What part of "BROKE @%^ COLLEGE STUDENT" don't you understand?

[TwoScoopsSciath]

I love to travel. It's the Danish pirate--Oops, sorry, Merchant Marine--blood in me. I love lolling about on tropical beaches and letting my Caribbean and MM genetics have at it. One small problem: My fiance and I are both from lower-middle-class families and are in school. Darling Boy-child (DBC) has a job, but he's basically supporting us both, as, right now, it's work or school for me. I can't focus well on both. I'm lucky, in that, DBC's family has been clever with money and has saved up enough to take us to Japan this summer and my mother's fiance has the money to send the two of us to Puerto Rico for their wedding in a few weeks. However, I have always promised my love that we'll take a grand old cruise and live it up for a few days some day.

So imagine my delight when I get a piece of mail from a certain resort company, offering me a huge, glorious vacation with various fixings and frills and a voucher. I'm thrilled, I tell you and quickly call in for more info.

They give us more info and were sort of helpful. Then they got to pricing. Now, again, we don't have much money and the price they quoted was WAY out of our range. We only would have had 8 months to use these tickets, which wouldn't have worked. So I thanked the nice man and told him we couldn't do it. He asks me to wait a moment.

Now I'm being put on the line with the promotions guy, who is giving us discounts right and left and gives us three years to use the tickets (giving us time to use our tickets for a honeymoon trip). So I call DBC and we talk it over and decide to do it.

We were both under the impression that this would also give us time to save up the money to REALLY live it up on our trip. What nobody had told us was that if we wanted to confirm the trip, we would have to plunk down the money right now. So, suddenly I'm being asked for a credit card. I asked why and this fact was made clear. We don't have 800 dollars right now. Hell, we only have enough to go up to my grandmother's for Christmas Eve and the rest of the trips are going to be bare bones if we want stuff like rent and groceries.

I told him this.

So he starts trying to make me another deal and, honest to God, my phone cut out at that point. I think the Powers-that-be were trying to tell me something.

Please understand I have nothing but respect for Call Center folks. You guys put up with so much shite, I toast you when I can. But please, understand, you can't squeeze apple juice out of a rock, so this guy pissed me off. I actually cried, mostly because this was the THIRD TIME I'd gotten this sort of offer and it had been unattainable by broke-ass, full-time-college-going, hopeful me.

[Knightmare]

Words of advice:
Anytime you get unsolicited calls or mail from companies with wonderful travel deals, even the big names companies, they are never as wonderful as they seem.

I get those things all the time. I actually called one once and got the same thing you did. Wanted it paid in full, I could use it within 3 years, etc.

Now all those things just go in the trash. Teh interwebs have better deals, anyway.

My personal favorite: Make friends of a travel agent. They always have the best deals.

[RecoveringKinkoid]

Uh...dude, that was a scam. Thank God your phone cut out.

[theredbaron47]

Uh...dude, that was a scam. Thank God your phone cut out.

That sounds more like a scam than a "deal" to me, too.

[RecoveringKinkoid]

Yeah, look. Do not EVER give your credit card number, or any other information, to someone on the phone that called you. Ever. I don't care who they claim to be.

If it sounds to good to be true, it always is. Please, be discerning and do not let the idea of "a good deal" blind you to this reality. Nobody is going to call you up and offer you something you just can't pass up. Nobody other than a crook is going to call you up and ask for your cc number.

You are VERY lucky you escaped that one. If you want a nice vacation, save up and use the proper channels. There are ways to do it on the cheap. This is not one of those ways.

[matty]

I actually received a call similar to this timeshare/holiday deal once. I wasn't entirely aware of the details, but knew it would involve me paying money at some point. You see, I had entered one of those "lead generation" type competitions that are run at stands in shopping malls.

So, this guy calls and says, "Hi, Matty, you entered our competition recently. Congratulations, you have won a weekend's accommodation at our resort in la-la-land". I had a feeling about this, so I said, "Well, thanks, but I'm not really in a position to take advantage of that right now, so I will have to decline".

You should have heard the shock in his voice on the other end of the line:
"Uh, uh, I see, okay. Right, well, thanks, have a good day then".

[ThePhoneGoddess]

The company didn't call Sciath, though, she called them not once but twice. First time she called to get info because she had received a flier from them, then she hung up and called her fiance to discuss it with him. Then she called back to make the reservations and was asked for a credit card. Sciath says it was a 'certain resort company'. This makes me think it was probably a well-known one that she recognized; especially if she likes to travel, she'd know the names of the bigger ones. In fact if she's really into traveling she probably signed up for their brochures on purpose because she enjoys looking at them.

At least that's how I read her story.

[RecoveringKinkoid]

Oh, right. Sorry, I didn't read carefully.

I've seen legit offers from well known companies and I've seen suspicious ones that look like they were run on the office copier after hours. I guess it would depend.

[ThePhoneGoddess]

That's ok, RK, you gave really good advice, I'm just anal about details.

[Jack7957]

You see, I had entered one of those "lead generation" type competitions that are run at stands in shopping malls.

Another favorite of those is to switch your phone service without telling you. It's in the fine print of the "contest entry" that by filling out the entry and putting your phone number on it, you are authorizing them to switch your service to another company.
Here's one article about it

Another scam is the magazine subscription scam. Someone calls you with a great deal on magazine subscriptions. Usually they're priced higher than what you can get them on your own. One of my idiot cow-orkers years ago got hit, the subscription was for five years and a few hundred dollars.
Here's more info on it.

[Shabo]

I've had two scammers call me before. One called my cell phone promising me money from government grants, and they would take care of all the research and tell me which ones were best for me, blah blah pitch. I said sure, I'll get more info on it, gave them my address to mail it, and then they asked for my bank account number. Woah there, wtfbbq do you need that for? Then they say that I have to pay for it right then and there. Uh, no. I don't think so. I asked them to send me anything they had that was free so I could learn more about them, and they had nothing. So I asked them if they had a website, and they did. I took the web address and said I would call them back... but they wouldn't give me a return number to call. I looked at their website. It looked like something a beginning programmer would have created in his HTML 101 class. So yeah... definite scam.

The second one called my house and was pitching about some fantastic consolidation deal for my student loans since interest rates would be going up the next few days. They could even email me the paper work! The only catch is that they could ONLY do federal loans... which I only HAVE one federal loan... and that they needed my soc sec over the phone. Hang on a minute... I've played this game before. The guy even got his "supervisor" on the line to try and convince me. No way buddy. I didn't even bother looking at the website they had, although I'm sure it looked just as craptastic as the first one. They wouldn't let me call them back, but they did call me once or twice more to try and get me to "consolidate" with them. Thanks, but the government offers better rates for their student loans than you could ever dream of. Go 'way.

[ShinyGreenApple]

Gah, I know the feeling. Like you said, it's nothing against those who work in call centers; I've been there and it sucks. But I think a line needs to be drawn and there should be more tact used when deciding that a customer is a lost cause or if you should continue with your scripts. A while back, someone from the company I bought my PC from called and asked how I was enjoying the computer, bla bla bla, and asked if I was aware that my warranty was about to run out.

I calmly explained that I was aware of it, but that I had lost my job several months prior and had no income whatsoever.

He still kept pushing for me to purchase an extended warranty for $150 *headdesk*

When did "Sorry, I have no cash flow right now!" come to mean "Hassle me for a hundred fifty bucks"?

[HawaiianShirts]

Scam or not Sciath, I can sympathize completely with broke-college-student-ness. Two weeks ago it was a choice between quarters for laundry or a tank of gas. Guess who took the bus to work for a week. (I don't mind the bus, but getting off work at 11:30PM means taking the long route home, so I don't walk in the door until about 12:30AM, and being late off the clock means having to walk home.)

Fortunately for us, my wife has graduated (woo! yeah! woo!), and she'll be able to get a full-time job off-campus instead of a part-time minimum wage campus job. Means less work for me as I finish my last semester.

Yeah, our last vacation was house-sitting for my parents.

[bigjimaz]

They do this everywhere. Next time you see Tanya Roberts hawking the Tahiti Village Las Vegas "deal" check it out. As it turns out, that "Free Getaway Weekend" is going to cost you about $500+ not counting transportation to and from Vegas which is $180.00 by bus or $210 by air from where I live.

[TwoScoopsSciath]

Well, they SAID I'd signed up. Which I could have and forgotten. But, it was a legit company, and the brochure looked real enough. I'm just painfully naive sometimes. I flat-out refused to give them my credit card number or DBC's. If you say free, I expect free. No money should be changing hands at all!