Hack The Rippers

There are some present day "rippers". These are the nasty guys who take you in with promises of something "free" and when you have filled in all the blanks at the bottom, in fine greyed print lies the sting. Most of the time there is so much of this poisonous print that you don't bother to read it all - one I got into was 68 pages long, I kid you not. Somewhere buried in the midst of this flood of unnecessary verbiage, you are told that if you "agree", you will, yes, receive the material free or close to it for a time and after that, your credit card will be charged automatically for additional use of the service. To get out of it, is complicated and difficult and involves the close reading and following of instructions that are often not printable. I have been caught a couple of times. It was all my own fault because I tripped over my ego and thrift and ended up pleading with my credit card company to deny the charges. What had occurred is that the company without informing me according to what I "agreed" upon, immediately charged my account even though I was not informed by my credit card company that the charge had gone through on line. When I told the cc company that I did not intend to pay and asked them not to charge interest if I did not, they told me they would have to charge interest as that is their "policy". When I asked them why since I had informed them the matter was "in dispute" they told me there was nothing they could do about it because I had "agreed" to the company's fine print. The charge was big enough that I called them and complained and fortunately I have a phone plan that allows me unlimited calls to the US because the woman I spoke to often asked to be excused and she disappeared. Finally I told her that I intended to keep the line open for years if necessary so she had better help me and NOW. She went to the "manager" and I did get my money back, not all of it but I considered it a lesson well learned. From now on, no company gets my credit card number and I am much smarter. End of tale. Message is - watch out and read ALL of the fine print or don't shell out your cc info.