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I believe the original intent of the bill came about from companies selling you a product and then launching a pop-up ad. Consumers would then click on the ad

I believe the original intent of the bill came about from companies selling you a product and then launching a pop-up ad. Consumers would then click on the ad and be billed a low, monthly recurring charge. They wouldn't be brought to a check out screen because they had just entered all of their billing information. I forget a lot of the specific details surrounding this, but I think these sorts of things are what originally prompted this bill. It started with good intentions and then politicians got involved.

jonhendry 16y ago
"It started with good intentions and then politicians got involved." Still sounds good to me. Spammy things like ClickBank need to DIAF.
- dangrossman 16y ago
  I don't think there's anything inherently spammy about ClickBank. It's a 3rd party payment processor with a built-in affiliate program for each merchant, pretty harmless stuff.
  - jonhendry 16y ago
    From their "How It Works" description: "Alan goes to work online, posting his HopLink in search engine ads, on his pet-training blog, and in the e-book review he writes for his favorite dog-training forum." Something about the way it's worded just sounds to me like they're hinting that people should "go to work online" posting spammy 'reviews' as an excuse to post affiliate links, and otherwise post the affiliate links far and wide.
ojbyrne 16y ago
I suspect it came out of this: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2010320149_sundaybuzz22.html http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/201...
ktsmith 16y ago
Yes and no. The bill speaks to a number of scummy things being done. The first is negative option sales in which the customer pays a low or no up front price but then is billed a larger price after a certain amount of time passes if the customer fails to cancel the service. This is how all the acai berry and colon cleanse sites worked. The blow up between Zynga/Facebook/Offerpal and the press last year which resulted in the Offerpal CEO stepping down was in relation to this topic as there was a lot of deceptive advertising going on with the negative option marketers. There were also a lot of really scummy merchants double and triple billing customers. Facebook reacted immediately by preventing landing pages for these offers from hiding the terms on later pages and being very explicit. Zynga stopped allowing any offers like those to be run at all and if I recall correctly Offerpal and others like them were stuck as a significant percentage of their offers fell into that category. The second thing they are talking about is the pop up offer, confirmation page offer or co-registraton/co-sale paths that these types of merchants were very fond of using. These worked by making additional offers available to consumers at the end of a transaction and presenting the additional items as being all from the same merchant. These sales would often be completed by doing nothing more than clicking a single link or forgetting to uncheck a checkbox. The original merchant would transfer all customer information including credit card details to the merchants of the third party offers that were accepted without ever notifying the consumer they were doing business with a third party. Another way this type of a sale would take place is via "order confirmation calls." upsell.com (no longer the same site as it's redirecting to a different domain now) ran a call center that would call up your consumers, confirm their orders and then try to sell a bunch of other stuff. If a consumer chose to purchase an additional item upsell.com would request the consumers credit card details behind the scenes so that the entire process looks like it was happening from one merchant until it hits the credit card statement. Besides potential PCI violations consumers were unknowingly putting their data at risk by having it shared without their explicit consent. This bill attempts to stop these practices.

jonhendry 16y ago

"It started with good intentions and then politicians got involved." Still sounds good to me. Spammy things like ClickBank need to DIAF.

dangrossman 16y ago
I don't think there's anything inherently spammy about ClickBank. It's a 3rd party payment processor with a built-in affiliate program for each merchant, pretty harmless stuff.
- jonhendry 16y ago
  From their "How It Works" description: "Alan goes to work online, posting his HopLink in search engine ads, on his pet-training blog, and in the e-book review he writes for his favorite dog-training forum." Something about the way it's worded just sounds to me like they're hinting that people should "go to work online" posting spammy 'reviews' as an excuse to post affiliate links, and otherwise post the affiliate links far and wide.

ojbyrne 16y ago

I suspect it came out of this: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2010320149_sundaybuzz22.html http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/201...

ktsmith 16y ago

Yes and no. The bill speaks to a number of scummy things being done. The first is negative option sales in which the customer pays a low or no up front price but then is billed a larger price after a certain amount of time passes if the customer fails to cancel the service. This is how all the acai berry and colon cleanse sites worked. The blow up between Zynga/Facebook/Offerpal and the press last year which resulted in the Offerpal CEO stepping down was in relation to this topic as there was a lot of deceptive advertising going on with the negative option marketers. There were also a lot of really scummy merchants double and triple billing customers. Facebook reacted immediately by preventing landing pages for these offers from hiding the terms on later pages and being very explicit. Zynga stopped allowing any offers like those to be run at all and if I recall correctly Offerpal and others like them were stuck as a significant percentage of their offers fell into that category. The second thing they are talking about is the pop up offer, confirmation page offer or co-registraton/co-sale paths that these types of merchants were very fond of using. These worked by making additional offers available to consumers at the end of a transaction and presenting the additional items as being all from the same merchant. These sales would often be completed by doing nothing more than clicking a single link or forgetting to uncheck a checkbox. The original merchant would transfer all customer information including credit card details to the merchants of the third party offers that were accepted without ever notifying the consumer they were doing business with a third party. Another way this type of a sale would take place is via "order confirmation calls." upsell.com (no longer the same site as it's redirecting to a different domain now) ran a call center that would call up your consumers, confirm their orders and then try to sell a bunch of other stuff. If a consumer chose to purchase an additional item upsell.com would request the consumers credit card details behind the scenes so that the entire process looks like it was happening from one merchant until it hits the credit card statement. Besides potential PCI violations consumers were unknowingly putting their data at risk by having it shared without their explicit consent. This bill attempts to stop these practices.