OT: rebate scam alter

I had the same problem with my $40 rebate on a cell phone from Radio Shack.

============== A large number of emails,in addition to this follow-up indicates this is not an isolated problem. To help tie a small knot in their pantyhose I post the following.

to file a complain with the United States Postal Service click on

To file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission click on

$.startup

I have also contacted the Attorney General's office in every state where either Tiger Direct of CA-Computer Associates indicates an office [more locations than a floating crap game including Florida, Illinois, Texas and New York...] with the following suggestion.

================== Given the critical need for additional state funds, and the flagrant abuse of the rebate process, particularly for small computer purchases by refusal to pay the promised rebate based on an endless series of unstated requirements/excuses such as the omission of a return address on the exterior of the rebate request envelope and/or the willful failure to process rebate claims because of a lack of sales date, etc. even though the relevant register tapes with exactly this information have been enclosed, I suggest that the abandoned or unclaimed property statutes and regulations be applied to rebates not paid with in

90 days of purchase.

This should require no new regulations or legislation, and will also address the twin problems of unfair trade practices of those companies that fail to pay the promised rebates and manufacturers that use promised [but never paid] rebates to undercut legitimate businesses, as well as the huge increase in small-scale white-collar crime of rebate non-payment, the totals of which must total billions dollars of consumer losses annually.

This may however require reporting of the sales of items with rebates by high dollar volume stores. As this data is already collected for their internal tracking, it will be a simple [cheap] process to extract and forward this data to you in a standard machine-readable format (such as CSV) on diskette or CD, to match against the manufacturers' records of rebates paid, for the determination of amounts of rebates not paid.

================================== Feel free to adapt if you would like to suggest the same thing.

To locate the email address for the attorney general of a particular state google on To start click on

or try which seems to have the entire 50 in one location.

The Microcenter is another retailer that is notorious for this sort of shit..

Look over their ads...a majority of them promise *after rebate.

Ive sent in countless rebate forms..never got anything in return.

Gunner

So start typing and posting using the above URLs as a start. If you don't get what you want, you get what you deserve...

The only ones I never got were the ones I waited too long to send end and then that was my fault.

Wes

=================== Update on CA/Computer Associates - TigerDirect rebate "problems."

Now if Texas, New York and Illinois will open investigations....

------- Systemax?s high profit margins may be too good to be true - Barron?s Systemax?s (SYX) owned merchant TigerDirect, has been the object of customer lawsuit, complaints on Internet discussion forums and now an active investigation by Florida?s attorney general. The allegations are that TigerDirect failed to pay out manufacturer rebates. It is speculated that the disputed rebates might partly account for the unusually fat gross-profit margins shown by the company. At 16%, the gross margins are 4-5% higher than is peers PC Mall (MALL) or Zones (ZONS). Systemax, did acknowledge in their securities filings, that some of the discrepancy might merely result from bookkeeping problems. Writing to the SEC on Sept. 6, the company said it expected to still be working to fix its accounting problems through the end of 2007, while expressing the belief that any undetected errors didn't exceed 5% of its pretax income. But, if the company's margins have been fattened by failure to pay out the rebates it gets from manufacturers, then an end to that alleged behavior might crimp profits. If margins narrow, Systemax will also have a tougher time going up against giants like Best Buy (BBY), Circuit City (CC) or Dell (DELL). SYX shares trade at about $15.25, a modest multiple of just 11x trailing-12-months? earnings. But that valuation assumes the profits are sustainable.

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