Places selling Mazal Brands products charged some customers thousands of dollars without their knowledge
The Jewish Daily Forward
They are a common feature at American shopping malls across the U.S.: skincare kiosks staffed by charming Israeli salespeople. For American Jews, they can be a place to practice your Hebrew, greet expats, or play Jewish geography.
But for hundreds of shoppers, an experience that began with a smile and a free sample at one of those kiosks ended in thousands of dollars of unauthorized credit card charges, according to an investigation published Monday by NPR.
Drawing on court documents, online reviews, consumer complaints, and interviews with more than 50 customers, NPR linked the fraud to ‘Mazal Group’, a conglomerate of dozens of skincare brands owned by Eli Weingarten and Daphna Oded Weingarten, an Israeli American couple who live in the Los Angeles area.
Many of the company’s victims were elderly, disabled, or otherwise vulnerable to exploitation.
NPR reported instances of overcharging and forced purchases at thousands of independent kiosks, stores and spas selling Mazal products around the country. An elderly man with dementia in Michigan was unknowingly charged $42,000 for skincare products. In Hawaii, a disabled woman testified to the state attorney general that a spa salesperson took her walker and refused to let her leave for hours until she gave him $2,600, NPR said.
A similar pattern was uncovered by the FBI at Mazal-connected kiosks a decade ago — which the agency referred to as a ‘credit card overcharge scheme.’ That investigation culminated in more than a dozen guilty pleas and prison terms for two store owners, Shai Cohen and Omer Gur.
Today, the company contracts with some 2,000 stores worldwide, according to a former employee quoted by NPR, although the exact number is unknown.
Mazal Group, which is headquartered in Chatsworth, Calif., responded to NPR’s questions by shifting responsibility for the overcharging onto individual store owners — but as the story was about to be published, the company terminated its own business license.
Today, their headquarters bears the logo of ‘Innovation Brands Inc.,’ a company founded by the Weingartens in 2024.
Though the kiosks are independently owned — sometimes bearing the name of those brands — NPR obtained documents showing Mazal Group’s aggressive pricing recommendations, sometimes with markups of more than 100 times the wholesale cost.
For example, the company suggested selling Voupre’s Cannabis Caviar Transforming Mask for $3,000 — 130 times the wholesale price of $23.
The products themselves would not have any price tag on them, making it easier for customers to be overcharged at checkout, former employees told NPR.
Another element of the investigation involved immigration fraud.
According to former employees, many kiosk salespeople were Israelis in the U.S. on tourist visas — a direct violation of the terms of the visa, which forbids performing labor or services for pay. When an NPR reporter posing as a prospective employee messaged a recruiter to ask whether it was okay if she only had a tourist visa, the recruiter responded with ‘yes’.