Its free all you have to do is signup by providing a credit card number (for identification purposes only) your credit card will never be charged, ever. This is our promise to you.

You must cancel within the free period by providing us with a notice to cancel. Please enclose your membership number, credit card number used to signup with and the password to your bank account along with the account number.

Sound familiar? I bet it does. A lot of us have fallen into this trap, some of us more than once. Firms like NETZERO or FREECREDITREPORT.COM offer free to try or just plain free. They then rely on us forgetting to cancel and when we do remember to cancel they make it impossible to cancel.

Several things to remember here. ONE) there is no such thing as FREE. Someone is going to have to pay for whatever we are getting. TWO) if you are not buying anything why would you have to hand over a credit card number? That being said what can we do once we have been taken?

Calling and talking to the company that ripped you off is going to get you nowhere really fast. These people are in the business of ripping people off. What makes you think you can change that? You can talk till hell starts exporting snow cones and they could care less. There is only one thing that will make them pay attention. MONEY. Yes money talks and BS walks as the saying goes.

Every company that accepts credit cards must contract with a processing bank. And each processing bank (unless it does it’s own processing like Merrick Bank) incurs extra overhead each time there is a charge back, especially when that charge back has to be investigated. If everyone that has a bogus charge were to dispute the charge and ask their credit card bank to investigate the charges, the companies that are creating the charge backs would soon disappear. For one thing the processing bank would no longer agree to process their accounts (too costly for them). For another the charge back fees would soon bankrupt the offending company (processing banks charge a fee for crediting a card holders account and charge it to the offending company).

Banks that issue credit cards are in the business of issuing loans. Yes credit cards purchases are pre-approved unsecured loans (a line of credit). Now if the bank has to spend 30 or 40 percent of its time investigating disputed charges it is not making money. Moreover, they are spending time, money and resources on something that does not generate income. The most economical correct course of action for the credit card bank is to get rid of the offending company. They are not going to get rid of the credit card customer because that is where they get their income from.

So in summary: if you feel you have been scammed and you used a credit card to pay, you have almost unlimited resources to set things right for you. All it takes is a phone call to your credit card’s 800 number and then follow through with whatever forms they send you.