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member date of membership | how membership was earned |
|---|---|
| America Online
(January 1998) |
Joanne's Work-at-Home Page was a unique web page describing personal experiences with a variety of work-at-home programs. Evidently, someone involved in one of these programs complained that the material was libelous or otherwise offensive to them, and AOL blew it away. The result: many people will be taken in by these schemes who otherwise would have read Joanne's page and wisely held onto their money. |
| Safeway
(October 1997) |
In northern California and western Nevada, Safeway
ran a heavily-publicized promotion announcing
Earn 5% OFF your groceries.To receive the 5% off, customers had to first spend $250. But instead of receiving 5% off of the $250 already spent, the $250 expenditure entitled customers to a 5% savings only on the purchases made on a single subsequent shopping trip. For customers spending $50 on an average shopping trip, the promised savings would amount to $2.50 on $300 of purchases, or less than 1% of their total purchases. |
| Quest Communications (August 1997) |
Quest Communications offers long-distance service promoted through a dial-around service known as Just Dial 10056. Their mailing includes the headline "Just 10¢-A-Minute on State-To-State Calls". If you read past the headline, you will find that during the day, the rate is 12¢ a minute, and that there is a 10¢ per call surcharge on all completed calls. But if you begin looking at the rate comparison brochure they include, you will be unlikely to find mention of this per-call surcharge -- it's buried among several footnotes on the back page of the brochure, where few consumers are likely to notice it. |
| Brittan Communications (June 1997) |
Brittan Communications (a.k.a. BCI)
distributes "drop boxes" to local businesses throughout the U.S. that
contain forms for authorizing the change of long distance carrier to BCI.
They deceptively induce people to authorize the change by including the authorization
as part of a contest entry blank.
It is not unusual for contest entry blanks to contain much legalese, so many
people fill out the forms without realizing what they are agreeing to.
But just in case one wants to find out what the charges for long distance service
will be with BCI, they don't offer any way to do it; however, according to
newspaper reports, it's approximately three times what AT&T charges.
BCI agrees to change practices in Texas [10/22/97] |
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