Annoying WebLoyalty scam Tom Smith

I noticed a $7 charge on a MasterCard I never use because I hate Bank of America so much (another story).  It turns out I am another victim of the WLI Reservations Rewards scam.  WebLoyalty apparently gets your email address when you buy something online, and then sends you some emails.  If you don't say no, they sign you up for a monthly fee, in return for which you supposedly get discounts if you buy some rubbish or other.  You can also get signed up apparently when you buy things from certain vendors, such as batteries.com, 1-800-flowers and quite a few others.  When you click to buy, you are actually agreeing to also join this service.  It's completely fraudulent, of course.  I doubt even the most hard-core freedom of contract sort, of which I am one, would count something like this as more than just plain fraud.  There seem to be lots of cases where quite sophisticated web users, the kind that keep logs of their keystrokes, have been signed up, in spite of their extreme paranoia about this sort of thing. In my case, they had me signed up under an email address I have not used in years.  God knows how they got a hold of it.  It's pretty sobering that they had this credit card number as well, which has a very high credit limit.  I would cancel the card, but apparently that's pretty bad for your credit rating; much better, I read, to leave it sitting there with a zero balance.  Maybe I should cancel the card and credit rating be damned, except you never know when you might need it.  In any event, it looks like this class action law firm is on the case.  I hope they grind the miscreants under their litigious heels.

Here is some more information on WebLoyalty.  They say they only sign people up through the small print in those rebate coupons you can fill out.  But I never fill those out, and if I did, I would not use an old email address.  If you google "webloyalty scam", you can see similar complaints from other users.  My guess is they are "slamming," industry argot from the telecom industry for just signing people up without their permission.  It certainly is good reason never to fill out one of those rebate coupons, but probably one should simply not use the merchants listed by the law firm, some of which are pretty big.  These guys are making $83 million a year on this scam.