Legal Research

“That’s a lot of complaints about one company”

The blogosphere’s buzzing (I’ve been wanting to use that in a post for awhile now) over a story in the Seattle Weekly about Intelius, the online public records site. For a couple of years now, the site has automatically signed you up for credit-protection services to the tune of $20 per month if you didn’t read the fine print when you purchased someone’s background data. The practice is known as “post-transaction marketing”. Now the complaints have reached critical mass:

“The word [scam] comes up a lot in 121 complaints, filed with [Washington State Attorney General Rob] McKenna’s office, against Intelius … Even during a time when his office is getting more consumer gripes than it has in years, McKenna says, ‘That’s a lot of complaints about one company.’ Intelius has drawn even more — 822 to date — at the Better Business Bureau. On the BBB site, the company is currently listed as unrated, due to ‘one or more serious complaints’ that the bureau has not yet had time to assess.”

Though I’ve decided to keep Intelius on Jenkins’ Online Directories page –  heck, they give a lot of interesting people info away for free — I’ve added a note to its entry, linking to the SW story.

Whenever you open your wallet online, you need to pay attention. Read the text. Look at the checkboxes on the page and see which ones are clicked. Make sure the site uses https for a secure transaction.

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on March 19, 2009 (boomark / email).