Well since DM mall is not even responding to emails, what is the best way to go about trying to get these miles that we were promised? I'm thinking we need to contact Rebtel or US Airways directly. There must be tens of thousands of people that signed up for this offer. It was posted on many blogs. I am yet to hear of anyone that got the miles.

In my opinion, and I did miss this deal but am glad I did, based on the performance of things like it as of late, I think the best form of action is to do this:

1) everyone in here tell everyone they know to craft a letter of complaint to the airline and the company (Rebtel) about the miles and demand to have them post now.

2) send a copy to the AGs office in the state where Rebtel or US Air exists.

3) send a copy to the BBB although they dont do much

4) blog it

5) trash RebTel in any and every reference you can.

6) find out who their competitors are. Send them notice of all this.

7) find out who their partners are. Send them a copy and ask them to refrain from doing business with the company. You yourself must also refrain from using those partners and let them know you have until the miles post.

8) call the cops in the state or town and say you were robbed like a rebate scam. I have done this in the past and it has worked.

9) talk to any journalist that will listen but since it's about miles which many equate with luxury travel or something most people just cannot understand, that may not get very far. but try anyway

10) find out who the principals are. key their cars, trash their homes, get their kids in trouble at school. (call me crazy but hey, maybe that would work! I aint doing it--after all, I was lucky enough this time to not have gotten in on this gig but I hope you all get your miles!)

11) if you actually do #10 it is because you tried everything else and more and realized that these days nothing else and nothing normal will work. They screwed ya.

12) now that's part of Cartera, let us all work together to take that company completely apart. I live near it's MA HQ. I will help any way I can unless they change and post all miles due to all people claiming them in any airline partnership offer they deal with.

Good luck!

:)MM

If the posting period as detailed in the T&Cs has passed, you fully qualified for the miles, and they haven't yet posted, then of course it would be appropriate to contact them. I never suggested otherwise.

Lately, the game is all about airlines and or their partner entities just plain not posting sh*t when due. They come up with every excuse they can, and often play on the FACT that many who complain become the ones that look bad.

All it's gonna take is for one of these issues to finally break--and it will in time--and all the miles will begin to flow. I have made it my quest to get my miles and will not stop until I do. I will start any battle, join any fight and fight in pretty much any way I can to get this to happen for me and for anyone else I know in the same situation for 1 or 100 million miles missing. I suggest we all do that and if we do, these idiots will start to listen up! If we do not, we have only ourselves to blame.

Right now, for example, I am out the following:

~3 Staples transactions from late September totalling to just under 1,000 UA miles

~3,000+ UA miles from mall transactions that the retailer, the credit card, the airline and the shopping mall management all know I legitimately performed.

~2,000 miles that posted in the negative by mistake on UA, due to the same people above making mistakes for me and many others that they have yet to fix somehow.

~21 missing REI transactions totaling to roughly 500 miles

~Whatever this translates into when later tallied for the botched UA MoM promo... ie, I expected 250,000 UA miles. I do not know if any of that will post now.

~The above UA is all from 9/9/11.

~140 AA miles from a BestBuy transaction. Historically, AA BestBuy has taken 8-10 weeks to post. This is going on 14.

~2,500 AA miles for self and 2,500 for wife from Cartera blunder part duex - with emails confirming these should have posted long ago.

~33,000; 26,000 and 2,400 Co miles that could now be posting as UA from respective mall transactions that USED to post within a couple weeks and now take months. I was told to wait 90 days for more info... after waiting nearly that long just to hear that. A half year? C'monnnnn! That's criminal!

~a whole lot of Hawaiian miles from a similar shopping scandal from June whereas at no time has ANY party involved claimed there were any mistakes. It's a number too big to mention here.

~other scattered mileage here and there. I have detailed records electronically and in print for every single legitimate thing I have ever done with anything listed above and then some.

I have stopped doing all things mall. I have told everyone in my world to do the same. I have written to all parties and collected all data. I have been spending the last several weeks working on this, fighting for these and gathering materials to head to my AGs office among other things.

I would ask that even as my plight may not specifically deal with these missing US miles, that we all DO try to help one another and band together to get things done. I will help you all in any way I can. Will you all do the same?

:)MM

Contact Rebtel here is the link to send an email to rebtel. I just told them I will not be using/recommending their service until they get DM Shopping Mall to post the promised miles.

It always amazes me to see how $10 worth of miles can cause so much angst. lol.

They are a company that only seems to allow contact via email.

BIG RED FLAG in my book, even though these types of companies sometimes DO pay out on deals because they've cut their costs so they can afford to do promos. And 792 US miles is not a whole lot to have to pay out... if they do pay it.


The vid below is about the CEO of the company:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p40eVlVeCE

This blog below may be found on the Rebtel site but if not, it may help you locate the CEO:

http://blog.rebtel.com/tag/hjalmar-winbladh/

Here is more about the CEO himself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjalmar_Winbladh

This site lists scams - not much on Rebtel... yet:

http://www.ripoffreport.com/directory/Rebtel.aspx

This site is about people's opinions (til now):

http://amplicate.com/hate/rebtel?sort=featured

This is a businessweek site with names and titles of some key execs:

http://investing.businessweek.com/re...capId=29291009

For example, you could try to see if they come up on your own LinkedIN accounts like this guy, Jonas Lindroth, who co-founded Rebtel Networks AB in 2006 and serves as its Chief Technical officer, for example:

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jonas-lindroth/4/a48/1b1

And since it seems many of the RebTel team is from Sweden, a DO may be in order, or at least a MR... to go kick some ice and take blondes :D


Or, just go here and try to reason with these cats and figure it out on the phone or by mail--NOT just by email!!

http://www.rebtel.com/en/About/Who-we-are/

Rebtel Luxembourg
Rebtel Services S.à r.l.
9A, Bd. Prince Henri
L-1724 Luxembourg
Luxembourg

Rebtel Networks AB
P.O Box 1182
7th floor
Augustendalsvägen 19
131 27 Nacka Strand
Stockholm, Sweden

Marketing & PR
Patric Blixt
Head of Marketing Communications
[email protected]

Sales & Partnerships
Anjani Daita
Head of Sales and Procurement
[email protected]

If it were me, I would ultimately post on everything, Facebook and Tweet, send them a mailed letter, email all teams. email CS, post on all blogs, post on all sites, and try and find phone numbers in Sweden for these guys too ---numbers that can be called where someone will actually pick up.

Maybe some could tell me this is overkill, but I find it's often best to go full bore out of the gate (as professionally as possible at first) and then let THEM say, "Oh, um sorry... we didn't know. Here's your miles!" Otherwise you just do the dance and more weeks and months go by. We already know or can rightfully assume they have NO intention of following through with these miles. Might as well just inundate the team now. Yeah, make a few new entries on some of those websites above.

But hey, that's just me.


The company appears to be rather websavvy. I can tell just by looking the above things up. In most every instance, they have done things at least with their googling SEO/SEM efforts to make it so everything directs you back to their site or that certain directions are taken when doing various searches with their company name in mind. In nearly every case the answers to things like, "What is RebTel's phone number?" or "RebTel telephone number" or "how do I call RebTel?" leads you to the email-only contact page, or misconstrues the question to relate instead to how their calling services work.

I tried several other combinations with mixed results, but most did confirm my belief that these guys know how to make their site work the way they want it. And there are (at least according to what I found thus far) only 28 employees there in total. It may be worth writing to every one of them at the same time and/or trying to reason with them as human beings. This may work, but then again I tend to lean toward the theory that they dont want to be easily spoken to for a reason... It was a bit hard to actually GET a telephone number for them during my 30 minute search just now.

However, this final site I just found may offer a useful phone number--that is, if anyone here hasn't already tried to just contact a friend in Sweden to look up the company for you:

http://www.insideview.com/directory/rebtel-networks-ab

Rebtel Networks AB
Augustendalsv?gen 19 , Nacka Strand , , 13127 , Sweden
www.rebtel.com
Phone: 46851906100 | Fax: 46 87 16 18 20
Revenue (ttm): 12.90656
Industry: Telecommunications Services
Employees: 28
SIC: Telephone Communications (No Radiotelephone) (4813)
NAICS: Wired Telecommunications Carriers (517110)

I will offer another notation:

When companies like this fail to post the miles, it often means the relationship between the company and the entity that offered up the mileage compensation has been severed or badly compromised. Commissions are not getting paid and in cases where the airline is more heavily involved, it often means someone cut ties and it aint gonna get fixed. With that, they axe us, the customers who thought we were going to get the miles.

In most cases it is a hard sell to later obtain them. In the case of RebTel, a lot of babble and near evidence may exist that may reveal to them that most if not every person who went for the 792 mile offer planned only to cancel the minute they signed up.

While this may have been ok in the T&Cs and may be ok in many other areas, the company and/or its aggregates, affiliates and partners (airline or otherwise) can and often will find a way to weasel out of it all and call us the scammers. And if laws were broken, who here is going to get a lawyer to sue someone in Sweden? They know this. So herein lies the uphill battle that I hope I am completely wrong about.

:)MM

as your own signature line can prove evident, it is hardly the $10 worth of miles people here may be bent on. It's both the volume and the principle of the thing. And in my experience, those who put forth this bogus offer who now fail to pay out as promised are part of a growing trend we all hope you never ever have to fall victim to in ANY area of mile-dum. But you will. Oh yes, you will.

Nobody has asked me for a bank direct referral, but that doesn't cause me angst either. Look, I've had plenty of signups that didn't pan out. I moved on until I found one that did, and then I invested the energy you're wasting here milking that opportunity for all I could until it ultimately went dry. To each their own though.

My point was, imagine if everyone who signed onto your referral was promised X miles, and you were also promised X miles for doing the connection. Then none of you got any of it. Maybe 1000 miles is only worth about $10 too but wouldn't that make you a bit upset? What if you also learned that the company that had you do this connection STILL gained from all your and other peoples referral and sign up efforts?

I invested time in this gig solely to point out ways to try and fight for the miles. I have nothing to gain from it as I have said I didn't even participate in this thing. But I see a growing trend and if we don't bother with the little $10 mile deals, then we will also lose out on the bigger ones.

Maybe there are things we sign up for that we do and just don't care about either way, but I still don't like it if someone else is going to get to party off MY efforts or MY sign up, promise me something for it, and then give me nothing at all in the end. Not unless I actually gave them permission to do so.

I think it's safe to say Rebtel terminated their affiliate agreement with freecause for non-compliance with their affiliate policy. If you value miles at what US Airways sells them (2.5 cents or more) the value of 792 miles was more than $10.

http://www.rebtel.com/Documents/Affi...for_Rebtel.pdf

Basically, Rebtel had put that in their agreement to avoid exactly what happened here - people signing up only for the bonus without any intent to use the service, so I can't find fault with them. You can probably find scapegoat though. I personally can't get upset with freecause, after all the miles their portal provided me for free this summer. I guess you had to have found the right offer to arbitrage. :D I am just glad nobody was stupid enough to blog about the other ones that actually paid.

makes sense to me that if they terminated their FC agreement, they are seeing that as an out.

Sadly, it is very wrong to have people sign up for X when such an agreement IS in place only to later cancel the agreement and the people who signed up for X get nowhere.

But I do have a multi-layered question...

Where is it written or even fully understood that one cannot do something JUST to get miles? And why is it wrong to get miles?
How can we be sure that people would actually just cancel this? What if some did not? Are we being presumptuous by saying we feel all these people are possibly about to screw us over and so we backed out? Seems a bit weird to me. I dunno maybe they have laws about that.

I did some high yield FC stuff myself in June. None was too publicized to be "FT'd" and thus over used but it was all right there on the website portals!

However, FC and the shopping partner also severed ties. Guess when? You guessed it: Right when we all asked where our miles were! Wow.

That one aint over yet though...

I signed up and purchased a calling card from them and used it, but never got any miles. I bought from them only because the $10 miles will offset the higher price i am paying for the card.

On the second thought they should have a minimum purchase requirement mentioned to avoid the "people signing up only for the bonus without any intent to use the service" situation. Without any such requirement not giving miles is bait and switch.

But you see, only those of us who signed up ONLY to get miles and then cancel shall ever receive anything. Anyone like yourself who actually USED the service and paid for it will suffer forever (that's at least how it seems, eh?)

On your second point... I find the problem is that marketers and companies like RebTel and heck, Cartera among others find it way too costly and difficult to actually put that simple two line disclaimer into their web ads.

I mean, in the days of radio, it would have been hard and costly to change an ad once the deadline passed to change things before air time. And you only had so much time on your ad to speak or it cost a lot more, right?

In the days of TV, we have all seen those car dealership ads with tiny blurry print (good thing for HD though, eh?) that flashes by at full speed when the ad is nearly over that we are supposed to have fully read and understood... They also have little time to ad anything to the commercials. There's an issue of time/cost for TV as well.

In a newspaper or magazine, Once it's in print, that's it! And there are deadlines, space constraints, where and how your ad will run, how much per line, etc etc.

But with the web? Why... it's pretty much impossible to change anything! Or so it seems, right? After all, you would need to actually hire someone who can type. Someone who can easily make changes at any time upon approval of management. Someone to read and vet and/or catch things in your online promos and ads up to, what, 2 seconds before posting it on your site? Or is it at any time, so long as you have an average student middleschooler with a computer and a FTP link that might be awake and able to enter the live pages at 3am?

yah, costs too much to change those things. Costs way too much to add in such lines of text that might actually enable customers to know what they are getting into and what to watch out for. Or how to stear away potential problems that anyone working there who thinks outside the box (you know these days how so many companies are asking to hire people who think outside the box) can spot!

I guess we are screwed!

The only reason i bought something from them is because i know that "you just signed up for miles" argument will come. Well....you buy something from them , you don't buy something, Its not going to matter. We are screwed.


They can simply say it's a mistake and not honor. That is easy than spending time to make sure that things are right.