Greetings card company Moonpig were this week discovered to be ripping off their customers by a Dumb Funded investigation.
We discovered that Moonpig are hosting a pop-up message during their checkout process designed to syphon customers to the Complete Savings cashback ‘scam’ operation, which has tricked 10,000s of UK consumers into paying a monthly fee they don’t get any benefit from.
Similar to what consumers might find on pornographic or other nefarious websites, users of the Moonpig website should be aware that they may be shown a popup message when using the website, advertising cashback deals or other special offers, similar to the free website Quidco. However it is important to note that this is a PAID service, which charges a monthly fee – catching out many people who then find it nearly impossible to cancel.
On contacting Moonpig, Dumb Funded received the following response:
‘We apologize for any inconvenience but there is no history of our website been [sic] hacked. There is no scam related to Moonpig, we advise you to be aware of any suspicious activity related to Moonpig as we don’t have partnership with any other companies.’
It seems initially their internationally based customer service team were unaware they were hosting the popup advertisement.
However after contacting Moonpig via Twitter we were provided with the following response via Direct message:
Complete Savings have been around for years, and other companies such as Pizza Hut have worked with them in the past.
They have been the subject of multiple reports and investigations by UK newspapers looking at consumer issues.
There have also been reports of consumers paying for the cashback service for years at a time without receiving any notice or information, having mistakenly signed up for them via a popup during the checkout process when making an order on a website like Moonpig.
At Dumb Funded we would advise our readers to always be careful when shopping online, and to avoid any companies that advertise scams like this as they clearly do not respect you as a customer.
