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New scam: pay a usurious fee to get your rebate faster

I’ve just encountered a new (at least for me) scam in the ongoing quest by retailers and manufacturers to make rebates more and more onerous to apply for and therefore less likely to cost them any money.

While applying on-line for a $10 rebate on an ASUS motherboard I purchased recently at Micro Center, I was offered the following:

Choose our No-Wait-Rebate service. We will mail your rebate payment via 1st class mail within 5-7 business days from receipt of all your rebate documentation and approval of your claim for a small fee of $1.00 which will be deducted from your rebate payment. If you are in no rush and do not mind waiting 8-10 weeks and at no cost, we will mail your rebate payment to you via 1st Class mail after we have received your rebate documentation and have approved your claim. To receive your payment in 8-10 weeks select here

As you can see, the “No-Wait-Rebate service” checkbox was selected by default.

Let’s do the math here… I’m being offered the opportunity to get $10 seven weeks sooner for a fee of $1, i.e., 10% of the rebate.  Annualizing from seven weeks to a year yields an APR of 74%.

Does this seem like a “small fee” to you?

It really is unbelievable.  What kind of idiot would fall for this scam?

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This entry was posted on Sunday, December 20th, 2009 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Computers, Consumer activism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “New scam: pay a usurious fee to get your rebate faster”

  1. Quantum Mechanic says:
    December 21, 2009 at 11:41 am

    Same people who pay ridiculous APRs for tax “refund anticipation loans”?

    (Even worse when you consider that to get an RAL you’re going to a paid preparer, who will e-file the return, which means you’ll get the refund in a week (sometimes less!) if you do direct deposit).

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