Monday, November 02, 2009

Why won’t Pugster leave me alone?

I signed up for Commission Junction (CJ) about a year ago.  I got tired of the spam, and no money earned, so I called CJ and cancelled my account.  All of the e-mails stopped immediately, except for Pugster’s marketing e-mails.

Pugster is some company that sells jewelry and other items.  I’m not interested in receiving e-mails from Pugster, so I look through the e-mail for an unsubscribe link or unsubscribe directions.  I find no such thing.  Next, I look for a physical address (required by law when sending out advertising e-mails); again, they lack the required information.

They do list some e-mail addresses that we can use to contact them, however, so I forward the e-mail to those e-mail addresses and ask politely for them to remove me from the e-mail list.  I get no reply, except more marketing e-mails.

I go on the Internet and look for a phone number for them; I found 800-555-1212.  They obviously don’t want to receive calls.  I kept searching and found another number, listed as a “voice number,” this goes to a fax machine.

I go to their site and look for contact information, unsubcribe instructions, or a way to cancel my account; although I can find e-mail addresses, I cannot find a phone number.  I continue to send e-mails (first politely asking them to stop, then directly ordering them to stop) to no avail.

Finally, I contact Commission Junction and explain it to them and ask them to have Pugster stop sending me e-mails.  The phone rep I spoke with told me to configure my spam filter to delete incoming Pugster e-mails.  I told her that I need for them to stop sending them.

She then tells me she can contact Commission Junction’s Compliance Department and explain that Pugster is not in compliance.  She said that she cannot guarantee that Pugster will stop.  I asked that if she fails to get them to stop, if she can escalate the matter to a supervisor, and she said that she cannot guarantee that she can escalate the issue to a supervisor.

She said she will contact me back this week to let me know whether or not Pugster chooses to get into compliance or not.  I told her if not, I will seek a legal remedy for this situation.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why not just blacklist their email so it goes directly in the trash?

Sean Arenas said...

I actually did that - I kept adding them to the gmail spam filter, but they have a cycle of them that they use to send out. I blocked 6 in 1 month, and got a 7th one. This is something they need to fix on their end.