Complaint Review: Scholastic Adteractive

Like several other people, I received an unsolicited package from Scholastic Books saying I had signed up for membership in a Pokemon Club. The package had two Pokemon figurines of about 1" tall, like the kind you buy for a quarter or 50 cents in a gumball-type machine at a supermarket, a sticker book, a kid's book, a membership card, some stickers, and a booklet to tell which Pokemon character is which.

The invoice glued to the outside of the box said that it had been paid for by a Visa card and that they would be sending another one in a few days. I thought there had been a mistake, but my name and address was correct, and it sounded ominous that either my credit card or someone else's had been charged. As far as I can tell, my credit card hasn't been charged.

I wrote cancel on the "paid" invoice and sent it back to them in the envelope provided, after sticking a 41-cent on it.

A few days later, I received another unsolicited package from Scholastic, this time for a My First Reader club. I decided to e-mail them about this. I received an e-mail back the next morning saying:

"Thank you for your email. We show that both orders were submitted through our partner site Adteractive on April 17, in response to a pop up ad, or a survey."

My habit is to ignore pop-up ads and surveys, so it's possible Adteractive got my name and address some other way, such as a mailing list. Their site is vague about what they do, but one of the things they say is that they increase online sales. They may be doing it by picking names at random and sending them to their clients and telling them these people signed up.

I noticed from the other reports on this site that this Scholastic-Adteractive program seems to have started in March since two other people have experienced the same thing recently. Apparently Scholastic starts billing you for these shipments. I hope to try to head this off and stop it before it gets that far.

I will report back here if things escalate. It seems that either Adteractive or Scholastic is involved in some kind of fraudulent practice here.

Dan
Westwood, Massachusetts
U.S.A.