Bits and Pixels

I enjoy reading and listening to self-improvement and motivational books. I particularly enjoy reading and listening to Jim Rohn’s books and CDs, and own several of them. One of his DVDs was of a seminar with many other motivational speakers, and I subscribed to several of their newsletters.

Yesterday I received an email from one of these speakers, announcing the release of his latest book. The email also stated that if I bought the book in the next few days, I would get over 20 bonuses! So I went to the website to see what  the bonuses were, and they included ebooks and mp3 recordings of other self-improvement and motivational speakers, all with a "valued at" amount beneath them. Some of these bonuses looked really good, and some were valued at quite high amounts, so even though I wasn’t very interested in the guy’s new book I decided to buy it anyway for the bonuses.

So I asked my dad if he had enough money left in his debit card to buy the book, and he said he wasn’t sure (he’d just payed for some flight tickets) but that I could try anyway. So I bought the book on Amazon and filled in my info on this guy’s website, and then I was taken to a page with a list of links where I could download the bonuses. So I clicked on the links, and they took me to the various authors’/speakers’ sites – all to those pages where you can opt-in for free stuff by subscribing to their newsletters. At this point I realized that the ebooks and mp3s weren’t just free for people who bought the book, but for anyone who signed up for the free newsletters. I felt so bad, especially since I had used my dad’s money and we’re going through a rough spot right now.

Luckily I later received an email from Amazon saying they were having trouble with the payment – there had obviously not been enough money in the card afterall! So I cancelled the order, and although I might have been interested in buying the book in the future when I could afford it, I doubt I will be buying anything from him anymore.

If you ever see these offers with incredible bonuses, always do a search on Google first to make sure they aren’t actually free products, added just to convince you to buy something you don’t really need or want. I will definitely not be so quick to trust in the future.

What about you ? Have you ever been burned with similar offers?

Tags: scams, special offers

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 5:27 pm and is filed under scams, special offers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.