Rebate scams

Queenee bought a new dryer a month or so ago from Sears. It's a fine dryer and she thought she was getting a good deal. It was on sale, plus there was a 10% rebate and free delivery. What's not to like?

The clerk at Sears gave PopPop the necessary paperwork and even circled the rebates that were available. When he gave the receipt and rebate form to me, I saw that the rebate could be filed online, but during the last step I got an error page instead of a confirmation. So I filled out the paperwork, made photocopies of everything and mailed it in.

What do you suppose came in the mail a couple days ago? A rejection letter, claiming that the rebate was either improperly filled out, illegible, or damaged. I smell a rat here. Why? Because not a week after mailing in the rebate form and original receipt, I got an email saying that it had been received and was being processed. Obviously it was all perfectly legible then, because I used an email address I knew Sears did not have on file.

The scam is that now Sears gets to sit on that money they owe Queenee for another month or so, collecting whatever interest they can get. Add that in with the thousands of other people they pull this on, and it is not an insignificant amount of money. And it isn't just Sears, in my experience you can pretty much count on this as the normal pattern. The real jackpot for companies who play this game is that a lot, if not most, people are not as careful or suspicious as I am and don't bother to keep copies of *everything*, so they are shit out of luck when their rebate is rejected out of hand. Insurance companies pull this crap all the time. They either reject a legitimate claim outright at first, or lowball you on their first offer. Scumbags, the lot of them. And these same people will piss and moan when it happens to them, whining about how unscrupulous people are. If this is company policy, and it sure seems to be, then the people at the top need to start living like the rest of us and get a friggin' clue about what it's like to be waiting for that little bit of money, only to be told they have to jump through a few more hoops and wait another 6-8 weeks.

I need to move to an island with my cats.