To entice people to sign up for an annual subscription to their Entertainment coupon books, the company recently offered an enticement: pay just $10.50 for the 2012 book (and agree to buy the 2013 book, and those printed in subsequent years, for $5 off when they become available).

Like a book club, they say they will give you advance notice before the new book is shipped and give you an opportunity to cancel. That’s fair and reasonable.

To prevent some clever consumer from just cancelling the future editions in order to snag a bargain on this year’s book, they buried in the fine print, this bit of protection for themselves:

*MOUSE PRINT:

6. If you cancel prior to receiving your first book through the Annual Renewal program (2013 Edition) your credit card will be charged a $5 cancellation fee.

That also seems fair, and the consumer is still getting a bargain price on the 2012 book.

What seems to cross the line, however, is this:

*MOUSE PRINT:

5. If your Credit Card reaches its expiration date, your failure to cancel after receipt of our notification will constitute your authorization for us to continue billing your card.

What? They are going to send you the book, knowing that your credit card has expired, and deem this fine print provision to be your authorization to engage in this questionable practice?

Somehow, I don’t think that Visa and MasterCard would look kindly on a company that deliberately puts charges on a card it knows is no longer valid.

Financial counselor Suze Orman just came out with her own prepaid debit card called the Approved Card.

It is a MasterCard that you can use in retail stores to make purchases, but only up to the amount you have deposited onto the card. It is promoted as an easier, smarter way to be debt-free. Upfront she touts that it costs “only $3 a month if you use it how I tell you to.”

The card’s homepage goes on to tout nine benefits of the card including “free Transunion credit score, reports, and monitoring”, “safer than cash”, and “teach your teens financial responsibility.”

A closer look at the fee structure reveals some costly provisions besides the $3 monthly maintenance fee.

*MOUSE PRINT:

CARD PURCHASE FEE — $3
ATM WITHDRAWAL FEE — $2 (if you do not have direct deposit)
OVER-THE-COUNTER CASH WITHDRAWAL — $2

While these fees are less than other competing prepaid cards, this whole genre of card is set up to cost you money rather than save you money.

Making a deposit via direct deposit or transferring money from your checking account electronically to the car is free. (But would someone really put their entire paycheck or social security check onto a prepaid card every month? And if you already have a checking account, might not a regular debit card or ATM card be offered by your bank for free?

*MOUSE PRINT:

Conspicuously missing from their fee list is the cost to deposit money onto your card at an ATM or in person at a store.

Apparently you can only add money at locations that support either Moneygram or Western Union payments. The cost, they say, is typically $3.00 – $4.95. Whatta deal.

Here is another surprise.

*MOUSE PRINT:

If you only read the headlines about the free TransUnion credit score, report and credit monitoring benefit, you may miss the fact that the service is only free for the first year. After that, if you want to keep it, it is $143.40 a year.

Lastly, Suze proudly proclaims:

*MOUSE PRINT:

As she admits in smaller print, debit card purchase information is not part of anyone’s credit report and does not affect your credit score. She merely has a desire to see whether providing card use and purchase behavior to Trans Union will be considered in the future as a predictor of creditworthiness. Put another way, Suze has put a clever spin on the fact that she is sharing your purchase history with an outside company.

Prepaid cards have become popular as moneymakers for issuers particularly since they fall through the cracks of federal reform legislation that covers conventional credit and debit cards. If you must have a prepaid card for some reason, a better choice is the virtually fee-free American Express prepaid card. There is no monthly maintenance fee. In fact the only stated fee is $2 for ATM withdrawals after your first free one each month. Depositing money at a retail location incurs the same approximately $4.95 charge as does the Approved Card.

Citibank has been advertising what appears to be a very generous offer to encourage new customers to open a Citi checking account.

$400! That’s a lot better than a crappy toaster typically offered in the 1960s. The question, of course, is what do you have to do to get the $400 in giftcards? A lot.

*MOUSE PRINT:

You have to open a Citigold account.

You have to enroll that account in Thank You Rewards.

You have to initiate direct deposit.

You have to make at least one electronic payment for two consecutive months.

You have to wait 90 days after your qualifying transactions to have the 40,000 Thank You points deposited.

You have to keep the account open at least until the points are deposited.

There are required direct deposit/e-payments each month to get points, with changes starting in December.

If you can get over the hurdle of doing all that and waiting five or six months before your points get deposited (and longer to get your actual giftcards), you’re all set.

Oh, wait. There’s more. The gold account has a steep monthly fee, and what may be one of the highest minimum balance requirements needed to waive the monthly fee.

*MOUSE PRINT:

A fee of $30 a month? (And if you have to keep the account open for five or six months, that comes out to as much as $180 — eating up almost half your $400 in free giftcards.) Or, if you want to get that fee waived, you only need to keep $50,000 or $100,000 in the bank.

Funny thing, taking everything into consideration, that free toaster from the 1960s is sounding better and better.

Taking a page from companies advertising free credit reports, a number of firms are now promoting free credit scores, including the company that invented the FICO score:

No disclaimers in the ad.  Nothing.  Maybe it’s really totally free!

When you click the ad, you are taken to this page on the MyFICO site:

Still no obvious strings. No asterisk after the word “free”. Go ahead and click the picture to see it full size. There, on the bottom is the VERY small disclaimer that reads:

*MOUSE PRINT:
 

IMPORTANT INFORMATION: When you order your free FICO Score here, you will begin your 10-day trial membership in Score Watch®. If you don’t cancel your membership within the 10-day trial period, you will be billed $14.95 for each month that you continue your membership. You may cancel your trial membership anytime within the trial period without charge.

The free score is only free when you sign up for a free trial, and if you fail to cancel that free trial within a short 10-days, you will be billed $14.95 monthly.

If you missed that inconspicuous disclosure and click to get your free score, you will be asked to part with a lot of personal information, including your date of birth, social security number, password, and full name and address — all before you are told on a subsequent page that you have to give a credit card number and it will be dinged $14.95 a month if you don’t cancel quickly.

FreeCreditReport.com got better about disclosure after the FTC went after them. And a new consumer law, the CARD Act requires better disclosure in ads promising free credit reports where you are really signing up for a trial of a continuing service. The law does not explicitly extend to offers of free credit scores, however. And therein lies the problem. Though general consumer law would require better disclosure, not until enough complaints get filed against “free score” offers, will disclosure likely improve.

Huntington Bank has a clever new advertising campaign promoting “Asterisk-Free Checking”. So many banks promise what sound like great accounts, but then you find all kinds of hidden charges and minimums buried in the fine print.

Not with Asterisk-Free Checking, they say:

A whole host of services are provided with this account, including “Free Online Banking and Bill Pay”. However, if you are planning to use Quicken to do online banking and pay bills, it is not free.

*MOUSE PRINT:

There is a $2.95 a month charge for “PC Banking”, which apparently is different from “Online Banking and Bill Pay”. That fact is buried in their FAQs which are not accessible from the detailed description page for Asterisk-Free Checking. And true to the name of this account, unfortunately, there is no asterisk leading the reader to this qualification and distinction.

When asked why they don’t disclose that charge upfront, and would they now consider doing so, a spokeperson for the bank replied:

“PC Banking is not actively promoted and is offered only to customers who contact us requesting services not provided through Online Banking. The monthly $2.95 fee applies only to customers using the extra services offered directly through Quicken® and Quickbooks®. Therefore, our Online Banking and Bill Pay services as the vast majority of our customers use them are indeed free.”

MrConsumer is not trying to beat up on Huntington Bank. In fact, it was selected as a refreshing change from how other banks advertise by hiding costly things in asterisked footnotes. However, if they talk the talk, they should walk the walk. No one put a gun to their head and forced Huntington to advertise “asterisk-free checking” and “isn’t it time you switched to a bank that believes in no surprises.” But having gone down that road, shouldn’t they have been a little more forthcoming about the actual cost of “free online banking and bill pay” for those who use Quicken?