Telescope Reviews: Astronomy Magazine DVD Scam

I have a Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia from the early 1980’s. For years I use to receive the annual yearbooks and the science yearbooks because I enjoyed the light reading. I always promptly paid the invoice for the yearbooks. By the year 2000 I tired of reading the yearbooks and right after receiving the year 2000 yearbooks, I decided to inform Funk & Wagnalls via a formal letter that in the future I no longer want them to send me any more yearbooks. Even though I sent the letter, the following year they sent me a 2001 yearbook. I promptly returned the yearbook to Funk & Wagnalls along with a second letter explaining that a year previous I had already sent them a letter asking them to stop sending me the yearbooks. I even personally paid for the return postage of the book via certified mail to be certain that they received the unwanted book I was sending back. After another 6 months, I began getting statements from Funk & Wagnalls that I still owed them the money for the returned book. After another 6 months, I received a letter from a collection agency advising that if I don’t pay for the book legal action will be taken against me. I then sent Funk & Wagnalls copies of the letters that I had previously sent them along with a copy of the U.S. Post office record that the book had been returned to them. I asked them to inform their collection agency that the account is settled. That still didn’t stop the letters from the collection agency. After several more threatening letters from the collection agency each getting more intense, I decided enough is enough. I finally took all my records with me to an attorney to assist me so that the collection agency would not hurt my credit. Shortly after that I received a letter of apology from the collection agency but none from Funk & Wagnalls. That was about 10 years ago and I still am bitter over the fact that it took an attorney to settle the situation.

Although a different publisher, Astronomy magazine has been sending unsolicited DVD’s for a several years now. There have been few other threads relating to this problem. In all those threads, I haven’t read any posts that publisher of Astronomy magazine has resorted to using a collection agency; but these threads certainly remind me of the experience I had with Funk & Wagnalls. I don’t subscribe to Astronomy magazine.

Edited by jsiska (11/21/12 02:03 AM)