Sep 26, 2007 2:33 pm US/Eastern
Consumer Alert: Magazine Subscription Scams
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
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Be careful who you give your information to over the phone.
CBS
You get a call with what seems like a legitimate offer for subscriptions to your favorite magazines. But before handing over your credit card number, here's a warning about who could be on the other end of the line.
They're enough to fill a magazine stand. But these subscriptions, most of them duplicates, were sold to Frank Haas' 79-year-old mother.
"The TV Guide there, she's getting two copies of that, there's the Soap Opera Digest, she's getting two copies of that," said Haas.
All told, his mom, who suffers from dementia, was sold $1200 worth of the same magazine subscriptions by a company called Worldwide Preferred Publishers in California.
"I wanted them to send me a list of each magazine and how long they had sold them for but they wouldn't do that for me," explained Haas. And when he insisted they cancel the subscriptions? "They ended up charging $400 to cancel the order," said Haas.
A former employee of Worldwide, who was afraid to reveal his identity, told us the company preys on the elderly, non-English speaking customers and college students with fast talk and exorbitant cancellation fees, dictated by a manager.
"She would look at the account and say how do they sound, we would say she's an elderly person yelling in my ear and 'oh, settle it for $800, $700, $300," said the former employee.
"Really what they're interested in is getting your personal information, your credit card information, your social security information so they can give you a subscription one time, two times, maybe for magazines you didn't even order," said Claire Rosenzweig with the Better Business Bureau which gave the company an "F" rating for hundreds of similar complaints.
What does Worldwide's owner have to say about these business practices? With the help of our sister station, KCBS, in Los Angeles, we tracked him down.
"Do you prey on elderly people who spend hundreds on magazines they didn't order?" asked KCBS reporter, David Goldstein. But while the owner wouldn't talk, his former employee had no problem divulging all their tactics.
"We relocated four times and they're getting ready to again because CBS 2 News was there," he told us. Bottom line says the BBB, if it's an unsolicited call, never give out your personal information over the phone and to avoid these calls altogether, take your phone number out of circulation by signing up with the Do Not Call Registry.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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