Doesn't sound that unlikely, especially considering how far back this was. I dunno how prevalent this has been in the US, but back then was kinda the high time

Doesn't sound that unlikely, especially considering how far back this was. I dunno how prevalent this has been in the US, but back then was kinda the high time of "subscription phishing" in Germany. Whole websites were designed around the idea of making the user to "agree" with a "signup" get to the actual content, and in the small print (on another page) it would hide costs of subscription for said agreement. So naive, new to the internet people, like my mother. Would sign up on some weird site, to look for generic birthday greetings and a couple of weeks later would get bills per mail, followed by rather generic letters from a lawyer, and debt collector letters, all over a couple of hundreds of euros. She didn't end up paying, anything because I told her it was a scam, but many others did, that whole period also lead to the creation of the "Button-Lösung" [0] where users have to give explicit consent to paying anything, by clicking a button. But back then the majority of average people were still a bit unsure about the legal ramifications of agreeing to something on this Internet thing. So with a bit of pressure, and legal speak, you could (and in some cases still can) convince them to pay a whole lot of money because they entered their information somewhere online. [0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Button-L%C3%B6sung https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Button-L%C3%B6sung