We get several lists of cut price books - by post or email. When the price suddenly drops, there is probably a new edition on the way. One can compare their prices on various Amazon web sites: -.co, which is uk, -.com, which is US, and even -.de, which is Germany. I compare currencies and exchange rates and often I finally abandon my interest.
Virtually all these mailings include inserted leaflets with offers from other companies. But at our age, these offers are of no attraction.
There is Oxbow for archaeology, Post Script for art books and others, the British Museum bulletin, the Biblical Archaeology Review, and at the lower end of the market 'The Book People'. These latter have changed over time and now their offers are almost entirely of children's books and we have not ordered from them for some time. We watch out for their cheap offer of the London A to Z atlas, to update our own edition.
The latest posting from the Book People included an [unaddressed] circular letter from the Loyalty Awards Club, with a London address. 'As you may know', they wrote, 'from time to time we allocate a number of thank you prizes and awards to a limited number of selected recipients'. I should ring a premium rate number [at £1.50 per minutes, maximum 6 minutes] to listen to my Despatch Code and obtain my claim number. But the return postal address was not in London EC1 but in Weston-super-Mare.
My code was ...00075, and I had 'definitely been selected to be awarded a prize'. Electrical items required a payment of £6.50 for despatch and insurance. Judith and I both suspected fraud. If we did not receive the present, we would only lose £16.0 at most - provided we ensured that our premium rate phone call did not last longer than 6 minutes. But the Loyalty awards club would have a tidy income, possibly thousands of pounds from this one exercise.
We could not see how the hundreds of customers on the book people's mailing list could all receive an unsolicited present of up to £5,000.
To investigate the credentials of the loyalty awards club was the sort of job the BBC would undertake. As for us, we just needed to interrogate 'the book people', who had mailed the letter with their book list, on 0845 602 3030. Our local phone calls in Britain are free, but not o854. So I searched 'say no to 0845' and obtained the local number for the book people - 01248 679395. After a long musical wait they answered and said that they dealt only with orders for their books. They seemed to know of the loyalty promotion but suggested that I phone the Loyalty Awards Club. I suspect that they had been instructed to give this answer. I was sure that the Loyalty Awards Club would not admit to any irregularity, and so I demanded to speak to a manager of the book people.
They gave me the number, 0194 2721777 and a very nice lady from the management confirmed that I should not touch that 'loyalty' offer. The book people management team had been against this scheme and very many people had contacted them to complain, but her superiors had insisted on proceeding - they were of course paid a fee by the Loyalty Awards Club for including their 'award' letter in the mailing. She would pass my misgivings to her superiors.
Recently we heard from our friends, that they had received notification that they had won a huge prize on the Spanish lottery - el Gordo. They had never played that lottery, but they have a son in Spain, who immediately warned them that this was an attempted fraud.
From time to time I receive emails from UK banks, on what appears to be their genuine headed stationery. They need to update my particulars, and ask me to click on a web address to complete my details. However, with most of these banks we have no dealings; and sometimes the letter has grammatical errors. It is an attempted fraud.
More rarely, an email arrives from a lady in Nigeria. Her wealthy husband has just died, and she needs me to help her to transfer his enormous wealth out of Nigeria - into my bank account in Britain, of course.
Now if she was young, and had requested my help to provide her with an heir...
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4 comments:
Thank you for posting this - I received one of these letters today, as part of a something I ordered. I am always wary of these types of things so didn't pay any heed to it until a friend said I should check the club out. I Googled them and came across your post which confirmed my suspicions. Thank you for taking the time to post it as I'm sure it's a warning for other people.
I too received a letter offering a 'free' gift. I checked google and came across your comments - I will now put the letter in the bin. No-one should phone for these prizes - it's all a con - the more people know to ignore these letters, the better.
I just received a Loyalt Awards letter in my Sky Magazine bundle. I was quite tempted thinking this might for once be genuine "I had definitely been selected", but before calling decided to google as inevitably all these letters and any chain letters received by email are ALWAYS scams. Glad I did, just saved myself £15
I got one in with my Sky mag too. I'm definitely complaining to Sky about this; they better not be giving my personal details out to 'companies' like this.
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