Unfortunately, not every business you deal with on the Internet acts how you’d like them to, and there are people who “play games” when you sign up for their sites…

The mildest of the games is only having signup options that include rebills and then hoping you’ll forget to cancel your membership. You can get charged month after month and there’s not a whole lot you can do when you finally discover it since they were completely upfront about the rebills.

A more serious problem tends to come with the $1 or $5 “trial memberships”. What you don’t realize unless you scroll all the way down the page, is that on the same page they have a section of “cross-sells” that are opt-out, not opt-in. You can get sold full-price memberships to other sites, or to things like tech support services. But what makes these things a bit sleazy is that they’re often “below the fold” meaning you don’t see them unless you scroll down the page - they aren’t where you expect them to be, which means you don’t even know you just agreed to the additional memberships. I’ve heard of cases where people thought they were charging $1 to their credit cards and got billed for $400…

The worst case is just fraud (or apparent fraud which always seems to be caused by a “technical glitch”). In these cases there was nothing on the page saying you were going to be billed more than you expected, but you get billed anyway.

I choose sites to promote based on their content, not on billing practices (unless they really are being fraudulent). Even the sites that are a bit too aggressive can have good content. When I launch the forum later this month there will be a place to discuss experiences with porn sites - not just in terms of their content but also their business practices and customer service. Hopefully that will help in letting people be aware of problems with certain sites.

So what can you do to protect yourself?

Be alert and read everything on each of the join pages. Know exactly what you agreed to and watch for opt-out “upsells/cross-sells”.

If you’re buying porn, you should be looking at your credit card bill when it comes in - don’t just shove it in a file without checking it out.

If you want to avoid problems completely stick with something like video on demand. VOD is a pay as you go concept with no rebills. The worst case scenario is you’ve bought a credit you haven’t used yet. There are a number of VOD sites. Check the sidebar for the latest list…

Buying DVDs is also pretty safe since you’re buying a discrete product and it’s clear what you ordered. I should also mention that in my VOD theater there is the option to legally purchase a download of most of the DVDs they offer. So you get instant access to the DVD and just need to burn it to disc yourself.

I can also vouch for certain sites because I work closely with the people who run them. These are some of the sites lised under “Other blogs I work on” in the sidebar. When yo go to them you see they have a pretty consistent look and they’re each tied to a particular pay site. They include Bareback That Hole, Felch That Hole, and soon Sweet & Raw (as well as some condom sites). I know for a fact they don’t play games and if you have any issues with them I know I can get to the bottom of the issues quickly.

Even some of the sites that do play games I can help with by contacting the managers of the sites after you’ve run into a brick wall with them. A lot of those euro twink sites that I’ve promoted so heavily were recently purchased by a company that plays the cross-sell game with cross-sells “below the fold” where you might not see them. That said, they do have good content, and they claim to have a low chargeback ratio and give people back their money when they ask. I don’t really like the game they play, but I do like their content and haven’t heard of any cases where they didn’t make things right.

But please be careful. I can’t know full histories on every site I promote and most of the problems can be avoided by just reading the signup pages carefully…