curiosity yet again. It was promoting a self-made infographic about “porn addicted” communities online. It came from a website called “Project Know.”
Sounds interesting, right?
The email started my second investigation into the seedy underbelly of the online marketing practices of rehab and addiction treatment centers. You know the ones, as you’ve probably seen at least one of their advertisements on TV, too.
For most people, recovering from addiction is a difficult and trying process — marked by failure as much as it is success. Lack of scientific evidence aside, residential treatment centers (also known as addiction recovery centers or rehab centers) purport to offer a safe, supportive treatment environment for a person to detox from their addiction, typically for up to 30 days away from home.
Because it’s such a lucrative business, it’s also highly competitive. Addiction treatment centers vie aggressively for new customers. While TV advertisements are one obvious form of their pushy marketing efforts, it pales in comparison to some treatment centers’ efforts online.
In a three-month investigation, I found companies utilizing anonymity in the creation of multiple seemingly-independent websites. One has even gone so far as to apparently create a non-profit organization in order to, at least in part, drive traffic to their own treatment services.
Project Know is Run by Recovery Brands
When I asked Sam, the person who emailed me about “Project Know,” he replied:
“ProjectKnow.com has been in operation since 1998 and is owned by Recovery Brands, a consumer addiction treatment information provider. I understand and respect your concern with the actual research side.”
Sam was at least forthcoming about who owns the domain today, because you won’t find the words “Recovery Brands” anywhere on the site itself. In fact, the website doesn’t even have an “About Us” page.
While the domain has indeed been registered since 1998, a quick visit to archive.org shows you the true history of this project. It was begun in 1998 as a government-sponsored website that hosted marketing materials for the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign. The government funding for this website dried up in 2002, so the following year, the website was acquired by a domain squatter. In 2006, the domain was acquired by an SEO marketing firm that was apparently hoping to get some paid addiction treatment centers to advertise on the site.
Why would anyone want to advertise on a long-dead website that was once a resource for a government anti-drug campaign? Because a lot of people still linked to that government website and never updated their links after it went away. The website therefore continued to enjoy some traffic and Google ranking from those links.
Recovery Brands acquired the domain early in 2012, when it closed a seed funding round for $600,000. It also owns and operates rehabs.com and recovery.com, among many other unbranded sites.
At least Recovery Brands isn’t an addiction treatment center pretending to be an objective third party. They are simply a referral service, with a straightforward business model of connecting addicted consumers to a treatment center. The toll-free number that shows up their websites often is tailored to your geographic location and treatment needs.
“You may see a different phone number depending on what section of the site it is,” said Jeff Smith, the CEO of Recovery Brands, in an interview I had with him in October 2013. “From there, we match you with clients that are specific to the type of treatment [a person is looking for].”
Taking Fake Websites to An Art Form
But Recovery Brands can’t hold a candle to Dan Callahan, the CEO and owner of Solutions Recovery Center which apparently also operates the Paradise Recovery Center ((Oddly, there is no active “Paradise Recovery Center” registered with the Florida Division of Corporations (even as a fictional name.) But the website refers to Dan Callahan’s unmistakably unique story, “Paradise Recovery Center was started by a former alcoholic that turned his life around. Now with over 25 years sober, he is spreading the message of hope to everyone,” while the domain is registered to his son. Based upon a previous version of Solutions’ website, it appears that Paradise Recovery Center is simply one of Solution’s facilities.)) in South Florida. Â Caught between drinking and armed robbery, Callahan’s early adult life was headed in the wrong direction. But as he recounts here in a story he wrote for SAMHSA, he turned his life around, earning a Master’s degree from Fordham University and entering the human service field. (Callahan is also the co-founder of ZenCharts.com, a behavioral EHR. “Paradise Recovery Center” seems to have closed in 2017.)
Since August 2012, he’s led Solutions. The rehab center appears to be a run-of-the-mill program offering the usual menu of residential addiction recovery services, with Callahan’s own unique twist. As is par for the course in the addiction rehab industry, Solutions Recovery Center has changed its name. It’s now known as Addiction Solutions of South Florida LLC, created in 2018 by Callahan. Its website currently (as of Feb. 2019) makes the dubious claim that it is the “#1 Alcohol Rehab Center in Florida” with absolutely zero evidence to back this extravagant claim.
But after digging a little below the surface, it appears that Callahan and his son Sean Callahan (yes, the same Sean Callahan I wrote about a year ago) are behind an intricate web of seemingly-independent websites and companies that support his South Florida recovery enterprise.
My interest in Callahan was ironically instigated by a slew of emails I’ve received over the past year from “Jeffrey Redd, Outreach Director.” The most recent one had the subject line, “Thanks for the Healthcare.gov mention.”
“I was doing some research about addiction, and noticed you mention HealthCare.gov on http://blogs.psychcentral.com/bipolar-life/2013/07/healthcare-reform-part-2/. . They are obviously one of the more important sites for people to visit due to current events.
It may also be important to mention the major change that is happening in the substance abuse, and mental health fields as it relates to these regulations. I helped create an article on QuitAlcohol.com you can see it here: http://www.quitalcohol.com/health-insurance-and-addiction.html”
Jeffrey Redd’s email address was jeff@onlynonprofits.org. Despite Jeff’s carefully-crafted email, it was immediately apparent he had no connection to Healthcare.gov (an official federal website). So why was he thanking me for our mention of it?
When I visited QuitAlcohol.com, (Archive.org link) a few red warning flags were immediately raised. It wasn’t long before I discovered it was one of nearly a dozen websites apparently operated or owned behind the scenes by Dan Callahan or his son Sean Callahan. These include:
- Drugless.org
- Quitalcohol.com
- Withdrawal.org
- Treatmentpartnership.org
- Rehab-programs.org
- Bestdrugrehabs.com
- Samhsa.net
- Paradiserehab.com
- Addictionlibrary.org
None of these websites list their affiliation with Solutions Recovery Center directly. Yet despite attempts to hide their ownership (such as using domain privacy proxy services and creating web hosting accounts on different servers so they can’t readily be traced back to one owner), telltale signs start becoming apparent:
1. The About Us page either doesn’t exist, or exists but is populated with fictional information.
For example, this page (from Archive.org) at QuitAlcohol.com says “Kim Beveraly” is behind the site. But that’s the only Kim Beveraly online today, says Google. And Kim’s photo comes from Mailchimp’s staff page (Marti Wolf, HR manager). Only two of the websites identify Dan Callahan as the owner — addictionlibrary.org and drugless.org — but they both fail to mention he heads an recovery center.
2. The websites share a distinctive Privacy Policy that is unique to them.
It’s always fun to see people copy and paste boilerplate privacy policies, only to go and put their own unique twist on them that make them stand out.
These privacy policies also often share the exact same business address — 16145 State Road 7, Unit B, Delray Beach, FL 33446. This is the address of “Website Consultants,” a company headed by Dan’s son Sean Callahan and Sean’s friend, Richard (“Rick”) Glaser.
3. A non-profit has a phony About Us page & makes no mention of its affiliation with a treatment center.
The USA Addiction Treatment Partnership is a non-profit company incorporated in Florida. Its articles of incorporation show Dan Callahan as President, Sean Callahan as VP, and Richard Glaser as Treasurer. Yet you’ll see no mention of them on the Treatmentparternship.org’s About Us page:
[Click for larger image]
Like the other About Us pages on these domains, it is populated by apparently three fictional staffers using stock photography headshots. Its telephone number rings to “Ira,” an admissions director at Solutions.
4. No matter what website you’re on, Ira Fox will help you.
While many of the websites will show a different toll-free telephone number to call, they all ring to the same person. When I called any of the different numbers on various days, they rang to “Ira Fox, Solutions Recovery Center” or, “It’s a great day. This is Ira, how many I help you?” or to his voicemail. (The one exception is withdrawal.org, which is showing a SAMHSA phone number — yet has absolutely zero affiliation with this government organization. ((Withdrawal.org even goes so far as to list the SAMHSA address in its privacy policy, again suggesting it is affiliated with an official federal government agency. However, the domain is registered and owned by none other than Richard Glaser & Sean Callahan, the guys who run Website Consultants.)) )
5. The Google Analytics code in many of the websites track back to the same parent account.
The obvious conflict-of-interest problem with hosting so many seemingly-independent sites is that in addition to the different toll-free numbers all ringing into a Solutions Recovery staffer, they also publish editorial content such as, The Best Alcohol Rehab Centers (Top 10 List). Perhaps of surprise to no one, Solutions Recovery Center is No. 1 and Paradise Recovery Center is No. 3 — both ranking above such world-renowned mainstays as the Betty Ford Clinic and Hazelden. ((They appear to update this list every month, slightly changing the rankings and title of the article. But every month, Solutions and Paradise will occupy two of the top three spots. Beachway Therapy Center, the focus of my prior investigation, is also always on the list.))
Dan Callahan initially agreed to be interviewed for this piece, but then bowed out at the last minute citing family priorities. When invited to reschedule the interview, he declined.
Recovering from an addiction is hard enough for most people to even consider undertaking treatment. The Internet offers a rich wealth of information to help a person learn more about a mental health concern like addiction, and make informed, empowering decisions.
But that process can be subverted by marketing efforts such as these. If you’re an addiction specialist or expert, there’s little legitimate reason to create nearly a dozen different websites to host your knowledge and to share your experiences. There’s even less reason to pretend these sites are independent, other than an effort to — in my opinion — apparently deceive the consumer into believing that one recovery center is better than all the rest.
While I singled out two such instances of these, in my opinion, deceptive online marketing behaviors, there are a dozen more companies doing similar things I haven’t (yet) cited. If this industry doesn’t clean up its online marketing practices, prepare to see more investigative articles of this nature in the future.
Residential addiction treatment centers sometimes have a less-than-stellar reputation among treatment professionals. Given what I’ve seen with some centers’ online marketing efforts, consumers have a good reason to be skeptical.
Kipu Lawsuit Against ZenCharts
Kipu is a company that makes EHR software for the addiction and behavioral health industries called Kipu EMR, using a web-based interface, connected to cloud-based servers. It launched its software in September 2012.
ZenCharts, launched in 2015, was developed by Sean and Dan Callahan’s web development firm to compete with Kipu EMR. According to a Florida corporate record search, ZenCharts LLC was founded in Florida by Keith Houlihan in 2015. The same Keith Houlihan who was found guilty in 2017 and sentenced to 9 years, 3 months in federal prison for a $23 million bi-coastal boiler room investment fraud scheme.
The lawsuit filed in 2017 claims that ZenCharts copied Kipu’s core functionality and features, and alleges that Houlihan funded the venture with his ill-gotten fraud gains. The lawsuit is very eye-opening about the multiple businesses that Sean and Dan Callahan have been involved with.
20 comments
Thank you for posting this! We receive these emails all the time—I always suspected something weird.
Your absolutely right. Online marketers buy expired domains for just the reason you stated. they want the links already built and (it is rumored) that Google gives more credit to site that have been around longer. Getting a link from a government site is like finding a gold mine.
Anyway:
Many people are pretty desperate when they first decide to stop drinking. We want these people to get to facilities that will help them. Many cannot afford these facilities if they first waste money on these other shady rehab referral sites. Whoever pays the most money per referral is the rehab center that get pushed to the caller. this may not be illegal but it is certainly immoral. I would way unethical but I don’t believe internet marketers have a code of ethics.
Great article. In my own field I have noticed multiple stealth websites geared toward addicts, partners of addicts or whoever might drive business. This is particularly prevalent as large corporations incresingly gobble up many of the more successful of the independent rehab operations. Is there any way to uncover all the websites operated by a large corporation such as CRC or Elements Behavioral Health? These two are reputable companies I know and have worked with but I also know that some of them do run multiple sites, and even if they identify themselves in the fine print (which they sometimes do) it may still not be clear to the reader what is going on.
Thanks for this article, which is disturbing on so many levels.I’s hard enough to recover from addiction without having to worry about scams….thanks for spreading the word.
Thank you so much for bringing this out!
Unfortunately, 12 years ago when my son was on the “forefront” of the pain pill/heroin addiction epidemic, I had no way of knowing this. I searched frantically for information in general and rehabs in particular online.
I didn’t know that Nar-coo-noon (purposely misspelled;), had done this exact thing. We found out too late they are affiliated with Scientology, and used many dubious and completely non evidence based “treatment” strategies.
Would love to see you investigate Nar-coo-noon and their marketing methods in this same manner. Other good information for parents/family to known is how this organization takes free drug information programs into
schools and prisons. Of course, the Scientology connection is not only not mentioned, but vehemently denied.
I’m not anti-rehab. But $25,000 later (this was years ago, probably costs more now) we realized we had been conned. Family members need to be very cautious and skeptical when using the internet to find treatment options.
So sorry you and your son were taken in by deceptive advertising, MotorCity. I hope your son is clean today.
Nar-coo-noon’s internet marketing methods have been investigated and dissected here in a 10-part series by a former insider:
The Rise and Fall of the Narconon Internet Marketing Empire.
I am glad to see Psych Central addressing this. It’s a huge problem in the field that takes advantage of people in their moments of vulnerability, and it’s obviously not limited to the one scam that took advantage of you.
As someone, who celebrated a year of recovery, it was these campaigns that helped me out, and many others. Today, I have the pleasure of knowing people in recovery who are doing seo for treatment centers. Isn’t this the objective of recovery, to keep addicts occupied?
Awsome article I’m sure its been very successful link bate for you. After all you make you money by selling ads for anyone who will pay you. Some of the “facilities” you have listed don’t even have a license to operate in their state! Who’s the scumbag?John M. Grohol, Psy.D is!!!! He is just another money grabbing advertising slut that will sell anyone an ad on his site!!!
Just to update everyone that I recently saw that American Addiction Centers )who is owned by Michael Cartwright and another “interesting” character in the rehab industry) just bought the Recovery Brands place you mentioned in your article for like 60 million dollars!
So I think your article must really be on to something with the amount of money these places are making like Recovery Brands and that other guy Dan Callahan too who you talked about in your article (https://www.solutionsrehab.com/author/dan).
Of course when you talked about this Dan Callahan (and his son Seamus/Sean) having a seedy background, I also have found there are a lot of rehab owners who seem to have seedy backgrounds, like that guy Chris Prentiss (and his son Pax Prentiss) from Passages Malibu that always are on their TV commercials saying they found the “Cure” for addiction in the book that they wrote called “The Cure”! LOL
I guess its they are all doing the 21st century version of what people like this did in the days of the old West traveling medicine show wagons with a snake-oil salesman trying to convince everyone they had a miracle “Cure” tonic/elixir that they could buy in a little bottle! LOL
I guess with our country’s addiction problem getting worse all the time (just look at rise of heroin addiction in recent years) there are unfortunately a lot of desperate people who really need to get help and are easily duped by these unethical and unscrupulous websites.
Sad . . . very sad.
I have a feeling that my comment will be removed because it doesn’t fit in with your bashing of Dan. You see, I happen to know Dan and contrary to your personal opinion, he is in the business of helping people. Oh yes, he is also about a profit however here is what I will say to you. My husband went to Solutions. He just celebrated a year clean. He did not get there via a website…I personally picked Solutions out of a field of four rehabs. To this day…we have not paid a dime to Solutions. And believe you me, it is not because we had great insurance. It is because Dan, and the entire team at Solutions, actually care about people regardless of profit! So please sir, take a step back and let some air out of that over-inflated ego of yours. I seriously doubt that you would have provided treatment to my husband at no cost…but Dan Callahan sure did. Why? He is a good person with a heart of gold.
I’m glad to hear of your positive experience with Solutions.
However, this article wasn’t about the effectiveness of Solutions — or any other rehab center’s — treatment programs. It was about the apparently underhanded way that companies like Solutions market themselves online.
What does it say about a company when they go to this much trouble to apparently deceive potential clients?
Says the guy that wrote: “The rehab center appears to be a run-of-the-mill program offering the usual menu of residential addiction recovery services, with Callahan’s own unique twist.”
I also have first hand experience with this program, and while it is not built of gold, it is far from a hole in the wall center, or “run-of-the-mill” as you say. Did you go there? What facts do you have surrounding the program to make such a blanket statement?
I guess at the end of the day, as long as you create controversy, you will get more visits, and you sell more ads. You are no better than any of the other people you speak of.
PS: Approve this message, and act like you have some integrity.
Help! Does anyone know who owns these 2 websites and how to reach the person or entity that does?
http://www.addicted.org/
https://rehabreviews.com/
I’ve tried to reach them by phone and email with no response. I have a client who wants their agency removed from the sites. I think the sites are fake. One doesn’t even have a phone number (rehab reviews) and their email doesn’t work (gets sent back). The other (Addicted.org) won’t answer any questions on the phone and they won’t take down the info either. I’ve called them over and over with no result.
Any help or guidance would be appreciated.
I suspect that those that are offended by this article are active in AA or other 12 Step. Those outside of recovery culture might find this odd, since it is also true that in AA meetings recovery centers are openly discussed as inferior to AA meetings. The most common reference to treatment I heard in my 18-month tenure in AA, before I became an Anti-AA activist, is that the best thing about treatment was being taken to a “free” Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Then Old Timers would share on how now, ten or twenty years later, they were the only one from their treatment group of 20-40 people that was still sober and attending AA. The Old Timer would then emphasize that the best and only way to stay sober would be to go to meetings, get a sponsor, do the steps, and service, which amount to about a fifteen-hour commitment per week for life. However, one of these had a variation to this story and that was he admitted that he had a lapse of about 10 years where he didn’t go meetings and yet he still stayed sober.
So the point of this is that not only are there some particularly corrupt treatment centers, such as Solutions, that the 12-Step drug treatment they use isn’t effective in any real is because if someone is willing to give up the bulk of their leisure time every single week for the rest of their life then they will be wanting it to work, so it does.
However, AA will still defend even corrupt treatment centers, as we seem to be seeing here, because treatment centers, and particularly the worst centers like Solutions discussed here, are feeders into AA. In addition, active AA will often know about the practices of the very worst treatment centers and do nothing to stop it. The reason they will give in meetings is that it is “an outside issue,” and “none of their business,” and then if they are more honest they will also say that even the worst treatment centers (but actually the terminology should be “especially the worst” treatment centers) funnel people into AA which is a good thing, even though AA is more religious cult than anything else, and only has a success rate of about 5%.
Thus, the public needs to not just be more aware of how corrupt some treatment centers are, but also the connection between the most corrupt treatment centers and 12-Step fellowships. Generally speaking the more 12 Step is relied on for addiction treatment methods, the more ineffective and corrupt the treatment center.  There are in fact many other options besides 12 Steps.
10 Major Alternatives to AA
(circa 2016)
Free Self-Help
hamsnetwork.org
smartrecovery.org
sossobriety.org
womenforsobriety.org (includes men for sobriety)
lifering.org
moderation.org
reddit.com (entirely online)
Help involving paid professionals
rational.org
sinclairmethod.com (for alcohol)*
ibogainealliance.org (for opiates)**
Sinclair method and Ibogaine use medication to rewire the addiction pathways in the brain
*most doctors can prescribe the medication Naltrexone, but Goodmancenter.com is a treatment center specifically
based on the Sinclair method.
**aftercare is recommended, such as genesisiboganiecenter.com, holistichousevegas.com, and medicineheartrecovery.com
I agree with you and very good information as well, thank you.
None of this has anything to do with AA. It is about fraud under the guise of recovery centers to the tune of thousands of dollars. AA doesn’t defend anything so why it is necessary to involve it seems simply to be sensationalism to promote alternatives. I support alternatives but they would get nowhere without riding an AA coattail.
Skip rehabs. Go to medical detox if need be. Find an AA meeting. Find one of the alternatives if you are lucky as they are far and few between. Most are just AA rehashes under a different guise. Rehab for the most part serves as simply a climate change.
The experts at Detox of south Florida are the best of this kind, in treating detoxification procedures. Detoxification is the removal of toxic substance from our body with the help of physiological or medicinal methods. You might be now thinking what is the use of it, because our body has the power to heal itself. This is needed in though conditions where our body is unable to recover by itself, and the reasons behind it can be many, mainly over dosage or any drugs, addictions, etc. in the process of detoxification, the experts or practitioners eliminate the toxins, and later feed your body with healthy nutrients.
Case in point. This is link building at its most basic. The link from the persons “name” goes to their site directly, which provides them with valuable SEO credit from the eyes of Google. Notice, the comment is not relevant to this article at all?
This has been going on since 2009. The issue that we see, as an addiction marketing agency, is that the money is to huge to pass up. Think of all the “Marketers” that go around getting $8,000 per intake they send to centers. Those folks are starting to dominate the paid search side. As an agency, we refuse to work with those people because our agency was built to help the small guy.
I will say that this is now a HUGE business. Addiction treatment has grown more than most industries and is getting more and more cutthroat. Once a treatment center has mastered their local listings for addiction treatment intakes, they must expand past their state. We recommend doing so with sub-pages explaining why comes to their center is the best choice for recovery, rather than pretending to be another center.
All in all, it is competitive, so if you do not pivot and modify your marketing approach, you will be left behind.
It’s unfortunate that this is happening. However, there are still legitimate treatment providers out there that offer ethical addiction resources. You just have to watch out for those that don’t have the patients best interest in mind.