Sleazeballs: National Magazine Exchange

[vakkotaur]

This time it's an "Important Delivery" letter. A designation that USPS does not use. It's pink. It's a 'carbonless' envelope with black obscuring over much of it, so it looks like something that has personal information or a check. But countering that is the text "SECOND NOTICE" which is a lie. For it to be a second of anything there'd have to be a previous one.

Opening it, oh gee, they're "trying to reach" me. Seems they have my address and just did. Oh, it's about a sweepstakes. Hrm, it's from Clearwater, Florida. As if the alarums hadn't been tripping merrily already. Let's see what Google brings up. Only link about the included phone number. This link about sleazy magazine subscription come ons.

This is another case of them not able to do telemarketing so trying to get folks to call them. And since they very carefully avoid saying they're selling anything (though there is a disclaimered logo of one magazine and reference to "if you decide to take advantage of our magazine offer" in the fine print) I am uncertain as to if I can effectively sic 'em with a Form 1500, dagnabbit.

The initials, which they use in the return address, are appropriate: N.M.E. Yep, an enemy to be thwarted.

Comments

[thecanuckguy.livejournal.com]

Gee, you'd think with your repeated "outing" of scammers in your LJ that they'd leave you, of all people alone? (After all, there's 300 million other fish in the pond.) It's like George Bush sending Michael Moore secret dossiers on his policies!

Interesting that I don't even get these (best I get is offers for credit cards in the mail, which are out and out offers - the one I have is enough of a headache, why would I want more?) Oh, and both wife and I were called about the same vacation scam aobut 6 months apart (starts with a basic survey about vacations (they were quite insistent/surprised when they asked the last question "what credit card do you use while on vacation?" and I answered "none" (remember what I said above about the hard-to-manage-ONE-card?). After finally making up an answer, they informed me that a winner is randomly picked to recieve a free Florida vacation. Alarm #1 (well, not quite #1, but was the biggest alarm to that point). Surprise, surprise, a few days later I won (alarm #2) - the informed me via email (I gave them the address I give to all online places, it's real and I do monitor it, but it mainly collects spam), and DNS checking did NOT match things up. Reported them to "Project Phonebusters" (who were surprisingly unsympathetic since I didn't lose any money in the deal, didn't take them up on their offer, and willingly answered their questions.) If there was ANY doubt in my mind about the scam nature of the organization, it was confirmed when my wife got the same survey pitch about 6 months later (I didn't know about it at the time), and, surprise, surprise, she won too! (She was unaware of the scam - was actually happy to have won, but I quickly pointed out to her my experience, and she wisely didn't proceed any further than I did). I mean the odds that the same household would "win" the same sweepstakes six months later? (Not to mention why the heck were they calling the same number again?)

Oh, and finally, hope everything's OK there, our NBC channel is the same as yours (KARE11) and I saw the severe tornado watch for your area around 430 today, so I hope that the storm has passed and the stable is stable.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

As regards the weather, it was nicely uneventful here all day. The excitement was a storm last night that had the UPSs tripping in and out every few seconds for a couple minutes, but that was all it did.