Complaint Review: United Benefits Advantage

I cannot say this is a scam, but it is certainly a ripoff!

For $1.95 I signed up for a shopping / buying service. While I don't remember doing it, it must have somehow seemed attractive to me. Shortly after that, USA Benefits began to charge my credit card $39.95 per month. It was on a card that we subsequently stopped using but did not close. 

I did not realize until eleven months later that I had been charged nearly $440 for a service I don't even remember and never benefitted from. Yes, I should have checked that unused credit card. Yes, I should have been clearer about what I was getting into. (I am legally blind and may not always catch the details.) 

My objection to USA Benefits is that after that initial sign up, I never received any correspondence from them. It was almost as if they were hoping that I would forget about them. It would seem desirable that companies extracting periodic charges from a credit card should communicate by email that they had charged my card. 

Another problem was that the phone number on my credit card was that of another company: Preferred Reader. When I called them, they initially said that the charge was not theirs and wanted to hang up. It was only when I expressed dissatisfaction with their denying a charge when their number was on my statement. It was only after I pressured them and it was apparent that I was not going to give up on these charges that they gave me the name of USA Benefits. It was as if they were trying to protect USA Benefits from callers like me. Is this illegal? It certainly felt unscupulous!

Please profit from my ill fortune. If you sign up for USA Benefits -- or for Preffered Reader -- please be sure to mark your calendar to follow up. Better still, you may want to keep your distance from these companies.