I was contacted by phone and told one of my credit card companies submitted my name as an entry to a contest and I was one of 500 finalists eligible to win either $25,000, Hybrid vehicle or Australian vacation.
The phone rep said she was from United Readers' Services.com and she said they are affiliated with PCH (Publisher's Clearing House) and she even mentioned the "$5,000 a week for life" contest that PCH now has running.
She said I had already won a Geneva watch and to help finance all their contests they ask their clients to order and pay for one weekly magazine publication at $3.95 a week and that I could get 9 other magazines free. This comes out to $19.95 a month for 48 months. I advised I am 59 and retired on a fixed income and I cannot commit to 4 years. She had her supervisor call me on the phone and she agreed to lower the program to 24 months. They said I could not proceed further with the sweepstakes unless I agreed to participate in ordering. I specifically asked the supervisor if in fact United Readers' Services was affliliated with Publishers Clearing House and she, too, said "yes." I gave them my credit card for the first month's premium and they recorded my order information.
After getting off the phone I was uneasy with this order and a few hours later I called their Customer Service number to discuss cancelling my order. They were closed for the day. I also got on line and tried to look them up with the name the first rep gave and it was incorrect, but I was able to find them under "unitedreaders.com" and I looked up their info and just as I thought, there is no mention of any affiliation with PCH. I did discover many other complaints about their methods to get "victims" to agree to order magazines and then get credit info from these people.
The good news is their website does state you can cancel within 72 hiours. So I contacted them today and told Customer Service I felt their sales reps misrepresented their company as being affiliated with PCH. I said I felt this misrepresentation conned me into ordering and that I wanted to now cancel as it was less than 24 hours since they called me. The C/S Rep was fairly rude and gave me a cancellation confrimation number and told me to just write "REFUSED" when their envelope comes in the mail to me.
Thank God I was able to cancel or I'd be getting a bunch of magazines that I really don't need and I'd be out of pocket almost $500 over 2 years!
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