Help, I've been suckered!

Factual Questions
1

Three months ago, I signed up for a “3-day trial” membership on a porn site. **AND YES, I KNOW ** that “free” or “trial” memberships virtually always automatically roll over to regular monthly memberships if not cancelled. I could have sworn that I carefully read all the boilerplate in tiny, hard to read print at the bottom of the screen. I was looking for the disclaimer about the regular monthly fee starting if membership not cancelled. And I didn’t see it! I really thought I’d found a site that would give you three days for three bucks. So I gave it a try, decided it wasn’t worth a monthly membership, and forgot about it.

Well today I find out that I now have on my Visa charge a total of $120.00 for three months of the regular membership. My wife took this surprisingly well; that I didn’t have an ugly scene with her is the one bit of luck I’ve had so far. I’ve cancelled my membership, but that doesn’t cover what I already owe. My question (and I know responses aren’t expert legal advice) is, is there any way I can avoid paying $120.00 I can ill afford?

For one thing, who do I appeal to? The site, the Internet Billing Co, Ltd., or Visa? I doubt the site or the billing company will be sympathetic; scamming chumps like me :frowning: is probably how they make lots of money. I’ll try Visa, but I’m afraid they’ll simply say “Sorry Bud, you charged it, you pay for it”. After all, they’re getting their cut too from this misleading practice. And thanks to the site’s disclaimers (that I DIDN’T see before), I don’t think I have a legal basis for disputing the charge.

BTW: I absolutely despise the entire concept of “implied consent”: “unless you say otherwise, it’s taken that you agree to…”. Imagine going to a store and buying something, and having at the bottom of the charge slip tiny little lettering saying “by signing this, you agree to having a monthly order which will automatically be billed to your charge account, UNLESS you tell us NOT to.”

So what then? The Better Business Bureau or the FCC? But the decentralized nature of e-commerce means there’s no guarantee that the parties involved are even under US jurisdiction. Yet if this practice is not technically illegal, it is extremely misleading and exploitive. If Visa won’t help me, is there any legal avenue I can pursue?

2

I’d cancel the card.

3

I’d say Visa is your best bet. Dispute the charges. It would be helpful if you had printouts, or a cached copy the the web pages you saw, that didn’t have the disclaimers that are there now (or were they there before, but you missed them?) Naturally, you should appeal to all possible parties, but Visa is probably the only useful one. If US jusisdiction applies, you can also talk to the BBB.

Don’t spend a huge amount of time on it, since it’s only $120. If your time is worth $12/hour for example, you shouldn’t spend more than 10 hours on it.

Arjuna34

4

Lumpy,

Not to make light of this but you may have to take your lumps here. If it was a three day trial and you “forgot” about it you have no leg to stand on…even if your third leg got the better of you here.

Seriously, if after three months you conveniently notice “you are being charged for something you conveniently forgot” then you have to take it.

I don’t know the legal issues but can you honestly say that you aren’t at fault here? If you do dispute the charges after your forgetful manner, three months later, I think you are in the wrong. A free trial when they ask for your credit card information is open to interpretation, I see it as, if you don’t play but I have your pay I make the money honey.

If you freely give your credit card out I will set up a web cam and show you my body for your credit card information, of course a three day trial…

I could understand if it was within the first month but three months later???

No offense but you knew the situation going into this:

if you ask them to stop charging your card then that one thing but if you forgot after giving them, the porno site, the information your credit card company has no obligation to you.

Trust me I have been in a similar situation with a web host of mine (a 90 money back guarantee) and they screwed me…

5

I must add, any webmaster can give you a trial period that includes your information, without a credit card, and give you a chance to sign up via email after your trial period ends.

This does not relieve you from your willingness to arbitrarily give out your credit card. If you want to safeguard yourself, NEVER give out your credit card unless it is a reputable site. You may as well just hand over your card to some dude on the street corner and tell him to charge up a storm, it’s on you!

< scratching head >

So chalk it up to a learning experience cuz I bet if you went back to the site you will find the fine print. I have a friends who has 8 porno sites, they usually cover their asses pretty well.

6

Call Visa and dispute the charge. The site owners will then have to decide whether the money worth fighting for. If they decide not, you’re clear. If they do, you cause them to waste resources, plus stand a fair chance of winning simply by claiming they hid the charge from you.

7

How much you want? :wink:

8

I hate dishonest practices like this.

First, some questions. Have they been billing you every month and you just noticed it? Or did they suddenly bill you for a three month period?

Did they clearly tell you when you signed up how to cancel if you didn’t want the membership?

Porn sites actually get a lot of “chargebacks.” This means people dispute the charge on their credit card, claiming they never made the purchase.

You should call your credit card company, and then send them the same information in writting. Tell them you signed up for three days and the site billed you for three months. The credit card company will not require you to pay this charge until a decision is made.

There is a high rate of “chargebacks” in the porn industry. Most of this is believed to be caused by men who tell their wives/girlfriends they never made the purchase. The wife/girlfriend then makes the credit card company remove the charge. So people have charges removed, even though they intentionally purchased the service.

I think you have a good reason to challenge this charge. They deliberatly misled you.

But then, I think you should have told your wife BEFORE you signed up for the porn site…

Some links for you to check out:

Here’s one you’ll like, it’s about the FTC passing a $37 million judgement against porn sites who billed for services that weren’t purchased.

http://www.ainews.com/story.phtml?story=1003
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2504289,00.html

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/000327/eporn.htm
About halfway down you’ll find this:

’ “We have a lot of what’s called friendly fraud,” says Karen Campbell, sales manager for Netbilling Services. “Somebody will join a membership site, and then it’s very easy for them just to call their issuing bank and do a chargeback”–that is, deny they ever made the purchase. Visa and MasterCard both impose sizable penalties on vendors when chargebacks occur too often.’

9

I was billed for $64.20 Canadian for an internet service I’d given my credit card for (no, not a porn site, in this case). Turns out they’d described their service so badly that I called back (voice) two days later and said, “This service clearly isn’t what I thought it was – please cancel it.” They guy said, “Okay,” but then the next month I got billed.

I called them back and he said, “Well, we set up your account. We cancelled it, as you requested, so it’s no longer functioning. But we have to bill you for the year because we did set it up. The fact that you didn’t use it isn’t our problem.” This kind of attitude made me furious and I told him I’d do a “charge-back.”

When I phoned MasterCard, I was told that if you give your credit card out on the Internet, they “can’t” do anything about you getting billed. Can’t? Seems a bit far-fetched to me.

Anyway, she said, “We get a lot of complaints like this.” I guess they want to teach people a lesson and get them to spread the word: don’t give out your card number on the net unless you’re really, really sure that you know exactly what you’re paying for.

Incidentally, the company that billed me eventually relented and said they’d issue a refund. I’ll look closely at my next credit card bill.

In a related case, I was reading about security on the net and I heard that many sites (it specifically mentioned porn sites) ask for credit card info with “http” pages (rather than https pages). That means that you’re virtually broadcasting your credit card info to the world.

I think that porn sites JUST DON’T CARE. Indeed, I suspect that porn sites have very little trouble with customer complaints, since most people are too embarassed to bring them to court.

10
      • You can contest it, but they may let it stand anyway, especially if it was billed monthly and you just now noticed the total. As far as the “free trial period” thing goes, every place that charges for memberships does it that way, even places not on the net (like exercise clubs, for instance). It can safely be assumed. If any other odd charges show up, request another card with a different number. - MC
11

Contest it.

My credit card was fraudulently accessed about a year ago by the same organisation that includes Playbirds internet sites (I worked that out from one of my card statements). Neither me or my wife have ever used a credit card on the netm either for purchase or for identification. But somehow the bastards got hold of my card number.

Every charge was a different amount, from a slightly different address each time. There was no pattern as to when each charge was made, but all were below the “floor” limit - the limit where the trader must ring the card provider for purchase approval.

It was only through vigilance of each card statement that we picked up on this in the first place. When we rang the card provider to query the statement, we were told that there were many innocent victims of similar circumstance. Some were people who had no experience of internet usage at all, just victims of someone else’s scam.

In our case, each transaction was disputed in writing, and all were eventually reversed, with our money refunded (about $1000 total).

BTW, when I found out about Playbirds, I got onto one of their sites. I noticed it was extremely easy to sign away all you rpersonal details, but ABSOLUTELY NOWHERE was there any link to cancelling your membership. Nor was there any info on the underlying organisation, a street or mail address, or even a phone number.

So get stuck into the bastards, they deserve every bit of grief they get!

12

>>When I phoned MasterCard, I was told that if you give your credit card out on the Internet, they “can’t” do anything about you getting billed. Can’t? Seems a bit far-fetched to me. <<

I had a problem with something I ordered on the internet (not porn, stereo equipment.) When it never arrived as promised via UPS, I called Mastercard & they deleted the charge without a problem. Perhaps it’s different if it’s a service contract rather than a product.

Anyhow I’m fairly cautious about putting my credit card info online. Only use it for Amazon.com & for the occasional airline ticket.

13

That is correct, but it’s not the way the business works. For the people who actually want the subscription, it would be a hassle. Also, the provider knows that people are lazy. S/he knows that someone might forget to cancel before the free trial period is over. It’s up to the subscriber to keep track of when he’ll have to start paying. If you read the Terms and Conditions thoroughly, it should tell you that you will have to start paying if you don’t cancel.

Also, the site where you click on the banner to sign up is not usually the site that is providing the service. That is, you could go to “Joe’s Online Porn Arcade” and see a banner that looks interesting. When you click on it, you’re taken away from Joe’s site to the banner owner’s site. The banner owner (provider) either pays Joe for the clickthrough, or he gives Joe a percentage of the subscription, or he gives Joe a flat fee if you sign up. All Joe is doing is providing space for the ad to run. Like a newspaper carries ads for the local Honda dealership. He’s not required to list the terms and conditions for his providers, as the actual transaction occurs at the provider’s site.

Providers cover themselves very well. Since the industry has a rather high sleaze factor, they tend to be very careful about following the laws. I heard of one site that was totally legal (and I think it was a free site – no sign-up) that the porn webmasters lobbied to close down because they found it distasteful. I never saw it, but I’m told it had women dressed in skimpy SS uniforms administering a bit of B&D. Nazi Sluts dot com. Not illegal, but they used their leverage to have it removed from the server. (It happens that the webmaster who took the most offence was a Russian Jew who was in Russia when the Germans invaded.) The point is, they get enough flak just by being in the business. They want to make sure that everything is on the up-and-up so they don’t get shut down.

A friend of mine made a documentary on the internet porn industry, and I was the cameraman. We were at a photo shoot (which didn’t appear in the documentary because we couldn’t get a release). The guy running the shoot we were covering insisted that the models bring proper documentation. “I don’t care if you’re 80,” he said, “If you don’t have identification that says you’re over 18, you don’t model for this shoot.”

It would be surprising if they didn’t have a terms and condition page that describes what you pay for and when.

What techchick said.

14

Whats the URL of the site? We could look up the real ownership, phone & fax nbrs, from that info & you can then call them up & inform them about whats happening. Of course, being a porno site they probably have some protections on the info they gave but its worth a shot if you give us the url.

15

I don’t think it would be a good idea to post the URL to a porn site on this message board…

16

First of all, do NOT post any URLs on this board (or at least, no URLs for the porn sites. Sites for Visa, the Better Business Bureau, etc., are of course OK). If someone wants to know the address of the company in question, let them know via e-mail.

If there genuinely was no statement on the sign-up page that the membership would automatically roll over, then you’ve defininitely got a case. Call Visa, and they should take care of all of the dirty work for you. If Visa can’t help you, then call the billing company. Don’t even bother with the actual site in question; if they’re willing to pull thison you, they’re not going to be responsive to your complaints. Be persistant. At the worst, even if you don’t get your money back, you’re likely to get the billing service to drop that site, making things harder for the scammers.

17

The reason I forgot about it was that I was unaware that there was anything to remember. I told you, I thought I’d signed up for a membership that automatically expired after three days. I would gladly have put in a cancellation if I’d known I was supposed to. Or rather, I would never have signed up for the site in the first place, since I would not have trusted a porn site to “accept” my cancellation in a timely manner.

As for why I’m noticing this now after three months, my wife usually balances our bank account and pays the charge bills. She noticed the first $39.95, but thought it was something she ordered. She only brought it to my attention after the second bill showed up. And when I contacted the Visa web site, they listed a third charge that hasn’t been mailed out to us yet.

As for giving out my charge number, exactly how do you pay for anything on the Web at all without one?

I honestly don’t know if the site didn’t have the disclaimer when I originally called, or if I just missed it.

18

I forgot to add to my story above.

Despite sending in numerous written disputations of every unauthorised transaction, the only solution I found was to to close the account. I had to sign up with my bank as a completely new customer, hence a different member number, in order to avoid unwarranted debits from my account.

You may have to do the same to get any peace.

19

" I had to sign up with my bank as a completely new
customer"

Really? When I asked for a new credit card, they gave me one with the same name on it & a new number because I could not find the old card.