My wife just renewed her Sirius radio. She did cancel and waited two months and got an offer in the mail for a discounted price. She called and negotiated a price of $5.00 per month for 6 months.
Call the number and negotiate. You will get a better price.
That is there tactic for sure. You call to cancel because of the price hike and they somehow manage to find an offer for you to get another year at the lower price. I renew that way every year. Xfinity used to do the same thing.
My complaint is that someone calls my work phone about once a week saying they are going to send me a free report about my industry, they just need my e-mail address. I always refuse saying if you found my phone number, you can find my e-mail address. Still have no idea what they are trying to sell me, but they call every single week.
It absolutely works. Just watch the consumer protection spot on your local news. It’s filled with people falling for this kind of thing.
At work we’ll get mail that looks official and will appear to be a bill. It’ll have a due date to get it sent in, an amount of money to send* and an explanation of what will happen if you miss the deadline. For many people, myself included, we know it’s a scam. I know that my website’s domain hosting isn’t about to expire and even if it was, it’s not through them. Similarly, I know that I don’t need to sign this random paper that just showed up to continue processing credit cards. In both those cases, closer inspection reveals that it’s not a bill, it has nothing to do with our current hosting/credit card processing and it’s actually a contract to sign up with a new company.
In any case, every.single.time, I get one of these, I report it to the FTC and the BBB. Generally, there’s already a ton of complaints on the BBB and google from everyone else complaining about how underhanded it is.
The last time I bought a new vehicle, doing the paperwork with the salesman. He mentioned the extended warranty, road hazard tire coverage, and gap insurance. Never asked if I wanted them, just mentioned them.
When he printed out the paperwork with all the details, the bottom line was quite a bit higher than my mental math had estimated so I closely reviewed the line items. I would have reviewed them in any case, but I was extra critical in that instance.
There they were, warranty, coverage, and insurance. He wasn’t thrilled when I had him remove them.
Of course, this isn’t any new or improved tactic, just something to be expected from car salespeople.
A friend of mine once said ‘the more important a piece of mail looks, the more likely it is to be junk’. The mail that comes in the yellow envelope with with blue lines around the perimeter and URGENT written in bold red is more likely to be for an extended car warranty or lawn fertilizing service than it is to be test results from your doctor.
I taught my adult children exactly that, along with “The really important stuff comes in a plain white envelope, possibly with a government agency or attorney’s name on it somewhere”
I received a particularly cool piece of junk mail yesterday…
It was some kind of glossy flier about siding or windows, but it had a short paragraph written in ink addressed to me by name and signed off as “Kristen”. I have seen many things like this one in the past, but this one was different.
Why was this one so interesting to me? Because of the effort the sleazy advertisers had gone through to make it look like it really *was *hand-written.
At first I had looked at my wife and said “Poor Kristen, that must be a miserable job writing short notes all day long…”
Then I got out a magnifier and saw that the blue pen ink really was printed by ink jet or something.
The thing that had made it so convincing was that the letters were all different and it was a rather sloppy looping feminine hand, looking very much like some broke college student really did write it.
It was only on close inspection that I realized that the font they used had three different variations of each hand-written letter.
The email was titled “Birthday reminder for {my wife’s name}” It arrived two weeks before her birthday, and had pictures of the items on her list, along with purchase links.
Presumably she’s provided Amazon with her birthday at some point, and probably she entered my email as someone who could view her non-public shopping list. But she certainly didn’t request that I get a buying reminder shortly before her birthday.
I got a $100 Visa cash card for signing up for an internet provider. It took two months to arrive, which wasn’t a surprise. What was a surprise is that activating the card is apparently impossible. The website fields to activate the card are formatted to be incompatible with the card number, the field simply isn’t large enough to input all of the numbers. It is a third party service, so the ISP says it can’t help, and the customer service of the third party is a circular phone-menu that also won’t accept the card number.
It all smells fishily deliberate.
I had a similar thing happen with my last car. It should first be noted that when I started talking to the dealer I mentioned (just in casual conversation) and issue I had the last time I got a car. He told me that they’re now under new ownership and everything they do is totally transparent and honest. In fact, that was mentioned so many times I assume they had sales meetings where they were told to say it. In any case, everything was going smoothly until I started signing papers. When I got to the actual agreement I noticed that, like you, the price was quite a bit higher than I expected. Luckily, I had taken a picture of ‘our’ notes from a few days earlier when we settled on all that stuff. I checked my pictures and sure enough, something changed. Upon picking through what they were going to have me sign, they added about $800 to the total price. It was broken down into a $100 gift card that I could use for anything and a $700 ‘all weather package’ that included all weather floor mats, mud guards and a trunk liner.
I told the person I was working with that I didn’t ask for any of that and didn’t want any of it. She got her manager and we had the same discussion. He got his manager, same discussion. I should have called them out when they said ‘we do that to all the cars, we have to protect our investment (it’s a lease)’. I should have said ‘that’s fine, but then you pay for it’.
They flat out refused to remove any of those items I didn’t want. And, it’s just fucking insulting that they add a hundred dollars to the price of the car to give me a gift card, to their dealership. And, that gift card couldn’t be applied to the car, though I could use it on the next one.
Anyway, they could clearly tell I was getting ready to walk out on the deal, and suddenly raised the price of my trade in by $1000. So, in the end, I came out ahead.
If this was at all recent and/or you still have the card, you could try calling visa and see what they have to say about it.
Also, I’d report them to the BBB (which does tend to get results) and maybe the FTC and/or their state’s AG. Report it as a scam.
About a year ago, I set up a couple of CDs at the Citibank website. And then when one came up for renewal after six months, I couldn’t renew it online, but instead had to make an appointment and sit with a bank manager to do so. Now it and the other CD expire in the first week in December, so I’m going to have to go in again to renew them. I don’t understand why I can’t renew the CDs online, especially since I bought them online. I think it’s something to do with banking regulations but it is silly.
XM’s customer service and pricing are horrible. Here’s what you have to do.
Call and tell them it’s too expensive, they’ll give you a lower price. Tell them it’s still too high and ask to cancel, again, they’ll give you a lower price. You usually have to threaten to cancel 3 times before they’ll magically find an even better deal. You should typically be able to get it down to around $6-$8/month for either 6 months or a year.
Make a note somewhere of the amount and date it expires and call back a day or two before that. Tell them you want to renew, they’ll tell you it’s $25 a month and then threaten to cancel 3 times to get your original price back (and don’t let them talk you into a different package).
I’ve been saying, for the 15ish years I’ve had XM, that they could get rid of half their customer service reps and bring in a lot more customers if they’d stop playing that game. Give it a reasonable price, say $10 a month. More people will sign up and less people will cancel (because $250/year is a lot of money for radio) and stop with the games.
Also, the nice thing about threatening to cancel is that if they do actually cancel you, you’ll get a ton of ‘we want you back’ mail from them with codes on them 3 months for free or a year at $5/mo or something along those lines.
But, yeah, I like XM, but they can be a real nightmare.
I needed a little cheaie calculator. I didn’t need trigonometric functions, or natural logarithms, just a plain four funtion jobbie. I went to a big name office supply store and cheapest was, I think, $5.99.
I take it to the register, the checker rings it up, and then they are so trained, the words automatically came out of her mouth: “Would you like a warranty plan with that?”
I started cracking up. I couldn’t even function to get the mo ey out of my purse! The guy behind me was laughing too.
The checker had a question mark over her head. I wiped my eyes and tried to straighten up. I said, “It’s a crummy little six dollar calculator!”
She said, “Ooohhh…”
~VOW
Not new, I’m afraid; though that may be a new twist on it.
Back in approximately 1970, I wanted a used mini refrigerator for my dorm room. There was, as far as I could tell, one place in town that sold such a thing. They advertised “no delivery charge!” I went down there, found one that would do, asked the price.
“That’s $x, or the delivered price is $x + y”.
"Your ad says “no delivery charges.”
“That’s right. There’s no delivery charge.”
“You just said there is one. You said the price is $x if not delivered, and x + y if delivered. I don’t mind paying a delivery charge if there is one, that’s fair, but you shouldn’t be saying that there isn’t one if there is.”
“No, that’s not a delivery charge. It’s two different prices, one for the refrigerator if you pick it up, the other for the refrigerator if we deliver it. That’s not a delivery charge.”
– we went around and around about eight times. I kept saying it was OK with me if there was a delivery charge but they ought to call it one. They kept refusing to call it a delivery charge. I figured my only choice was to deal with them or not get a fridge, and the amount was actually reasonable. I wound up paying it, and got on with my life.
But if something reminds me of it – do you know, I’m still ticked off.
I think they’re on to that one. I’ve had junk mail arrive in a plain white envelope, sometimes with a return address carefully calculated to look just enough like a government agency to get it opened, but not quite enough to get make it illegal.
I’ve had Mr VOW say, “This looks important!” As he hands me some official-looking mail.
“It’s garbage.”
“How do you know without opening it?”
“Look at the stamp. If it says ‘bulk rate,’ it’s crap. If it’s something REALLY important, they’ll pay for a stamp!”
~VOW
I once got a flier in the mail that had the appearance of a photocopy, with “handwritten” notes on it in blue ink. Something like “Hey, this is a really great deal! I thought you might be interested” or something along those lines, and the price circled with the note “Wow, this could really save you some money!.” The envelope it came was addressed to “Our Neighbor at [my address]”, with the address printed in the same fake handwritten font. But like your flier upon closer inspection those parts were just printed on. They were apparently trying to trick me (and all the other people they sent it to) into thinking one of my neighbors photocopied this flier and personally mailed it to me.
I will take the other side and say that this doesn’t seem particularly slimy to me.
If Amazon sent something like that to me, it might be a really useful reminder that I should really get on buying a gift and, hey, here’s a thing she said she wanted! It’s not that I’d forget my wife’s birthday, but I easily get stuck in gift-choice paralysis and until like the actual day before, it’s not an urgent issue, so it often gets postponed, etc.
To me, such an email would obviously be an auto-generated thing, not initiated by her.
A similar sort of thing, but in person: the jeweler who made our wedding rings calls me a month or so before my wife’s birthday and our anniversary and says “hey, do you want to give your wife a piece of jewelry? I’ve got some ideas that I think she’d like.” I’m sure my wife never told her to do this, she just has that info and knows that that’s when I’m likely to buy my wife some jewelry. It’s not slimy. It’s just sales.
They are, but there are still enough “tells” on junk mail that a seasoned junk mail recipient is rarely fooled.
See? “Tells” like that one.
“car rt presort” (mail pre-sorted for the carrier’s route for a cheaper rate) is another tipoff, thought that could be legit, it usually it is junk.
Those have been going around for quite some time, but this one was personalized and had context in it, so it was written differently for each home, and made to look messy and non machine-like. I actually stood there for quite some time admiring their handiwork. The ink was far better than what was used in the old-school “I thought you would be interested in this” sticky note technique. That’s why I had to get out a loupe to look at it close up.
Just give them a fake and extremely rude email address. It’s what I do.
That is strange, because my CD with a local credit union renews automatically by default. If I just want to renew it without making any changes I don’t have to do anything at all. If I do want to make changes, or not renew it and just withdraw the money, I can do that over the phone. I don’t think I can do it online, which would be nice. So I don’t think you having to go in has anything to do with banking regulations unless those regulations are specific to your state.