Friday, November 06, 2009

Caveat Emptor – Let the buyer Beware!

So it’s nearly Christmas right? And money, as usual is tight. So tight that you are looking at any and all ‘special offers’ in order to get the best value for money you can find. Well watch out because many of these ‘Special Offers’ have a sting in the tail!

I was playing this game on Facebook called Mafia Wars, a cool game but it uses a system of ‘reward points’ which make the game easier if you buy stuff they advertise or sign up for ‘special offers’. So inevitably I find myself needing some reward points, well one of the ‘free’ offers was for ‘The Complete Road Dahl children’s Collection’ £4.95 and was worth 100 reward points. I have a niece and this I thought would be an ideal gift. So I clicked.

I was taken to a webpage and I duly entered my details, there was a terms and conditions PDF which I downloaded and a text box with a shipload of text crammed into it which I couldn’t be bothered reading. Gave ‘em my Card details and in short order I had my 100 reward points. A few days later the books arrived and they were as advertised, so I figured I had got a damn good deal,..

Then I started getting emails from ‘Books for Children’ saying I had agreed to take another 4 books and that their ‘editors choice’ would be sent automatically if I didn’t order anything else and on further investigation I discovered that in order to cancel I would have to pay £10 for each book I did not take. The ‘editors choice’ arrived a few weeks later and it was a piece of crap with an invoice for £16.95. I think you can now see where this is going, I phoned them to cancel and had to pay £46.95 in order to do so. To sum up those 100 reward points have cost me ( inc postage and packing ) approximately £60!

I’ve complained to Zynga the makers of Mafia Wars about this so called ‘free’ offer and the advert is no longer there, but when I complained to Trading Standards there was bugger all they could do. Why? Because I hadn’t read the terms and conditions, hadn’t read the crap in their little text box and the webpage I’d signed up on was no longer there! I’d been clobbered by your classic BookClub scam.

They hook you in with an offer that is too good to be true, and in the fine print claw back the real cost of the initial offer by forcing you to take over priced crap you don’t want, and there is bugger all Trading Standards can do about it because ‘The information needed to make an informed decision was all there’.

Well in my book this amounts to ‘Theft by Deception’ but I seriously doubt that a court would agree with me, so next time you are thinking about clicking on a ‘special offer’ remember this : CAVEAT EMPTOR , which is Latin for ‘Let the buyer beware’.

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