cuddlebugs

Fraud Alert on active.com

Today we take a break from silicon2tanana reportage and baby elephants to report something sketchy going on at active.com, the race registration site. The last time I used active.com was to register for the Equinox Marathon in 2009, about a year ago. This July, I noticed some unauthorized charges on my credit card. One was from a foreign company I had never dealt with, and the other was from Active. When I called my credit card company, they removed those two charges, forwarded them to the fraud department, canceled my card, and sent me a new one.

I thought it was over at that, but today I got a letter from my bank informing me that since I had used active.com in the past, this is not a 'fraud' issue, but rather a 'charge dispute' issue, and that I should follow up with active.com and ask them to remove the charge. This chapped my ass. So the person who stole my card number happened to use it at a vendor that I had happened to use before. That makes it not fraud, how? Nevertheless, I could see that I would accomplish nothing in this telephone conversation, so I politely let it go and called the numbers provided by active.com.

There are two, and both of them ring several times and then disconnect. Around this time, I started simultaneously googling around and venting to BT via IM. BT somehow found me a third phone number for them, which was live. The recording actually had an option, "for credit card complaints, press 2," so I pressed 2, and... got disconnected!

Simultaneously, my googling turned up this. Apparently, active.com has a sketchy history of deceptively registering people who sign up for races for an active.com "membership", and charging an annual fee of $59.95. Which is the exact amount I was charged. They then continue to charge their victims this annual fee, and don't provide a way to cancel your unrequested "membership". When victims call their banks, presumably they are given the same runaround I was given by my bank: "Since you have a purchasing history with this vendor, we cannot call it a fraudulent charge."

How perfect for those slimy, skeevy, sketchy bastards!

Two things are even sketchier in my particular case. Firstly, it had been a year since I used active.com, so they are definitely digging deep to catch victims unawares. Secondly, there was that other fraudulent and foreign transaction charged to my card that same month. I suspect someone at active.com is checking to see whether victims read their statements carefully and catch the small charges first. If they get no reaction, and the card isn't canceled, they forge ahead and buy themselves some sort of jackpot!

So we have here a double scam: active.com sketchily and fraudulently charging people $59.95 a month for "membership" that gives the appearance of legitimacy (I could see saying to myself, "Oh, crap, I guess when I registered for that race, I accidentally signed up for membership as well!"). But they also, probably at random and much less frequently, outright make overtly fraudulent purchases on their victims' cards.

On BT's advice, I wrote several letters and sent them via certified snail-mail to active.com and also my bank. If they still won't reverse the charge, the most I stand to lose is that $59.95, since that card is now canceled, and active.com doesn't have any more information on me, thank goodness! $59.95 is a relatively small payment for tuition in the school of life.

Here is a link to their parent site, The Active Network, with a list of all of the companies they manage. Beware! I'm going to noodle over this for a while, and once my anger has calmed down, I'll think about what to do from here. Minimum, I think a letter to the editor of the News Miner is in order, as well as one to our local "Outdoors" columnist, Tim Mowry.

Edited to add: Here I found a link to another person who was a victim of their outright fraud instead of the deceptive registration that seems more common

Edited to add: On the 20th Sept, I see that Active has returned my money. Onto the next victim; let's see if they notice!

Edited again to add: Nope. It was Bank of America who reversed the charge. Active is still quite comfortable with having stolen from me.

Veggies for the week

Brussel sprouts! Fractal broccoli! Spaghetti squash! Carrots in two colors!

And here is the Alaska Range as seen from campus the other day. What a clear day it was!


Edited to add:

This morning around 10 a.m. I suddenly bolted out of my desk and realized that in riding down and gloating over my summer of triumph, I'd completely forgotten about a bunch of bureaucratic stuff that has to happen at the beginning of every semester. Such as:
*signing up for thesis credits for fall.
*going upstairs to the business office and picking up my next year's contract (yeah... getting paid would be good!).
*bringing a copy of said contract to the grad school so they transfer my fellowship money appropriately.
*getting a new parking permit for the new academic year.

A funny thing is, even after doing it three times, I don't recall how to do that last one. I think you need to fill out paperwork at the Department of Parking, but they won't accept your paperwork until you pay for the parking fee. But accounts services won't input a parking fee for for you (so you can pay it) until you do the paperwork with the Department of Parking. And I forgot the way out of that hot mess.

I must really be distracted, because after the first year, the following two years I knew exactly how to do this, but now I plum forgot!

So that's what they are

They are called bunchberries.

I have a flower of one pressed and on my wall:


It's also called a dwarf dogwood and not, contrary to my personal nomenclature, an outhouse flower.

Fall photos

A storm coming in:


The Chena:


Snapshots from the top of Ester Dome:


This is my master's adviser from SCU. Although I normally preserve my friends' anonymity, she told me she'd pointed her husband to this blog. So, Hi, Gary!














Now we are along Wickersham Creek trail in the White Mountains:














LARS:


Cabbage that bolted in a weird way. The head busted open and sent a brussel-sprout-like stalk skyward:


A trail on the side of Ester Dome this morning:

Breaking News: Triplet Meese Could Be Kidnap Victims!

Mama moose with supposed triplets two years in a row is actually a kidnap suspect!

Very cute photo not included in online article!

I took this photo from the paper... Sorry for the lousy quality. I don't have a scanner and so took a photo of the photo.

An evening in the life of Arvay

It seems I'm often busy with tasks and chores that other people don't even have--picking berries and rose hips, splitting and stacking wood, combing fuzzballs out of dogs, searching for and picking clover and dandelions in the yard for Millie, etc, etc. Last night, for example, I was all kinds of busy doing completely self-inflicted tasks. I bought ten pounds of kale from the farmer's market for ten dollars, and chopped up, blanched, and froze them in batches because I'm such a snob about Alaskan kale that I hoard it when I can. Also, I sometimes can't recall the difference between horde and hoard.

I also spent a good twenty minutes following an owl around the street to see if I could get a good photo of him. I don't often see owls!

Anyway, here are the girls when I first get home:

They need to do that for maybe 5-10 minutes when I first get home. Then they go calmly back into the house. :) Can you believe that (1) those crazy pups are 11 years old and (2) this entire performance is silent? No barking, growling, etc. The girls only bark or howl on special occasions. :)

(Incidentally, before I forget to add it to today's post, we had our first really nippy morning today... the thermometer said 35F/2C.)

Here are my lousy photos of the uncooperative owl. He refused to go anywhere where he wouldn't be backlit. How rude!





But still! An OWL! In my YARD! How awesome is that!

Here are photos of Operation Kale:

The setup:

Chop up in station 1. Blanch in pot 2. Dunk into cold water in 3. Put into colander over bowl 4. Move colander to sink 5. Put into plastic bag 6. Then put into freezer 7. Incidentally, I once whipped off my sweater too quickly underneath where I had that (steel) colander hanging, and the colander came down and gave me a black eye. :( But I've since moved the colander so such things won't happen again. :)

I should have taken a photo when this bag was full! All that's left for this photo is the dinosaur kale, my favorite!


Kale in three stages:


All done (with a few stems left for Millie)!


Then I group the bags and label each group, according to kale type:

I'm not sure what that one on the right is called that's veined with purple and shaped like oak leaves, but I like it!

And that's my evening of owl-chasing and kale-processing. :)