Fraudulent Business Ethics
Complaint
Kathleen Neal
Country: United States
This a.m. I decided to contact Reading America to find out the approximate date I would begin receiving my magazines and also my $1,000.00 Gift Card. As to my suprise, when typing in Reading America it took me directly to pages and pages of very angry customers. They claim to have never rec'd their magazines or their $1,000.00 Gift Card. They claim that Reading America is a Scam and a fraud. Before this totally gets out of hand, I have requested to cancel any further business transactions with this company and or any other companies associated with them. I will expect the initial $24.99 paid back to me, as it was taken out of my account on 7/5/11. If you or your company have a problem with this request, please feel free to contact me @ signmtg2@aol.com or 615-818-1475. Respectfully, Kathleen R. Neal
Comments
By Kathleen Neal, a few seconds ago | Country: United States
This a.m. I decided to contact Reading America to find out the approximate date I would begin receiving my magazines and also my $1,000.00 Gift Card. As to my suprise, when typing in Reading America it took me directly to pages and pages of very angry customers. They claim to have never rec'd their magazines or their $1,000.00 Gift Card. They claim that Reading America is a Scam and a fraud. Before this totally gets out of hand, I have requested to cancel any further business transactions with this company and or any other companies associated with them. I will expect the initial $24.99 paid back to me, as it was taken out of my account on 7/5/11. If you or your company have a problem with this request, please feel free to contact me @ signmtg2@aol.com or 615-818-1475. Respectfully, Kathleen R. Neal
If you get threatened, or subjected to fraudulent claims that you "agreed" to additional larger charges, (a common practice with this type of scam), contact FTC and your state Attorney General. They are well known to state AGs, and generally back off when you file a complaint.
You know you never agreed to any "$917.00" order. Sending unwanted magasines, combined with deceptive confusion, is an attempt to create the appearance of an "order" or "agreement", to use to extort money from you. If they can't get the whole $917 out of you, their next ploy may be to try to extort a "settlement" of $300 to $400 to "cancel", just to go away. Free money for nothing.
"I called to cancel any agreement they might have gotten from me in their VERY confusing switch between marketers. "
Bet there wasn't any "switch between marketers". "Confusion" is a deliberate deceptive tactic designed to attempt to defraud while being able to claim it was an "accident" if confronted later. It's a way of engaging in implied extortion while having an excuse ready if they get caught.
Sending an invoice for unordered merchandise is a violation of postal regulations, as is using the U.S. Mail to send the magazines used in the scam. It is essentially mail fraud.
File fraud complaints with FTC, your state AG, and with the U.S. Postal Inspector. If they get too many complaints, they might get prosecuted, even have their mail seized and shut off.
Respond to their fraudulent bill with a letter mailed ceertified notifying them that their bill is fraudulent, and that you have reported it to FTC, your state AG, and the U.S. Postal Inspector as mail fraud. Also file a billing fraud complaint against them with BBB.
Dispute all unauthorized bank charges as fraudulent, and close your account or block the card number to prevent additional fraud. File a written dispute with your bank, and send them a fraud affidavit to back up your dispute, including in it that you have filed a mail fraud complaint.
Regardless of what they say or threaten, they are playing a game of chicken, but their tactics are too well known to push it beyond your fraud complaint to the authorities. They have to keep finding new naive victims to keep going. That is what they revealed by their use of the "confusion" prearranged excuse tactic. With this type of scam, they will typically huff and puff, claiming "you agreed", but if you file complaints, notifying the authorities they will "cancel" in this one case as a "courtesy". Regardless of the language. that counts as a win.
If they actually pass anything off to a shady debt collector, get an attorney and sue them both. Your paper trail will document your dispute due to fraud. Not likely they will, but possible they might harass you with their own calls pretending it's "in collection".
The nature of fraud is to say whatever makes the scheme work. You aren't going to sue them to enforce whatever "offer" you think they made, no matter how many notes you took. Your only recourse is to block payments and claw back the money.
These scams are built on changing the terms AFTER they get your account information. The terms may sound perfectly reasonable, maybe just slightly better than publisher prices, and even if they sound clear, the scripts are designed to give that impression on the initial call, even as they are designed to fraudulently twist them into an inflated, overpriced, front loaded, but now "uncancellable contract".
Sometimes the goal is really to con several hundred dollars to just "cancel", using harassment, even sending the wrong magazines or no magazines until the consumer is willing to pay just to be left alone.
This is really more like "negative option" marketing, where they already get your account info (with the bait), then make up the terms, and leave out your "option" to cancel once you find out what the real "terms" are. The "terms" might even change week to week, depending on how much of a sucker you appear to be. That's the plan from the beginning, built into the scripts so they can hire anyone off the street to man the phones.
That said, most cold calling telemarketers calling consumers are probably engaged in fraud. In an era of low margin internet sales, it really isn't profitable to deliver consumer products like magazines at competitive prices via cold calling. The publisher or Amazon can undercut any "sold" offer.