I normally think of myself as pretty savvy and able to spot a scam from a long way off.

Yesterday, I let my guard down.

A kid showed up at the door, typical just out of high school type, drinking a NoS energy drink and talking at 100 miles per hour. He was going door to door selling magazine subscriptions for US soldiers over seas. It’s tax deductible. He gets points towards a trip to Cancun and paying for part of his tuition next year.

He seemed so sincere. I said, “Sure, we can do two of those.” He continued on with his spiel, including things like “Checks are held for 2 weeks before depositing” and “You’ll receive a letter in the mail thanking you.”

We handed him the check, he handed us a receipt, he left.

Then I started to think about it a bit more. I read the fine print on the receipt. I started to get that, “Oh crap” feeling.

I looked up the name of the company on google.

“Face to Face Technologies, Inc” aka “FTFT, Inc.” aka “Dynasty Technologies, Inc”.

First hits are for scam and fraud reports. Oh crap indeed.

I emailed some friends and family who have worked with the VA before and asked if they had heard of this program. I went to the VA website and used their web form to ask if FTFT, Inc was associated with them.

Then I went to bed for some very troubled sleep, waking a few hours later. In my email were two responses, one from the VA saying that they were not affiliated with FTFT, the other telling me to cancel it as soon as possible since it was a scam.

So I called the bank, put in a stop payment on the check. Then I filled out the cancellation form on the receipt, just in case they honor that. It will be mailed later this morning, with delivery confirmation. According the the terms on the cancellation, it must be postmarked no more than 3 days after the original purchase, including Saturdays. Not much time to try and get out of this.

After doing that I thought about this scam. It’s really quite clever. Since you are buying the subscription for someone else, you don’t expect to get anything from it. It hits the heart strings of many due to it being “for the troops”. That it was a kid trying to “work his way through school” didn’t hurt either.

I think I will be adopting my friend Adam’s response to someone asking for donations, especially going door to door. “Send me some literature through the USPS mail, and I will consider it.” or “Sorry, but our budget for charitable contributions has already been met for the year.”. Which in all honesty, it had been. We have a finite amount of money that we give to several charities, but I thought this would be an ok one to splurge on… it’s not like we were signing up to pay for this every year, it was a one time charge.

We’ll see if it actually gets cancelled or if I get to play games with these people later on.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 03:14 and is filed under life, security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.