Scam hunting 101: a beginners course

You know how you sometimes go looking for one thing & accidentally uncover something else entirely? Have you ever, without your knowledge, given a random company your credit card number and then allowed them to charge you $10.00 a month for services you wouldn't even use even if you knew they existed? And, have you ever done this for so long that you suddenly find out that you have given them $200.00 of your hard earned money for no reason what-so-ever?!! Aaarrrrggghh!


Never mind the screaming, that's just me & Mr. Crackers finally realizing that, through a series of small misunderstandings & oversights, we are the dumbest people in America we have thrown $200.00 right into the trash. Bitter? Me? Never!

And so, let me share with you my many readers reader, how we uncovered a sneaky scam that cheated us out of money right under our very noses for almost 2 years. It all started back in March 2007, when my husband ordered some flowers for his boss from FTD online after hearing that he had a heart attack. (That Mr. Crackers can be a very thoughtful guy!) After he hit the purchase button & finalized his order, a pop-up asked him if he would like a $10.00 rebate good toward his next FTD purchase. All he needed to do to redeem the rebate was to re-enter his email address. Being the man he is, he clicked yes & entered his email address to save himself some dough on his next floral purchase (here, I like to imagine he was going to get me some flowers -something big and showy like a 2 dozen roses in assorted colors. A girl can dream...)


But, instead of a rebate, entering his email address apparently authorized the company RESERVATION REWARDS to charge his credit card $10.00 a month for services we never wanted. It did this without even asking for his credit card information again. Let me repeat: he only gave them his email address. He never provided RESERVATION REWARDS with his credit card info, nor did he authorize them to sign us up as "members" for their services. Somehow this bunch of shady characters company was able to access his credit info directly from the FTD site!!!

And so, for the past 20 months RESERVATION REWARDS (notice how I keep saying their name to remind you who you should be wary of? Clever, huh?) has been charging us $10.00 a month for nothing, nada, zilch.

You may now be thinking, " Mrs. Crackers, are you guys completely idiots or what? why didn't you or your husband catch the $10.00 monthly charge?" Well my friends friend we actually did, but due to a slight misunderstanding and a small communication error we thought (I guess I should say, I thought) that the charges were a recurring business expense for a website that my husband hosts for his company. I also assumed (again in error) that we were getting reimbursed for this monthly expense. So, I diligently (& later found out stupidly) logged the monthly charges into Microsoft Money as I paid all of our bills without giving it a second glance.

If not for a problem Mr. Crackers was having with another company we believed may have been scamming us, we would never have discovered what was going on.

Last night, Mr. Crackers asked me to pull up his unbilled activity on his Visa card online. You see, he had ordered my Christmas present from a company neither of us had ever heard of called iKitchen (I'll just point out here that I did give him a link where he could buy the gift from a more reputable place, but he found it cheaper there...) and he had no word on the status of his order. Not only that, when he tried to reach customer service, he discovered that the only way to reach them was via email - they had no phone service. This of course started to make him a little nervous. He had emailed iKitchen to check on the status of his order & (not surprisingly) had never heard back from them. Getting more and more leery of this company, he wanted to check his Visa to see if they had billed him for something that it appeared we may never receive. As I had a vested interest in all of these goings on (it was my gift after all!) I jumped at the chance to help him investigate what was happening.

It was during this search that we found the $10.00 charge from Reservation Rewards.

Mr. Crackers turned to me & asked "Ummm, what's that charge for?"

I politely replied "Oh, you know, that's the monthly charge for your website."

"Uh, no, it's not", Mr. Crackers replied, "that charge is on my American Express Card."

I will now spare you the ten minutes of not so polite back & forth where we eventually learned that perhaps we don't always do such a bang up job of listening to and/or understanding each other as we had previously thought.

After doing a bit of research online, we found countless articles that warned readers about the bad bit of business trickery that RESERVATION REWARDS uses to scam people who think they are getting rebates into paying a small monthly fee on their cards that may go undetected for, let's just say, as many as 20 months!

Mr. Crackers immediately called the customer service number we found & after a few minutes of talking, got someone who agreed to shutdown our "membership" and refund the $200.00 they had stolen charged us within the next 3-5 days. Now, I am not sure yet if this will actually come to pass, but I just wanted to send a warning to all of my readers, to you my friends, to you Mom not to get sucked into this terrible scam. I am keeping my fingers crossed that we can resolve this issue with them as quickly and as smoothly as possible. I have my doubts, but I will keep you updated.

Please learn a lesson from us, the dumbest people in America the Cracker family, and resist the urge to respond to pop-ups promising great rebate deals, even if they just want your email address. Afterall, you may just be one click away from a slow and random draining of your cash reserves.