People in the Philadelphia suburbs should watch out, I had a run-in with a group of Veritas Communications magazine salespeople this week!
Their scam is this: a person knocks on your door around dinner time. You open it to find a young person there who proceeds to tell you a hard-luck story, then tells you that their life is turning around thanks to door-to-door magazine sales. They are excited because if they sell a certain number of magazines, they have the chance to win a trip to Hawaii. They then essentially beg you to help them get "those last few points" by buying a magazine subscription... And here's the catch... The magazines won't be delivered to you, but to one of two charitable groups: one distributes these to overseas US military personnel and the other distributes them to children's hospitals. That's right, they want you to buy magazines with absolutely no way of ever knowing if said magazines will ever be delivered!
I was actually tempted to do this, thinking that being out $15 or so was no big deal and then they told me the price tag: $50 for ONE subscription! I asked why the price was so high and they told me it was because they were going overseas and these subscriptions were for THREE years! I asked what about the subscription to the children's hospitals in the U.S. And they said that it was high because the paper they used for the magazine was "special." At this point, I asked to see some kind of I.D. Which demonstrated they were working for a company. The person did not have I.D., but did have a crazy story to explain why. On and on this went until I finally got sick of things and said I would not buy anything. I had to say this several times, they kept talking, finally I shut the door.
I did an internet search for "Veritas Communications" and came across several people who had been ripped off by a similar scam. Well, these guys are in the Northeast now, so watch out!
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