INTELIUS people search is a SCAM...Did you know about this?

Intelius is the market-leader in online people searches, trawling public records for information. It's headed for a $143m initial public offering. The problem? Its revenue growth is powered by deceptively signing customers up for a useless third party service which bills monthly until you notice it and cancel.


Every time a customer buys a product at Intelius, they are shown a page telling them “Take our 2008 Consumer Credit Survey and claim $10.00 CASH BACK with Privacy Matters Identity.” ... Undoubtedly a lot of consumers do the survey and move forward to the next page - it only takes a second. But what most people don’t do is read the fine print ... in light gray small text, users are told that by taking the survey they are really signing up to a $20/month subscription.


It's the way it's put in hard-to-read gray on gray text that makes it so great—a confession encoded in design principles?|||Thats why you should always read everything you do or sign or give your credit card number to. Sorry, but if you werent smart enough to read, thats your problem.





Lots of companies do this. Intelius is far from the only company, and a lot of the companies that most people support do this.





Intelius people search is kind of dumb to pay for anyways, being that all the info you would get from a paid search is public information that you can get by calling the apporpriate sources on your own, usually for free.|||Intellius gives you exactly what you pay for.


Like MANY companies, they also allow sponsored links on their website. Heck, I ordered Papa Johns pizza online yesterday and there were two links to confirm my order...one that would deliver my pizza, and one that would deliver my pizza and a one-year magazine subscription.


How could you expect to get cash back if you weren't expecting to give cash in the first place? You see links online all the time offering a free credit report, but those sign you up for trial offers. How is that any different?


I fail to see how it's a scam if they tell you it will be $20 per month.