Is active.com Safe?

I am fed up with the magazine scam that Active supports through offers while signing up for an event. My daughter used my credit card to sign up for an event and somehow opted for trial offers of magazines. The company that redistributes subscriptions is called Synapse. The charges on the credit card show up as ACT*SYNAPSE ACTI. A trial is offered with a money back guarantee. The process for cancellation is purposefully difficult. They use language to try to trick one into continuing the subscription. It is nearly impossible to talk to an individual, and then they do not have complete information on your account anyway. BEWARE. And, as for Active....if there is a way not to use Active to register for an event....I say do it. (When I commented on my experience, the Active representative reminded me that the magazine service was 100% "Opt-in." Here is my response.) I certainly understand opting in. I take responsibility for the youth of my daughter and her lack of understanding of what she was committing my credit card number to. However, an opt-in to a "TRIAL" should have an efficient method of opting out. The hard fact remains that your relationship with this magazine company really shines a bad light on Active. This company, Synapse, is set up to make it difficult to get one's money back. I'll try to explain in detail. When we realized in the early summer that we were being charged for the four magazines, I had my daughter call to cancel. She was told by the telephone agent that she could not cancel until the trial was up (not true). I found a link online after the call, and I canceled the subscriptions two months ago. I recall that the there was a "trick" question in the sequence, where subtle language leads one away from a refund. I was reimbursed eventually, and I thought the matter done. Imagine my surprise when I found another ACT-Synapse charge pending on my card this morning. I spent two hours trying to figure out how to stop the charge, cancel the magazines a second time, etc. Here's what happens. If you call the number for Active, you are given a number for the magazine subscription agent. If you call that number, you are routed into a telephone maze where you have to manage each subscription separately, and start the process over again each time. You have to figure out which magazines you are subscribed to and go through the sequence of trick questions to, hopefully, cancel the magazine and get a refund. I wish I could accurately relay the questions. I will go back and see if I can copy the text as a followup to this. If you call the number and push "O" for operator, over and over and over, you get responses like, "Are you sure you don't want to use the automated system? You might have to wait a long time." (Give me a break!) Finally, you get a person to talk to. If you give her your information she can find your account. Then she says, "Which magazine do you want to cancel?" We say, "Which magazine trials am I signed up for?" She says, "Well, I don't know. All I do is take a report and send it on." So, the company representative knows my name and account number, but they don't know what magazines I am getting on a "trial" basis? Look, that is ridiculous. What company would set up hurdles like this for customers if they weren't trying to obstruct service? Active has associated itself (these offers are inherent to the process of registration for an athletic event) with a magazine reseller (Synapse) that takes advantage of people with automatic charges and a difficult system of reimbursement. This is really unacceptable. If you are going to have this relationship, you are responsible for the money that is lost by people on unwanted magazines, and hiding being the "opt-in" aspect of the process is just not moral or fair. I have closed that credit card account and instructed my credit union to block any purchases by ACT. I regularly use the Web of Trust as a reporting system for the unreliability of Web sites, and I will make a report about this for the active.com site. I will see if I can figure out a way to display the sequence of tricky questions on the magazine site. This has been an awful experience.

This site is the worst. You go to register for a race and you end up with "free" magazine subscriptions and a "free" trial membership only to find your credit card charged up the wazoo a month later. I am an avid runner and really have a hard time using this site when registering for races. Surprised it has such high scores.