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Here's an interesting take on the whole situation. According to Computer and Communications Industry Association, fair use of copyrighted materials adds more value to the US economy than the copyright holders themselves.

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The Consumerist today has a surprising article about an instance where a rebate company has been caught with over 1300 rebate claims thrown, unopened, into the dumpster.

Rebates are a system that is easy to abuse. Avoid them if you can.

Gift Cards - Use with care

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Rebates (which are a scam to begin with in most cases) are now being returned as gift cards. Not only does this force you to spend the money back at the store, but they come with all the nastiness that gift cards do. Things like fees, expiration dates, etc.

It's not as good as West Virginia(who banned all payday lending), but Oregon has taken a first important step to contain the evil that is payday lending.

The new laws should significantly ease the triple-digit interest rates charged by payday lenders and their cousins, auto title lenders. Indeed, payday lenders say the new laws will drive them out of the state altogether. Whether that is so remains to be seen, but the laws still allow payday lenders, through a combination of interest rates and "origination fees," to charge effective annual interest rates of well over 150% on one-month loans.

I like this line too:

If that's so, however, the demise of the industry might not be a bad thing at all. Any industry whose best argument is that it can only make money by exploiting the worst of its credit risks, and keeping them in a never-ending cycle of renewals and interest payments, doesn't seem to have much going for it.

Hear, hear.

Phone Scams

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Be warned. No matter how nice, not matter how much they already know, no matter how much they try to upset you, don't give out information over the phone.

The scammer – who sounds young and American – calls a military spouse and identifies herself as a representative from the Red Cross. The caller says that the spouse's husband, who is not identified by name, was hurt while on duty in Iraq and was med-evacuated to a hospital in Germany.

A former payday scum manager comes clean in a video released by The Center for Responsible Lending.

In this 4 minute video, Rebecca tells how payday loans are rarely two-week loans. Most of her customers came in payday after payday to renew the loan—after the first time, they couldn't afford to pay it off. Rebecca tells how she and her co-workers explained away the 400% interest rate, and how tough their collection tactics were. And she tells how she came to understand that rather than help her customers, these loans were "keeping them poor."

Now if Virginia would just kick out the whole industry like West Virginia did.

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If you aren't watching your rates or if you don't understand what you're paying, you could end up with a huge cell phone bill by handing a teen a cell phone with text message capability.

Debt is the pitts

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In clever application of the law, debt collectors have started to garnish wages from debtors. To stop the garnishment, you have to pay to file the case in district court.

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If you have an outstanding debt that you eventually decide to make good on, you may get penalized. The "Date of Last Activity" field on your credit file will get updated if you make a single payment making it appear as if your delinquency was yesterday instead of 3 years ago.

This practice has been challenged and it seems that the consumers are winning.

Want this? Lol, nope

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This is useful. A short write-up on how to tell when someone can get away with not giving you what was advertised vs when you can force them to honor a deal to their detriment. Here's the interesting part:

Employs compensation methods that discourage or penalize sales people for selling the bait.

So that means that any kind of negative reinforcement used to make sales people not want to sell the advertised "junker" is bait and switch too. Employees take note.