As most have read, the Goldpoints folks are auditing points credited via the ValuMags promotion. I've been told a big part of the audit has been going back and deducting points credited for *not* spending money -- i.e. Gold Points credited for money not spent via the 15% discount many people used. They say people are not going to get 450 or even 150 points per dollar that they didn't spend on magazines.

So that's one of the reasons Gold Points are being deducted from some accounts.

Now the "how" bit is a quite bit more messy. If you think you've already had points deducted for the discount, check the rate they were deducted at. [Don't guess, do the math to figure out if it was really 150 or 450 per dollar discount]. Also check to see if some more points have been deducted over the last week or so.

Apparently what's happened to many accounts is that Goldpoints originally deducted points for the discounts at the rate of 150 per dollar not spent, when those transactions were actually credited at the rate of 450 points per dollar not spent.

So recently they have been going back and "correcting" things to deduct points at the rate of 450 points per dollar not spent via the discounts. Unfortunately, it seems they stuffed up some accounts by putting through a new adjustment transaction deducting 450 points per discount dollar when they already had deducted 150 points per dollar of discount in an earlier transaction. Oops. Net effect is some Valuemag purchases now have 600 (450 + 150) points deducted per dollar not spent using the discounts. From the sounds of it this was an unfortunate mistake, not a vast conspiracy on the part of Goldpoints some make it out to be.

I broke this out under a separate subject line since in the 57 messages (so far) in the "GOLDPOINTS is taking back thread" no one bothered to explain the source of these deductions, only whine about them and/or flame Goldpoints in general.


[This message has been edited by Quokka (edited 03-07-2002).]

By the way, with the info above I set to auditing 5 accounts of friends and family myself. I found one account where excessive points were inadvertantly deducted. Goldpoints fixed it. I found another account was off by 450 points (which looked like rounding since it's one dollar worth).

Three of the accounts are now showing 0 Gold Points. Those account holders redeemed Goldpoints into miles before Goldpoints got around to auditing their accounts. In each of those three cases, my calculations show those account holders got points/miles credited on the dollars they didn't actually spend using discounts and they redeemed them into miles before Goldpoints audited their accounts. In one case the number of extra miles walked away with was quite substantial.

The owner of that account was livid about Goldpoints draining the last 9000 points out of his account. Once he saw the spreadsheet and realized what he got away with, he decided against calling Goldpoints and complaining (go figure).




[This message has been edited by Quokka (edited 03-07-2002).]

Quokka, you must be really in love with GoldPoints.
You are absolutely right, in the past 2 month they made every possible F***ING mistake one can think about. In fact I challenge you to find an error they did not make, and if you will still somehow find it - I guarantee they will commit it too.
What you described in your post shows that database people at GP have an expertise of freshmen CS student from the bottom of the class studying SQL for 2 month, all this problems could've been fixed in 24 hours at most.
I dealt with worst problems in less time and so thousands upon thousands of others.
All this demonstrates a complete lapse of business and professional ethics.

Nope. The ValueMags deal was a great promotion that was unfortunately stuffed up on the back end. It's obvious the GoldPoints folks were overwhelmed by the response and have been struggling to get caught up.

Many accounts have had points deducted and it sounds like many more will have points deducted as the auditing continues. Since there were over 50 posts in the "*GOLDPOINTS* is taking points back" thread without one of them mentioning why points were being deducted, I thought it might be useful to mention one of the major reasons for the activity.

Yes, there are some accounts in a woeful mess and anyone who's in that position has my sympathy ... but only up to a point. Flaming and rants about Goldpoints aren't very helpful to fixing those problems and frankly aren't really interesting any more.

Until you take up employment at Goldpoints I suspect people are going to need to work with the folks already there.


[This message has been edited by Quokka (edited 03-08-2002).]