Class Action Suit That Might Affect You

If you have been a subscriber to People magazine, Time, or Entertainment Weekly between 1998 and 2004. If you ever got screwed into renewing your subscription under false pretenses like I did. Time Warner has agreed to pay up 4.3 million dollars to magazine subscribers who were charged for renewals they did not order, or were tricked into renewing subscriptions they wanted to drop. 108,000 people could be affected. And I'm one of them.

I subscribed to Entertainment Weekly in 2002 by cashing in some air miles. A year later when my subscription ended, I began to get bills for my subscription. I thought, "Why am I just now receiving a bill? I never use the 'bill me later' option", not remembering my air mile transaction. My excuse is that I was working and going to school and moving at the time... and it had happened a year earlier... so I assumed it was a mistake that they would figure out on their own.

I received about 5 more menacing bills and threw them out without a second thought - what're they gonna do? Then I received a yellow envelope of great urgency which said that I was about to be turned over to a collection service... and I began to doubt myself. They were getting serious. I thought that maybe I had never paid them their $86 and maybe they had been billing me the entire year and I had just been throwing them out... and I wrote the check.

So guess what showed up in my mailbox 3 weeks later? An issue of Entertainment Weekly. Followed by another. And another. And it went on for a year, because I had renewed my subscription. Because I was threatened. Of course I had no proof of their threats, so I set my sites on the future, and waited for my subscription to run out. I thought to myself, "I'll write Eat Me or Fuck You on the bill and send it back!" Yeah! That'll show 'em.

This time around, instead of demanding payment, I received a more toned-down 'notice'. I got a 'REACTIVATION FORM' rimmed in yellow. The upper half asked me to 'indicate my re-order volume', but the lower half of solid yellow said SERVICE CONTRACT SUSPENSION between two black bars. It says that it is an URGENT NOTICE. My renewal instructions are 'past due' and my 'contract has been suspended'. I am instructed to 'detach the re-order form and return at once with my remittance'. At a glance, it looks like I owe them something. This isn't a friendly renewal reminder, this is an urgent looking 'notice' that seems to infer that something is 'wrong' with my 'account', hence the 'suspension'. So far it is the only one I have received.

But now I might actually get my $86 back and that is something to crow about. And I thought that there might be others out there, too embarrassed to tell anyone that they fell for such a bald-faced scam that only a bubblehead would go along with... I just wanted to tell you to keep your eyes open for an official looking letter from Time Warner. It might just be money.