Felix Salmon
pestering preening potentates
Ben Stein, predatory bait-and-switch merchant
How far has Ben Stein sunk? Far enough that I feel compelled to resuscitate the Ben Stein Watch, just to share this unfunny and positively harmful TV ad which is now being aired:
“I went to freescore.com and found out my score for free”, says Ben, while an annoying squirrel holds up a sign with the word “FREE” in some horrible brush-script font.
A few points are worth noting here. First, the score itself is not very useful to consumers. What’s useful is the report — if there’s an error on the report, then the consumer can try to rectify it. Secondly, and much more importantly, if you want a free credit report, there’s only one place to go: annualcreditreport.com. That’s the place where the big three credit-rating agencies will give you a genuinely free copy of your credit report once a year, as required by federal law.
You won’t be surprised to hear that freescore.com is not free: in order to get any information out of them at all, you have to authorize them to charge you a $29.95 monthly fee. They even extract a dollar out of you up front, just to make sure that money is there.
Stein, here, has become a predatory bait-and-switch merchant, dangling a “free” credit report in front of people so that he can sock them with a massive monthly fee for, essentially, doing nothing at all. Naturally, the people who take him up on this offer will be those who can least afford it.
The level to which Stein has now sunk is more than enough reason — as if the case for the prosecution weren’t damning enough already — for the NYT to cancel Stein’s contract forthwith. It’s simply unconscionable for a newspaper of record to employ as its “Everybody’s Business” columnist someone who is surely making a vast amount of money by luring the unsuspecting into overpaying for a financial product they should under no circumstances buy.
It’ll also be interesting to see whether the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency will have the authority to regulate this kind of advertising. If it doesn’t, that’s a significant hole in its mandate.
Update: Ryan Chittum notes that the new credit card act requires advertisers to inform consumers that the only place for a free credit report is AnnualCreditReport.com; they will also be required to include a statement that “This is not the free credit report provided for by Federal law.” When does this act come into force?
Update 2: It’s also worth quoting the NYT’s own ethics guidelines:
40. It is an inherent conflict for a journalist to perform public relations work, paid or unpaid.
44. Staff members may not engage in financial counseling (except through the articles they write). They may not manage money for others, offer investment advice, or help operate an investment company of any sort, with or without pay.
Stein isn’t a staff member. But the NYT generally holds its columnists to the same ethical standards.
Update 3: Here’s a good video, to go with Stein’s bad one.
Update 4: Freescore seems to be intimately connected with a very ugly company called Vertrue. Ugh.
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Felix is a piss ant little boychild…..he might as well save himself some time and just write, Nah nah nah nah…..nah nah. Cuz thats all I am hearing!
I whole heartily agree with wenzy, Felix is a piss ant and obviously very intimidated by Ben. Is it any surprise they canned Ben, a Conservative at the most liberal rag this side of the London Guardian. Ben will move on to greater things as the NYT dies a well deserved death. Besides I’ll bet Felix doesn’t like Ferris Bueller either.
wow, so did you have a crush on Stein in high school and he turned you down? I’ve never seen an article written with so much baffling hostility about such a harmless person. I’d love to see the writer go on “Win Ben Steins Money” and see how far they could go up against Stein himself.
Secondly, most of the comments I’ve seen about Expelled lead me to believe that almost no one here has actually seen the film. Nowhere does the film argue that Creationism should be taught in schools. Intelligent Design doesn’t even argue that. The film’s argument is that any teacher or scientist that considers ID shouldn’t be fired. Science should be open to considering anything… thats how we learn. Nearly every scientific discovery in history seemed ridiculous to someone at one point or another.
Secondly, someone made it sound like ID and Creationism are one and the same. They are not. People of all religions believe in ID. There are even athiests that believe in ID. ID is simply the idea that maybe there was a “designer” behind the beginning of life.
[...] Stein was a columnist at the NY Times until he was fired a few weeks ago for appearing in misleading ads for freescore.com. He’s now gone to the American Spectator and said that the real reason is because he [...]
[...] recap for those of you following along at home: Felix Salmon wrote about Ben Stein advertising for Freescore. I wrote a follow up using publicly available information [...]
[...] Stein’s paymasters Adaptive Marketing, the owners of freescore.com, aren’t just predatory bait-and-switch merchants. They’re also litigious [...]
[...] Stein’s paymasters Adaptive Marketing, the owners of freescore.com, aren’t just predatory bait-and-switch merchants. They’re also litigious [...]
[...] Stein’s paymasters Adaptive Marketing, the owners of freescore.com, aren’t just predatory bait-and-switch merchants. They’re also litigious [...]
[...] Stein’s paymasters Adaptive Marketing, the owners of freescore.com, aren’t just predatory bait-and-switch merchants. They’re also litigious [...]
[...] Stein’s paymasters Adaptive Marketing, the owners of freescore.com, aren’t just predatory bait-and-switch merchants. They’re also litigious [...]
[...] Stein’s paymasters Adaptive Marketing, the owners of freescore.com, aren’t just predatory bait-and-switch merchants. They’re also litigious [...]
[...] Stein’s paymasters Adaptive Marketing, the owners of freescore.com, aren’t just predatory bait-and-switch merchants. They’re also litigious [...]
[...] Stein’s paymasters Adaptive Marketing, the owners of freescore.com, aren’t just predatory bait-and-switch merchants. They’re also litigious [...]
[...] Stein’s paymasters Adaptive Marketing, the owners of freescore.com, aren’t just predatory bait-and-switch merchants. They’re also litigious [...]
[...] Stein’s paymasters Adaptive Marketing, the owners of freescore.com, aren’t just predatory bait-and-switch merchants. They’re also litigious [...]
[...] Stein’s paymasters Adaptive Marketing, the owners of freescore.com, aren’t just predatory bait-and-switch merchants. They’re also litigious [...]
[...] Stein’s paymasters Adaptive Marketing, the owners of freescore.com, aren’t just predatory bait-and-switch merchants. They’re also litigious [...]
[...] Stein’s paymasters Adaptive Marketing, the owners of freescore.com, aren’t just predatory bait-and-switch merchants. They’re also litigious [...]
[...] those reasons, Reuters blogger Felix Salmon called Stein a “predatory bait-and-switch merchant” in July, and someone called “Flâneur de fraude” added to the claim in a blog post, [...]
[...] those reasons, Reuters blogger Felix Salmon called Stein a “predatory bait-and-switch merchant” in July, and someone called “Flâneur de fraude” added to the claim in a blog post, [...]
[...] those reasons, Reuters blogger Felix Salmon called Stein a “predatory bait-and-switch merchant” in July, and someone called “Flâneur de fraude” added to the claim in a blog post, [...]
[...] a public service, since ‘free credit reports’ is one of the biggest scams, here’s the real place to get your free credit reports (you can [...]
The article is unfortunately true. Freescore.com made $60 in authorized charges against my credit card. Avoid them at all costs.
What they are doing ought to be illegal but unfortunately is not. So, too, is Ben Stein’s activity in endorsing them.
Instead of insulting Felix Salmon, readers should be grateful for this informative article. I used to work in the field of financial education and literacy (something Americans’ need a lot more of, in general) and remember when Ben Stein was the key note speaker at a conference on the topic in Washington, D.C. The fact that a man whose entire career and reputation as an economics journalist has now sold himself as a pitch man for a shady, unethical company whose main purpose is to rip off the unsuspecting public is what you would call a “shanda” in Yiddish and Ben Stein should be ashamed of himself. Kudos to Salmon for exposing that Stein is a hypocrite and a fraud and betrayed all that he had purportedly stood for just for an easy buck.