Today I got three identical notices saying that my “recent order/payment” for Make Magazine couldn’t be “completed because the credit card you supplied was not accepted by the credit card company”. Only one problem with that - I decided some time ago not to renew because I never read it. Well, if their business practice is to fraudulently charge credit cards, I’m pretty glad I didn’t renew. Fuckers.
Maybe it isn’t them. The customer support email is customerservice@espcomp.com, which is not an address that I immediately associate with the magazine. On the other hand, they did have a the credit card number of an old card, the one I probably did use for that subscription.
I wonder if the Attorney General’s Office is interested in fraudulent credit card charges?
Stephen Harris says:
Tracking around some whois records for espcomp.com gives an Admin contact email address that isn’t valid (but the parent domain appears to be a telecom company) and a technical contact at “real estate readers”. Whereas Make Magazine (if they’re the same as makezine.com) appears to be an O’Reilly publication.
Which raises a few more issues, like… how did they get hold of the credit card number?
If I was you I’d talk (by voice) to O’Reilly to find out WTF is going on; it might be they’ve had a data leak and credit card numbers have been exposed…
November 20, 2007, 00:06 GMTRich says:
I got the same one, but in this case, it was because I was signed up with the “Premier Maker” subscription - a couple bucks off a year plus the electronic version, in exchange for auto-renewal. I’d canceled the card after that, so of course it didn’t work.
Perhaps you had signed up for the Premier subscription, too?
November 20, 2007, 00:06 GMTPaul Tomblin says:
Hmmm. Maybe I did sign up for Premier. But if I go to their site and sign on, I can’t find anything to allow me to unsubscribe or cancel my account.
November 20, 2007, 00:27 GMTBill Bradford says:
Every time I’ve had to email “Make Subscriber Services ” I’ve gotten a reply back within 2-3 hours from a human and gotten any problems resolved quickly.
I think you probably subscribed to the Premier Maker version…
November 20, 2007, 01:59 GMTBill Bradford says:
er, make that “cs@readerservices.makezine.com”
November 20, 2007, 01:59 GMTrpg says:
Wouldn’t be the first time. Mags tend to use clearing houses for subscription management, which makes for . . .’interesting’ times.
http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/fraudreports/topic1962.html
November 20, 2007, 02:57 GMT