In 2017 the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a complaint against AAFE Products and its related companies, Kitchen Advance, Gourmet Cooking Online, Gourmet Cooking Rewards, Medicus Golf, Kick X Tour Z Golf Balls, Golf Online Academy, Golf Tour Partner and Purestrike Swing Clinic through which AAFE sold golf and kitchen gadgets on a free trial basis.  The only problem was that if you signed up for the product, you were automatically charged for a monthly subscription service.  According to the FTC, AAFE not only did not clearly disclose that its customers receiving the “free” product were automatically enrolled in the costly monthly subscription service, but also misrepresented its return, refund and cancellation policies.

Now the FTC is mailing checks to 14,370 victims of the scam.  The funds for the refund were obtained by the FTC from AAFE.  For more information about this particular refund program check out the “FTC Scam Refunds” tab in the middle of the first page of http://www.scamicide.com. You can find information there about the mailing of the refund checks.  There is no cost or fee to file a claim or get a refund.  Anyone who tells you differently is trying to scam you.

TIPS

Trust me, you can’t trust anyone.  You should always be a bit skeptical of any “free” offer and always read the fine print in any contract you sign.  Rarely is there anything fine in fine print.  Also, in scams such as this, you are generally asked to provide a credit card number even though you are getting a free product.  While a legitimate free offer may require you to pay for the shipping, you should still be skeptical of such offers because scams such as this are common where you have provided your credit card number to a company that signs you up for  continuing purchases.   Finally, make sure that you review your credit card monthly statement carefully to pick up as quickly as possible any such fraudulent use of your credit card.  If you find such charges, you should contact your credit card company and demand that the charge be removed from your account and that no further monthly charges be posted.

For those of you receiving the Scam of the day through an email, I just want to remind you that if you want to see the ever increasing list of Coronavirus scams go to the first page of the http://www.scamicide.com website and click on the tab at the top of the page that indicates “Coronavirus Scams.”

If you are not a subscriber to Scamicide.com and would like to receive daily emails with the Scam of the day, all you need to do is to go to the bottom of the initial page of http://www.scamicide.com and click on the tab that states “Sign up for this blog.”