This insidious form of deceptive e-mails promising a variety of valuable gifts if you will only answer a few marketing-type questions exists in a variety of forms and apparently fraudulent offers.
Once you reply you are caught in a trap of "to qualify you must select x number of offers from the following list." You do and then are told that you are practically through, just go to the following page. You do and the process repeats itself — and repeats again, and again, ad nauseum.
By the time you are exhausted and quit answering you have signed up to receive a variety of offers costing only a few dollars each only to find that (as others have attested to Rip-Off) your credit card has been billed a dollar and then 29.95, or 39.95 not once but quickly for two months and supposedly destined to continue until stopped — and you are no closer to getting the promised "free" merchandise because you have not completed all of the questionnaires. So you call to complain.
That is no an easy thing to do. Again, as others have attested your calls may a) not be answered at all or b) be answered after long waits only to be transferred to other locations where you may or may not reach a person.
I asked if I was being charged for the calls and was told I was not, but that is still to be resolved.
It is difficult to know how many different organizations are involved and equally difficult to determine who is behind all these obviously deliberate shenanigans. Phones are answered in Conneticut; or Nebraska; or California.
Perhaps the clearest indicator I got was from a man who said he was in California who said (in essence) "Listen, these companies don't have warehouses full of computers or handbags just waiting to be given away free. Why don't you just quit and forget about it?"
I quit but I haven't forgotten.
One last word: Intermingled with all these apparent deceptions are what appear to be legitimate offers from recognizable national companies. It is an odd mixture of legitimate and (apparently) illegitimate offers together in a program that appears to be designed not to deliver but to deceive, just as one on-line representative told me. I should have been smart enough not to have become involved. I hope you can profit from my experience and that of others on these pages. As they say, "If it sounds too good to be true it probably is."
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