I’ve been in the Internet business for a while. In my time I’ve met some shady people. To tell you the truth, I’ve spent a LOT of time with some of these people. Buying and selling domains and websites in mass puts you in a lot of businesses after all. At one point I actually started writing a book about some of them but decided on not being the whistle blower.
Without naming names, there are the guys in the download business. These are the guys that install AdWare on your computer. They can pop a window to tell you to buy a stock at 9:30 a.m. or copy every email address out of your Outlook. Hell, they can have 1 million users send 10 emails each so spam blockers won’t detect a single server farm sending 10 million emails. You could be spamming. They can do anything they want because they have an exe file on your box.
There are the phishers, spammers, scammers and theives….
Then there are the people that specialize in billing. They are the ones that run many adult and dating sites. They also do a lot of mainstream stuff. You think they are in the business of selling tits, ass, Sundays in the park or punch the penguin games but they are really in the billing business.
I have a nickname for them. I call them shoe string salesmen. They are the ones that buy an old couple’s shoestring company that has been around for years and has excellent credit and then use the merchant account to sell adult site memberships. They tell the surfers that the site is free as long as they enter their credit card number to verify that they are 18. Buried in the terms of service are multiple pre-checked cross sales. The unsuspecting surfer with a hard-on thinks he’s getting away with something but what he doesn’t know is that he’s subscribing to 3 or 4 other sites as well at $39.95 per month each.
Well, it appears Master Card has finally been shown the light. Clearly they’ve had enough charge backs to call it quits. Maybe Visa will finally follow suit to end this shady practice. As recent events in the global economy have shown, if business can’t police itself government will do it for them.
© 2010
Let’s hope now that MC has started then the others will follow. I enjoy your blog and your news letter. Happy New Year to you Rick.
Wow and I thought the music business was bad.Thnaks for the inside scoop Rick.Happy New Year.
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It’s not just the p0rn people, either
I recently had a run in with Yahoo regarding their predatory billing practices. After nearly a year of trying to get through to a human being, I finally threw up my hands and did a chargeback on two credit cards–something I had never done before and hope to never do again.
Amazing how fast the issue was resolved! Evidently, chargebacks are seen as a blight on a vendor’s record.
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I’d loved to have read that book,
never know, 1 day you may become an authour and give up domaining
Glad to hear of these companies getting shown the door from MC – Lets hope Visa and others really put a stop to this!
It can only help improve our industry helping get rid of these scammers & spammers.
Regards,
Robbie
If you thought domain players are shady, wait till you look into the shenanigans of the financial industry, spam and porn shadiness is like a micro-drop in the Atlantic ocean.
Write the book, you can use my name.
I think you should still write the book
I hear that chargebacks aren’t difficult to do, although the one that I once did encountered problems and I couldn’t get my CC company to side with me (my fault: I thought I’d be patient in allowing the merchant to credit me my partial refund, waiting a couple months, but my “chargeback statute of limitations” with Visa thus lapsed).
I’m always telling people about the benefits of disposable credit card numbers (aka virtual CC’s). Some CC companies, like BoA, offer the feature to their cardholders. I’ve been using ‘em for years. I can login to my bank’s website and have a new # created on-the-spot (which flows/links to my regular CC acount), and give it a minimal credit line (max charge amount) for protection. So, the aroused surfer in Rick’s post could use one of these CC#’s, with a $1 credit line, to pass the age verification test, feeling safe that no more could be charged to the card w/o his consent. The CC I have on file @ PayPal is a virual CC, and I doubt they even know it. I can thus keep a leash on PayPal’s reach into my personal financial life.
Just thought I’d share.
Thanks for the info Rick, just the tip of the iceberg imo and Jake thanks for the heads up on Virtual CC’s.