My disabled sister was recently hospitalized and after going through her credit card & bank info I've found that she's being scammed by several magazine ripoff artists.
This seems to have been going on since 2004. She apparently initially ordered some magazines and it snowballed. She was confused and probably embarassed and tried to handle it on her own. She had been getting frequent phone calls from these companies and told them "no". She did not want to renew or extend her service.
I also found mailings from these companies at her home that suggest that she returned entries for sweepstakes & claims for "free gifts" which, no doubt, also gave them the implied permission to extend her orders. Also several mailings telling her they are going to automatically send her more magazines unless she cancels in so many days - this stuff looks like typical junk mail I would have thrown out.
I've called these companies & have been told that they were prepaid & no cancellations are allowed. I seriously doubt that these orders have been prepaid by the scammers since the majority of the subscriptions haven't even started yet. Her original subscriptions back in 2004 were 4 and 5 year and there were renewals made in 2004. I've talked to many of the magazine publishers who've told me she has back-to-back subscriptions til the year 2068, which is ludicrious since she's 59.
To top it all off, all of these companies have several alias's and each one of them is charging her credit card for the same magazines.
And now for the Credit card company. How they ever approved someone on disability, who gets less than 600.00 a month is beyond me. And they won't investigate these magazine charges. Discover Card claims that since she must have initially given out her credit card number the charges cannot be considered fraud. Regardless of the fact that she says she has turned down all requests for renewals & extensions. Regardless of the fact that they are obviously submitting charges through many alias's for the same orders.
The companies & their alias's are: General Subscription Service AKA Northstar readers, NME magazine AKA Agora corp, Magazine Services of America AKA MSA Central AKA Publishers Guide AKA American Preferred publishers, American Marketing AKA Magazines Inc AKA National Service Corp., Millienium Marketing AKA National Readers Service AKA Readers Source AKA Publishers Renewal service, TMC Publishing, Treasure Coast AKA Sunshine Readers Corp. AKA National Readers Service, United Readers Service AKA Western Readers Service, Florida Periodicals AKA Budget Marketing, World wide Preferred Publishers AKA Southern Magazine Promotions AKA HMD magazine AKA Lir Enterprises AKA Magazine Readers Service AKA Community Reading Club, Rocky Mountain Readers Service, Better Billing Solutions, 5 Star Customer Service, Area Circulation, Magazines of Florida, Motivational Ventures in Marketing, Heartland Inc AKA Trumpet Marketing.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that these companies are even more tangled with each other than I've found them to be so far.
I'm gathering as much info on these companies as I can & will be turning it over to the Attorney Generals office & urge anyone whos has been like-wise scammed to do the same.
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