A little while back I found an awesome deal on video games. As a certified gamer nerd I jumped on it. The deal allowed me to get 10% off all video game related purchases on Amazon. The only catch was I had to join a consumer's organization called The ECA. Luckily they were offering free memberships and I could cancel auto renewal so they wouldn't charge me $20 every year. It was a dream come true. Unfortunately, like all dreams, it was going to end.
The free memberships was an attempt to get as many members as possible to bolster their credibility and future profits. There very openly and frequently touted their Amazon discount and said it would pay for the membership fees by itself. With more and more members brings more and more people that are unscrupulous. Some user quickly figured out a way to exploit and stack the discount getting 30% off instead of 10%. This caused Amazon to quickly pull the promotion and members to jump ship in droves. The Amazon discount is the only reason people joined which makes sense since that was what the advertising campaign was focusing on.
This caused quite a stir and many of the legitimate and honest members were rightfully upset. During the whole fiasco they promised us the discount would be back and even kept their advertising the same. In the end the discount was discontinued and they quickly edited their website to claim they never advertised it. No problem they had other discounts right, wrong. Most are useless or normal discounts you can find on any bargain site. 2 more of the good ones, Tritton and Buy.com are also "coming back soon" and not working as advertised respectively. Starting to seem like a scam.
Here is where the fun comes in. Mysteriously people started noticing the cancel auto renewal button missing. Inquiries were rudely answered by their staff saying they never meant to have it and it never worked. They also called paying members names and started deleting all dissenting comments. They said we could use the feedback form to cancel auto-renewal anyway. Some of us tried that and no response. Then they said we had to send in a letter to cancel. They also removed the phone number cancellation method previously listed in their Terms of Service. On top of that they have a clause in their Terms saying they have no responsibility of keeping track of mail they receive. We need to send certified or something similar to prove we canceled. They also gave some rather lame excuses about the Internet was inefficient and snail mail was easier.
For week I tried hard to get this information out and get people to complain. When a company advertises something it can't provide and then makes it really hard to cancel membership it is a SCAM. Their immature responses, name calling, and other unusual behavior supports this. Finally a real consumer group The Consumerist picked up my story along with information from multiple additional parties. Now the web is ablaze. People are upset and hopefully something will get done about this. As my girlfriend can attest I always win!
Note: some of these sites have angry customers who like to swear a lot ;)
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