UPDATE: DirecTV has given Consumerist its side of the story.
_________________
For years, DirecTV has been advertising its "refer your friends and get $100" promotion. But for one DirecTV customer in Florida, that referral didn't end up profiting her; in fact, it ended up draining her bank account after that friend passed away.
The woman referred her friend to DirecTV a few months ago, but when that friend died unexpectedly, DirecTV debited at least $800 — without notifying her — from her bank account to pay for her late friend's unpaid service.
"I was never told of this," she told the NBC affiliate in Jacksonville. "I didn't see any of this. I never signed for this. I was blindsided. I have no record of this....
"I have a sick child at home that I couldn't afford to buy her Pedialyte... I had to ask for help from family. I had to get money for gas to get to work today, and DirecTV hasn't offered anything."
There is nothing in the DirecTV terms and conditions that ties a referrer's account to anyone they refer to the company. But the customer says that all her phone calls, letters and faxes to DirecTV failed to get her an explanation or refund.
It wasn't until after the local TV news got involved that she got any sort of response from DirecTV, who wrote, "This is definitely not part of DirecTV's policy. If a customer refers a friend, they are not responsible for making payments on their friend's account."
Eventually, she received a call from the company's president, who told her that DirecTV would be refunding all the money that was taken from her account. The next day it was back safely in her bank.
We've reached out to DirecTV to see if anyone there can explain what caused this huge error and will update if we get a response.
DirecTV Bills Woman After Friend Dies [News4jax.com]
Thanks to Jeff for the tip!
Facebook's 3rd Biggest Advertiser Accused Of Being Affiliate Toolbar Scam; Facebook Says It's Never Heard Of The Company
from the just-like-the-old-days... dept
There have been numerous reports lately concerning just how much money Facebook is making on ads. That's part of the reason it was able to get that otherworldly $50 billion valuation from some. However, some are noticing something fishy in the Facebook ad business. After seeing an AdAge article mention in passing that the third largest advertiser on Facebook is not a household namebrand, but rather Make-My-Baby.com. Google's spam-catcher-in-chief Matt Cutts did some digging and quickly noticed that the site appears to be a sketchy toolbar installer that tries to switch you to using Bing, and then it gets an affiliate cut of any search ads you click on going forward. Cutts also points out that the URL to tell you how to uninstall the toolbar leads to a 404 page not found -- and many folks have had difficulty uninstalling the toolbar.
Marshall Kirkpatrick, over at ReadWriteWeb, digs in deeper and wonders if anyone at Facebook or Microsoft is actually minding the store. Even if they didn't directly know this was happening, if this is really the third largest advertiser on Facebook, both of those companies had to know something was up, just based on the numbers. A company like Facebook is intimately aware of its third biggest advertiser, and if the company is really driving that much traffic to Bing, then Microsoft would surely know about it as well.
Of course, this is where the story gets more bizarre. While Microsoft's response to this story was to cut off the company, Facebook's response was to claim that the company isn't an advertiser at all, let alone the third largest advertiser on the site. So how is it that reports suggest the company is the third largest advertiser, when Facebook claims they're not an advertiser at all? The company does have a slight hedge, by saying that "any affiliates that try to push people there we would shut down." So it's possible that it was hidden through some sort of affiliate setup before Facebook caught it -- but no one seems to be revealing any of the details.
Either way, all of this sounds quite reminiscent of the old adware days, where all sorts of sketchy companies would trick people into installing software to scrape up affiliate revenue. We hadn't seen much of that lately, as many of the old players eventually got wiped out, but it's hardly a surprise that similar schemes would quickly jump up in a Facebook world, whether or not it was officially through Facebook's advertising functionality.
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