unauthorized billing of $ 24.95 on credit card
Complaint
Sandy Terrazzano
Country: United States
Spoke with Monica at WC Budget Savers 800-475-1942; she was unable to define exactly what I purchased and stated that the auth must have come via telephone from one of their agents. I have never heard of this company - nor would I authorize credit card billing over the phone with an unfamiliar company.
Requested repayment of the $24.95 credit card charge from 3/23/10 and for the company to exclude my name and "account" from their database.
Requested repayment of the $24.95 credit card charge from 3/23/10 and for the company to exclude my name and "account" from their database.
Comments
Immediately contact your bank to dispute the charges as fraudulent, and close the account or block the card number to prevent additional fraudulent charges.
The company behind this, and similar "discount club" scams, are being investigated by both the Senate Commerce Committee, and the New York Attorney General.
Since we already know that this "discount club" already routinely gets account information from its marketing partners, with complaints of deceptive marketing, this should be no surprise.
The only reason to call after getting it would be to obtain your authorization which they knew they did not already have, or to fabricate the appearance of obtaining that authorization, for their "records". Since; you did not provide any authorization in the call, it points to the latter.
Fabricating recordings of consumer authorizations has been reported in connection with other fraudulent telemarketing operations involving "pre-acquired account information" and "negative-option" marketing.
FTC Telemarketing Sales Rules (TSR) require recording of the whole call in such cases, specifically including full disclosure of the offer terms, and specifically recording the consumer disclosing at least the last 4 digits of the account number as "verifiable authorization" that the consumer knows they are agreeing to pay money through that account.
However, since the TSR changes requiring such recording came out in 2003, fraudulent telemarketers have been reported to fabricate such recordings, either editing recordings of the actual call into a different script, recording a call to a co-worker, or just claiming they have the required recording and stalling until the consumer gives up in most cases.
In the few cases the consumer pushes the issue with authorities, they typically first offer to refund a few months of crammed charges, claiming that they can't find the "recording" and denying that anything illegal happened.
Since no one other than the consumer would actually know the recording is authentic, having or claiming to have recorded "authorization" is no proof of anything, but still useful to con consumers, banks, or regulators. Such fabricated recorded authorizations pose little risk to fraudulent telemarketers willing to cram "sales", and reports indicating this fraudulent practice have shown up with many companies employing telemarketing with preacquired information, even third-party bank marketing "parners".
The Senate Commerce Committee has held investigative hearings on these companies, and the New York Attorney General is investigating them for consumer fraud.
VISA recently changed their merchant policies to require separate entry of account number for these deceptive pop-up "discount offers", rather than the current practice of the merchant or payment processor just passing along account information from the original purchase the consumer actually made.