Fraud already? But we have not even talked with any customers!

I tell ya. If it's not one thing it's another. By law we are required to comply with several regulations. To assist us with this we went to http://www.oshasafetytraining.net/ to purchase materials needed so that we can be in compliance. We purchased a CD and a book. Today we noticed a $1 hold on our credit card. We use a Paypal card for a lot of stuff and it's great because they send us emails about every transaction. "This is to notify you that a payment of $1.00 USD was made to WLI*RESERVATIONREWARDS 800-732-7031 CT using your PayPal ATM/Debit Card." I may have missed this otherwise.

So I call this place. I get put on hold for 10 minutes by an automated system and then the call drops. I call again and this time I get through. They tell me that we authorized them to bill us for a monthly service. The info can be found here: http://home.reservationrewards.com/ They stated that we double opted in. What that means is that we added our email address to their system. They then sent us an email asking us to confirm the subscription. Or so they said. We got nothing of the sort. Dennis, our Operations Manager was the one who made the purchase. He's Internet savvy. He's did not double opt in for this.

We did a little Googling about this company and we were shocked at what we found. Thousands of people complaining about the same deceptive practices. I knew we would get some fraud from time to time but I did not expect it so soon! This company has me a little ticked. I actually had this happen to me about 2 years ago with the same company. I looked up old emails and I went through the same thing. Except last time I did not catch it for several months. It's been long enough ago that I don't even remember if I got my money back.

So to let the OSHA Safety Training company know that we are displeased I had Dennis send them the following email.
---

After we bought from you, I was sent to a page for reservation discounts, or something along those lines. I closed out of it because I was not interested in that service. However, we have since got a bill to our credit card for $10.00. We looked it up and found that your affiliate WLI uses highly questionable, if not downright dishonest business practices. They said we double-opted in for this service, and that never happened. If your company authorized this transaction on our behalf, that is not proper. I will let this link I am giving you speak for itself.
http://adam.rosi-kessel.org/weblog/the_man/webloyalty_aka_wli_reservations_is_a_scam.html

If you continue doing business with this affiliate I will find it necessary to stop doing business with your company.

Thank You,
Dennis Hutchinson
Operations Manager
Markee Dragon, Inc.

--

If you look at the link we included in there. You'll see thousands of other people that have had this issue. I refuse to be a customer of any company that would help this company scam it's customers. All I can think is that they must get paid very well to make up for the lack of ethics.

/RANT

**Update. 1/19/07. We got a reply from the site where this happened at. I wanted to share it with all of you.

Dennis,

Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I will not stand for such things to be done to my customers. Please be assured that we did NOT authorize any charges to your card other than for the products you bought.

The webloyalty program is a "feature" of the secure shopping cart we use; however, it is not something I have ever cared for. Up to this point I did not realize that I could opt out of this; however as I was looking into this I discovered that I could opt out, and did so immediately.

Since this happened following a purchase from my website, I have directed that my supplier credit your card for $10 to reimburse this charge. Just please be sure to cancel whatever subscription or "benefit" they (web
loyalty) say you signed up for.

I apologize for not getting back to you sooner; we had a major ice storm and it's been rather hard to keep current on the email-- I've been without power for a week now...

Once again, I want you to know that I am extremely upset that this happened to you, and I am going to start firing some emails to my shopping cart service for betraying your (and my) trust.

You should see the credit on your credit card next week; my supplier is down today due to another power outage.

Respectfully,

Tim Morton, owner
Osha-safety-training.net