Dan@xanga clued us in on a horrible online scam that occurs on the checkout pages of some suprisingly legit websites. Priceline, Fandango, Pizza Hut, Victoria's Secret, you name it—the scam involves 88 well-known companies, according to
The Consumerist.
How it works is, after you buy movie tickets (or calzones, or boy shorts), a little window pops up offering you a $10 coupon if you enter your email address. But somehow, when you click "OK," you're actually allowing the main website to pass along your credit card information to an insidious partner site. From here, you'll be billed about $9 every month for a bogus "discount buyers club." The problem is, you might not even realize you signed up for anything until the charges start to show up on your credit card bill. And you probably won't get any $10 coupon.
There are three companies behind this scam, all based in Connecticut: Affinion, Webloyalty, and Vertrue. (The hypocracy of those last two names makes me want to vomit.) Vertrue is also the company behind those freescore.com commercials featuring Ben Stein.
These scams have raked in more than $1.4 billion in revenue, $792 million of which goes to the "reputable" partner sites like Priceline, as reported in
Felix Salmon's Reuters blog. Classmates.com, another site that's worked at various times with all three of the companies, has earned more than any other service with $70 million in scam-related revenue.
Part of the problem, Salmon says, is that the Internet is far less regulated than other venues, like telemarketing, where similar practices have been banned by Congress and the Federal Trade Commission.
The good news is that these companies are willing to refund your charges if you shoot them a call or email. And that happens a lot. Vertrue gets about 7 million customer phone calls each year, Reuters says, and 98 percent of those are cancellations.
Have you heard of this scam? Do you think Congress and the FTC should better regulate online vending?
Comments (4)
hmm.. so it only happens if you click on the pop up?
@swtaznxtc90@xanga - yeah, there's some ultra-tiny print somewhere explaining what you're getting yourself into, but it still seems pretty scammy to me.
People need to watch where they click. If you don't read what's in front of you and aren't careful, it's your own darn fault. We don't need laws so people can't learn to defend themselves against scams, people need to open their eyes and read.
Yikes. >_< I guess pop-up blockers won't work on these ads...