About a year ago, I was contacted by a company called Zipweb to participate in their free internet marketing. They said that they would contact me to follow up about a paid service. They eventually did follow up, and I expressly told them that they were to take no action that would cause me to be billed. I figured I was safe, as I never gave them a credit card number or any other way to bill me.
Now, over a year later, I just noticed a charge on my phonebill for $49.95/month "billed on behalf of zlocalhost.com." Doing a quick check of my older phone bills, this has been going on for quite some time. I will be allerting Verizon, my phone company, as well as the Better Business Bureau and the police. Since I know my site is indexed by google frequently, I'm putting this online to help get the word out on this sheister company.
Other links I found on the topic:
http://www.marketingshift.com/2007/10/beware-aggressive-search-marketers.cfm
http://www.aboutus.org/ZipWeb.com (read the comments at the end of the post)
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/312/RipOff0312641.htm
In fact, if you just do a search for "Zipweb scam" you'll get plenty of results.
I called their billing provider, PaymentOne, and was redirected to Zipweb. Heather, the first representitive I spoke to reversed two months charges, then passed me up to Robin, a supervisor. She tried their "we have the conversation recorded" tactic, emailing me an unopenable .wav file (I'm on a Mac, so it could have been a legitimate file that I just had a hard time opening, but I tend to doubt it). I emailed PaymentOne customer support ("customer" being a very loose term in this case) to let them know to start investigating Zipweb.
I decided to try going through Verizon instead of these guys, and Verizon was kind enough to instantly reverse the charges all the way back to February as soon as I said "fraudulent charges." Thanks to Mr. DeLeon at Verizon for his prompt help with the matter.
I've also put a call into the FBI's anti fraud division, and am awaiting a call back. There's just way too much out there on these guys to let them keep operating. Once I find out if there's a case, I'll post the information for the investigation so that other people who have gotten ripped off can be in touch with the investigating agent.