I like to buy books from QPB on occasion. They have an interesting assortment of some good quality (physically) books. I have been getting books from them for decades. Initially, it was all mail-order, but now they have a web site. And so I went to buy a couple of books online last month.

I think I was successful: the order was entered, I received acknowledgment, I even got a notice that they were shipped. Still waiting for them, but shipping books takes time. But that’s not where they got me.

I have tried to be pretty careful about who gets my financial info on-line, or off-line for that matter. Evidently, when I ordered the books from QPB I had to go through a third party to complete the transaction. Since it was a month ago, I don’t remember the sequence of events I went though to complete the order. So yesterday I got an email from some Web Loyalty group called “Reservation Rewards”.

Their email stated that they would be billing my credit card in a few days and then gave the last four digits of the credit card. Needless to say, I was rather surprised, since I had no memory of authorizing this transaction. I was able to tell that QPB was the source of the problem based on the email address the note was sent to. I also thought it strange that some scammer would bother sending an email about the pending charges. The email also explained how to cancel the pending billing, but I wasn’t about to click on any of the links to find out what was going on. I wrote QPB a note saying their billing system may have been cracked and then went on to search the web for more details on “Reservation Rewards”. Consumer Reports had some background, and someone’s web site had a lot of comments on this service offering.

Basically, RR is a quasi-legal scam. At some point of a transaction with an online seller you click through an authorization for RR to charge your credit card a monthly fee to join their rebate program. You don’t even have to provide them your CC number, they will get it from the seller! What could be easier?

Evidently, there have been a number of consumer complaints over the past few years that these rebate customers don’t know what they are being billed for, why they are being billed, or even that they are being billed. At $10 a month, some folks don’t even question the charge. It’s something the spouse has signed up for and it’s only $10 a month. And that’s the beauty of it. Some of the original computer crime stories talked about programmers taking all .001 cents left after rounding the monthly bank account statements and putting the rounding errors into another account. In a short period of time all those rounding errors amounted to a lot of money. Here, it is doing the same at $10 a month, figuring that most people won’t notice.

It seems that there were enough complaints so some Attorneys General were questioning the integrity of the company. They now send out email reminders to people that their credit card will be charged. That’s what I got. And except for the email address that it was sent to is automagically filtered to my inbox, it would have entered my spam bucket. I think that almost every convention that is used by spam filters to identify spam is in this note (except the sex and drugs words.)

So I called their 800 number this morning, did not give them the credit card number that was going to be charged, and canceled the rewards account. All without talking to a real person. We’ll see if it sticks. In the mean time, I should probably call the credit card company and tell them not to accept any charges from WLI*RESERVATIONREWARDS.CO. (but it’s only $10 and it is such a hassle to talk with the CC people…)

And I suppose it is time to say good-bye to QPB. I should use up my bonus points first and I will use the snail mail this time. But a company that is that cavalier with their customer’s expectations should expect that.