Is this a scam, or is Make Magazine a bunch of scumbags?

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?

6 thoughts on “Is this a scam, or is Make Magazine a bunch of scumbags?”

  1. 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…

  2. 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?

  4. 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…

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