While purchasing one book from website HotBookSale.com (HBS) in April a family member may have unknowingly clicked past an obfuscated notice that our credit card would be charged a periodic "membership" fee. (As of September the notice on the website is obscure and misleading; of course we can't confirm what it was 5 months ago.) Notice of the fee did not appear in the purchase confirmation e-mail and indeed there is nothing in the e-mail headers or body to indicate the visitor is doing business with SmartSavingsCenter.com (SSC) instead of HBS. Each monthly charge has been made silently, without any e-mail communication as is standard with legitimate automatic billings. SSC clearly does not want you to know they exist.
The first month's charge of $0.25 (twenty-five cents!) slipped by unnoticed, as did the next month's charge of $9.99, and we finally spotted it five months later after it had increased to $14.95. So the total to date was about $60 and accelerating.
Following the recommendations in complaint #245575 we contacted our credit card company's dispute unit, which conferenced in a representative from SSC. The SSC rep agreed to cancel the "membership" (confirmed by e-mail) but was unwilling or unable to refund our money and asked for our phone number to have someone call us back; we declined to give out further info to them and instead returned to our credit card company, which agreed to remove the charges but also canceled the card number and issued a new one as part of their standard fraud unit investigative procedure. We'll have to change a couple of legitimate automatic billings we had on the old number, but that's reasonable considering the alternative of letting HBS and SSC keep our credit card number.
Currently, HBS has no privacy policy, only an unexplained link to the SSC policy. Another misleading feature on the HBS site is the "Powered By SmartSavingsCenter.com" in the footer. Usually "Powered By" indicates some back-end software technology in use, not a parent company with a parasitic business model; the average visitor will see this and think "Oh, they're giving the company that wrote the website code some free advertising", not "Say, I also need to vet the code writers before I do business with this website." These people burn me up and waste my time. And I'm out of time or I'd scour the websites for more questionable practices. Everything I've seen of their whole shady plausible deniability setup is distasteful and dishonest.
Once burned
Sunnyvale, California
U.S.A.
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