On February 20th, two young men came to my house selling magazines. They explained that the winner would receive money for tuition and books for college and as an added bonus, a trip to Cancun. I told them up front that I did not have the money to pay for them as I am trying to work my way through school paying for everything from my tuition to my rent by myself.
They were very persistent and tried to get me to go to the ATM and withdraw the money right then and pay them in cash. I told them again that I did not have the money and they explained to me that if I wrote them each a check and then later cancelled my order, then they would still receive half of their points.
So against my better judgment I wrote them the checks in an effort to at least help them out. They told me that someone from their organization would call me within the next three days to confirm my order and I could cancel when I received the phone call. They also informed me that if no one got in touch with me within three days that the order would self-cancel.
Being, apparently, nave in my thoughts, I felt I could at least help in that way seeing as how I know what it is like to be struggling for money for college. Needless to say, I never received a phone call so I assumed that the checks had self-cancelled. You can imagine my surprise when both of the checks cleared my banks. Each check was written from a separate banking account both of which charged me numerous fees for insufficient funds.
All in all, including the amount of the checks that I was under the impression would not clear, the total amount of money I have lost is $242. The thing that I am bothered with the most is the leadership that these young people are receiving. It seems that they have a very distorted sense of ethics and I fear that since this happened to me that it has happened to many other people, such as the elderly, who are too afraid to say anything about it because they feel it is their fault.
I understand that I should have read the fine print on the receipt, and it is my fault for not, but it is not my fault that I was lied to and made to believe something untrue.
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