Terms and Conditions - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/86/how-to-take-money-from-strangers

I worked customer support for one of the worst possible scams out there. The deal went a little something like this -

The company would run an advertisement on your Facebook for innocent stupid people to click on. It said that it was a diet pill that you could get a free trial sample of.

Now, while this is true, that the trial was free, what you didn't see in the small print in the terms and conditions was that the trial period started when you first purchased (not when you received it) and that if you did not stop your subscription, as soon as your trial period was over, you would be charged about $200 a month.

Now, this would be a great thing if it was clear, and if the shipping actually worked in time. The problem was that shipping would take longer than the trial period, so people would sign up, expect to get a free trial, and by the time that the trial would arrive the free trial would be done and they would already be paying a LOT of money.

The stupid part about this, refunds were near impossible to process. It involved the person spending their own money to ship back their unopened bottles to the US. If they opened them, no refund. This also took at least 60 days worth of time to get money back into accounts. The even more frustrating part about this is that at one point in time the company closed their merchant account and switched which bank they worked through, which meant that if any one wanted their money back they had to go to their bank and file for a chargeback, which is a whole nasty process in of itself.

All things considering, the thing I learned from the entire process is that terms and conditions when you buy things can handle just about anything. As long as it's an agreement, as long as people say yes, you can charge people just about whatever you want, for whatever you want.

We would joke at work that we wanted to add in lines to the terms and conditions to products to include things like offering first born, mansions worth millions of dollars, or even souls. The stupid part about the entire thing was that from what we could tell, as long as the T&C's were put in enough legal mumbo jumbo, you could get away with any of those, and bleed people too dumb to read them, absolutely dry.