You’ve found an awesome product, possibly something that will promote weight loss or make your skin clearer, help you make a resume or something else that’s been advertised to you. And all they want from you is a little bit of money for shipping and handling.

You give your credit card details and they ship you the product or let you use the service. Then you get the product and you’re less than impressed. But it’s just a mostly-free sample, right?

But then you notice a charge - a recurring subscription or other unexpected charge - from the site. You make a query, and they tell you that you signed up for that subscription when you ordered that sample or that product, and points to a bit of the website that’s either in small print, on a different, hard-to-find page, or otherwise deliberately hard to notice. The product may have had a very short return period before you get charged for the full product, or even a recurring subscription. That is, if the company has any customer service at all.

How to protect yourself
Try to find reviews of the product and/or site. Search for the name of the product or the website and the word “scam”.

Always read through the page, and any other page that you can find. These people make it deliberately hard to find the text about recurring charges because they know that most people don’t read the fine print.

Make sure that any checkboxes that are checked on the form are unchecked unless you are very sure that they are not signing you up for a subscription.

And be sure to reach out to your bank to prevent any more charges. A company that is unethical enough to hide their Terms and Conditions where they know most people won’t read is not a company that you should trust to actually cancel any future payments. (Already existing payments, unfortunately, are lost; you did agree to their terms, after all!)