So I'm doing the should-be-weekly, dreaded financial planning (not as dreaded, though, since I started using www.mvelopes.com, I must say), when lo! what do I find? A $10 charge to my wife's account. That's not odd, particularly, but I don't recognize the vendor, a Reservation Rewards out of Connecticut.
First stop is ask my wife if she knows of these cats. She replies in the negative: "never heard of 'em." Then comes some research a la Google to find out they are apparently a real company and even have a website with a pretty easy-to-find cancellation number (1-800-732-7031). So far so good. At least I can get out of the thing without the AO-HELL levels of diligence to cancel.
After going through those steps, I notice, though, that my wife actually has an account with this company--I mean she has a profile with some of her info, particularly her name and c.c. data. No address, though, which is odd since one would normally include that info with a service one had knowingly opted into. This makes me wonder: who are these guys really?
Turns out they are owned by a company called Webloyalty. One more Google search later brings to www.consumerwebwatch.com where an article is published giving the real deal on Webloyalty/Reservation Rewards' modus operandi relative to acquiring so called "customers".
The article gives an example of a person named Mr. Wilson who had his own identical experience to ours. Here's what concerns me the most about the way these guys operate:
How They Get You To Pay Without Knowing It
"Upon making a
purchase on Allposters.com, an online poster and print store, an ad
popped onto Wilson's computer screen for a site called
ReservationRewards.com. The ad made a seemingly simple offer: In
exchange for filling out an online form requesting basic information,
including an e-mail address, Wilson would get a $10 rebate coupon for
his purchase."
He clicked on the offer and that's when the charges started.
"While he never got the rebate, he did, however, start getting a small monthly charge on his credit card account, which he did not recognize and initially shrugged off. "I noticed a $9 charge," says Wilson. 'I thought it was just some little fee.'"
How can this happen?
It's easy: Webloyalty and Reserveration Rewards are, in my personal opinion, essentially criminal entities. Basically the essence of criminality is, they take something valuable from you without giving anything of equal or greater value in return.
They may reply "well you clicked on the rebate offer that signed you up for our program. It's perfectly legal!" As pointed out by the article I'm quoting for this blog posting, it is true that technically speaking this practice is legal. But who cares about that? Do you think the consumer gives a damn. No! They want companies that are ethical. And there's nothing ethical about having relationships with vendors that allow you slyly extract customer credit info and then sign them up for a service they never plan on using (hint: in the end Webloyalty aka: Reservation Rewards are not returning to consumers as much value as they are extracting from them in the form of cash money--hence what I would call a criminal relationship).
Mechanically, this is what happened when Mr. Wilson clicked on the coupon/rebate he thought was going to get:
"But by filling out the form for the rebate, he had become a paying member of ReservationRewards.com,
which is a Webloyalty discount club offering travel bargains -- an
arrangement disclosed in relatively small print on the form. When
Wilson discovered who was charging him the $9 per month, he was
surprised, since he had not typed his credit
card number into the rebate form.
"'You make the assumption that if you don't give a credit card number, there must not be a charge,' he says. In fact, Webloyalty had obtained his data from Allposters.com when Wilson completed the rebate.
[Can you say 'collusion'? -Hans] Allposters.com is one of about 75
online retailers which has a business relationship with Webloyalty and
serves Webloyalty's rebate ads."
They Won't Go Changin' To Try And Please You
These
guys have no intention of fixing this, which makes they
dyed-in-the-wool bad guys in my book and every one of their 75 vendors
(some of them big names like: AllPosters.com, Classmates.com, Priceline.com,
Redcats USA (who runs Lane Bryan and Brylane Homes) are accomplices,
holding the door open for them as they run out away with not just a
little bit of consumers' bank accounts.
In our case, it looked at first like they had only taken us for $30. I was willing to cut my losses there and just be done with it, figuring "well, at least I caught it in time...".
In the course of my looking into this though, I ran a full search of my wife's email looking for anything related to Reservation Rewards. I found it odd that B of A was telling me I only had 3 "Reservation Rewards" transactions for $10 each, when apparently Reservation Rewards had been spamming my wife and busy mother of four toddlers since at least April of 2007.
Well here's why. Webloyalty (an oxymoronic name isn't it?) changed the way they are listed on check registers when they make charges. This makes it much harder to see how many transactions there really have been (and thus ask for a refund) because the search has to ask the right question if you're going to find the right answer. Note my first search was "reservation [space] rewards". That found three transactions. But when I re-searched asking B of A to give me all transactions for $10 going back as far as it could, here's what I found:
I can almost feel the shareholders of Webloyalty wringing their hands
from here. Their evil plan is complete. Now they can avoid some
detection by consumers who never really see just how much has been
extracted from them.
Summary
Do we have to accept some authorship for this by not paying closer attention to our check register? You bet!
Are companies like Webloyalty/Reservation Rewards literally banking on the fact that people don't? I would say so!
The proverbial bottom of this line that I'm trying to draw is that Webloyalty are intentionally trying to bilk people out of their hard-earned money. If they weren't, they would simply expose their intention to charge consumers just like every honest company out there in the world does. It's a simple case of not having anything of value to offer in order to justify their $86 million in revenue (2004). $86 MILLION!
"Our approach is generally to make transactions simple for consumers" (from Webloyalty CEO Richard Fernandes, no doubt implying that since it is easy to cancel, they are free of suspicion) is nothing more than JUSTIFICATION for what they are doing to trusting e-commerce customers. It makes Fernandes and his co-conspirators able to sleep a little better with each other and not feel so ashamed for what they know, in their hearts, they are really doing to folks.
In the hopes that others won't fall for this same scheme (in case you missed what you personally can do about protecting yourself: DON'T CLICK ON ANY "REBATES" OR "COUPONS WITHOUT READING ALL THE FINE PRINT FIRST!) I'm posting this up on the web where I hope others will see it.
Meanwhile I'll be making my case for a complete refund from Webloyalty and taking my bank to task for letting them take my money when they didn't have any address info to run the transaction (Download noaddress.jpg).
