Cross-Selling Online Scams and Security Issues

A recently published discussion of an online scam called 'cross-selling' describes a devious online marketing strategy to cleverly trap consumers into committing to more than their intended online purchase.

This occurs when an after-sale business has made an agreement with an online retailer to link to their site for yet another sale without actually leaving the retailer's site. The retailer then gets a percentage of whatever the after-sale business manages to also 'sell' to the unwitting consumer.

The method used involves an easily ignored 'opt-out' box buried in text and is perfectly legal.

For a description of how the scam works, see Caveat Emptor - Use of Credit Cards On-Line, linked from a slashdot article posted on Saturday November 3.