Magazine Sales Scams
Most magazine subscription scams fit neatly into one of three categories, depending on how contact with the customer is made:
- telemarketing
- typical line is that, as a credit card holder, you're entitled to a diamond-studded watch or some jewelry. then they tell you about the free magazines you're going to get. finally, they ask you to "help out" with another one or two subscriptions, all at a 50% or so savings ... off the greatly-inflated newsstand price.
- field sales
- kids trying to win a prize, earn tuition, go to camp, whatever it is, knock on your door and try to convince you that it's all for a good cause. the kids who sign up for this work often get scammed as much as the customers who buy the subscriptions, getting promises of reasonable incomes but finding out later that this is not the easy work it was represented to be. none of the money from this scam goes to charity.
- direct mail
- several agencies are resorting to phony invoice scams. the notice they send out appears to be an invoice but the wording says it's merely a subscription offer. sending in a payment in response to this notice, usually half of the total amount due, constitutes a subscription order.
Techniques that may be encountered in any of these approaches include:
- trying to get people to commit to subscriptions for as long as possible (4 years is common)
- charging full publisher's price for the subscription (sometimes more), when the publisher has multi-year or promotional discounts
- claiming savings by comparing to newsstand prices (hint: a magazine that costs 50¢ per issue by subscription may cost $2.95 or more on the newsstand)
- quoting prices per week even though some of the magazines they offer you may only be published monthly
- failing to quote the total cost of the subscription order
- multiple names (often generic names) for the same company
Although the scam is that people are enticed into buying something based on misrepresentations of savings, gifts, and appeals to help out a worthy person, one of the common complaints is non-delivery... but the industry standard time before a non-delivery complaint can be processed is 90 days. While many publishers do much better than this, it's likely that many of the non-delivery complaints are simply due to the lead time that a lot of publishers require to get that first copy to you.
hazards and abusive practices of field sales
magazine scams: telemarketing
magazine scams: field sales
magazine scams: direct mail
hazards and abusive practices of field sales
more pages about magazine scams
trade publications
You must register before editing pages or using other extended features on this TWiki system.
Revision r1.28 - 03 Jul 2003 - 04:03 by EliMantel 
Privacy Policy
|
Copyright © 2000-2005 by the contributing authors.
All material on this collaboration tool is the property of the contributing authors. Collect email addresses here.
Ideas, requests, problems regarding TWiki? Send feedback.
|