unauthorized charges to my credit card

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• 0

  tj

  1 May 2010

  They are a "discount club" scam.  They use deceptive pop-ups or sales scripts to create the appearance that the consumer has "agreed" to join some "membership" club with monthly fees, supposedly to get some "discount coupon".  They get account information from some other merchant you may have bought something from, either on-line, or through a phone call.
  
  Companies behind them include Vertrue/Adaptive Marketing (formerly Memberworks), Webloyalty, Affinion, and others, but they may post charges under literally hundreds of names, supposedly different "services" they claim consumers have "agreed" to be charged for.  The use of many names has diffused the picture of unauthorized charging visible to regulatory agencies and credit card fraud departments.  Even BBB doesn't have a complete list of all names associated with each actual company.  
  
  Sometimes once one such charge starts appearing, a whole cluster of monthly charges under different names follows.  That is why it is seldom sufficient to dispute just the charges you see, but you must close your whole account as part of disputing the fraud to prevent fraud under other names.
  
  
  Dispute fraudulent charges directly through your bank (credit card company), and close and block the card number or checking account number due to fraud to prevent additional fraudulent charges.  
  
  VISA recently announced a policy change in their merchant agreements requiring that these "discount club" pop-up windows can no longer obtain consumer account information from the original merchant's order, but must require the consumer to separately enter card number information, to reduce unauthorized charges.
  
  
  They are being investigated by the New York Attorney General for consumer fraud, and the Senate Commerce Committee held hearings on them several months ago.
  
  You can find academic studies, and reports by Attorneys General outlining how there is little chance any significant number of consumers either knew they had "agreed" to these charges, or got anything of any value comparable to the cummulative charges.  Subpoenad company records have outlined how the process to even obtain alleged discounts had been rigged to ensure they would be unlikely to be worth the charges, had consumers even known they were being charged.
  
  This scam "industry" has apparently grown to the point it has been raking in hundreds of millions of dollars annually from unsuspecting consumers, most of which didn't know they were being charged before they found charges on their accounts.
  
  Presentation from the Senate Commerce Committee hearings:
  
  http://commerce.senate.gov/public/?a=Files.Se ... 31-2c5366c31e54

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