Beware These Two Skin Care Facebook Scams

This is an eye-opener.  A listener brought this to my attention and it seems like it's affecting a lot of people.  Watch your credit card closely because these "free offers" are ringing up huge charges on peoples bills.

The charges will appear on your credit card bill as "Products4youth" and "LusciousSkin" (both followed by a sequence of numbers).

Here's how the scam works.  A "free" product is offered, all you have to do is "pay for shipping". Now the shipping runs five bucks or so, and even though we know that's about four bucks too much, most people say, well that's not that bad, and go ahead and order.  Now, so far this is kind of a standard trial offer thing, but here's where it goes crazy. A few days later that initial shipping fee will be followed by a huge charge (in these cases $79 or $89 bucks).  Boom!  Now you may have thought these people signed up for some kind of subscription or something, but no other products were delivered at all.  In fact, the listener who brought this to our attention swears they didn't even order samples from both sites, they only ordered from one, and then got three bonus charges( the initial shipping for the "free" product, shipping for another "free product" that never was even sent, and then two overcharges).  In other words, it looks like this, with the only authorized charge being the first one:

Now I took into account that this might be a "buyer beware" or some other type of mistake on behalf of the consumer, so I went to the Facebook site for the initial product, and right there, on their front page, in the left "comments" column, were other consumers complaining about the same thing.

I can tell you that if you try calling any of the phone numbers associated with the trial orders, you will be put on hold forever. The best thing to do is call your credit card company and tell them you did not authorize these charges. The actual phone operator at Chase told our listener that he was "dealing with a lot of this lately" and immediately removed the charges.  This scam is currently targeting ladies cosmetics, but I'm sure it'll make it's way around to other products.  Always look at your credit card bill close for these kind of oddball charges.