Same Old Scam, Every Month

Zeidner's credit card company was willing to investigate the two months of disputed charges but could not assure her that filing a dispute would cancel the WLI membership or stop the monthly charges. "It occurred to me that I may not have any way to get the scammers to stop billing me," she says.

Jim Hood, founder and editor of Consumeraffairs.com, a consumer news and advocacy Web site, has heard the story often. "Whether you're buying a push-up bra from Victoria's Secret, a membership in Classmates.com, a ticket to Rome or one of those impossible-to-shake AOL subscriptions, [these kinds of offers] are lying in wait," he says. "These negative-option shakedowns are the modern equivalent of the pickpockets that once infested major cities."

Although a few state attorneys general (Minnesota, New York, Nebraska, California and Florida) have "administered a sharp slap on the wrist" to MemberWorks (renamed Vertrue in 2004), Hood says "the prevailing legal opinion seems to be that these schemes are operating within the law -- which says something about the state of consumer-protection laws in our country today."

So does the amazing number of consumer complaints. The Better Business Bureau, for instance, has 2,218 complaints against AP9 buyer clubs. Ed Magedson, founder of Rip-offReport.com, a consumer complaint and advocacy site, says he has received more than 2,400 e-mail complaints about AP9 clubs and 4,758 e-mail complaints about WLI Reservation Rewards.

"They do it to millions of customers, and you're talking millions of dollars, and they know exactly how to stay under the radar," says Magedson. "For every person who has a complaint, there are hundreds of other victims out there."

Richard Fernandes is chief executive and founding partner of WebLoyalty.com (WLI), the Norwalk, Conn., member-services marketing company that has partnered with 110 companies to make its offers through their Web sites. Last year, WebLoyalty's revenue exceeded $108 million.

He says most of the complaints against his company are several years old and that WebLoyalty.com has corrected its businesses practices that caused problems.

Now, he says, WebLoyalty.com makes the terms of membership clear and sends five e-mails over 30 days to new members to make sure they understand what they're getting into. "I think somebody's got to make a decision to join this. You have to put in your e-mail address twice and click 'yes,' and there is a box with our terms and conditions," he says.

But what about Rita Zeidner?

"She may have forgotten, and that's why we try, at the end of the day, to make it easy to cancel," says Fernandes, who produced a print-out labeled as Zeidner's "customer history" that detailed each transaction, from her agreeing to a 30-day trial membership in exchange for a $10 cash-back award to each of the e-mails confirming and reminding her of her membership.

"What we found in a lot of these cases is that the person knows when they joined, but a month or two later, they've forgotten," says Fernandes, who canceled Zeidner's membership. He adds that if she had stayed on the customer-service line longer, a human would have picked up and helped cancel her membership. "We are not in the business of convincing consumers to keep a service they don't want. They can get a refund," he says.

Zeidner concedes she has clicked on "get cash back" offers. "I don't know if this is the case here," she says, adding that she does not recall using a WLI $10 coupon or getting all those e-mails. "But yeah, I've played the fool. . . . Obviously, these guys are way smarter than I am."