Is Legacy.com, a swindle?-recent revelations may have revealed this to be a case according to Boing Boing and
another website. There larger question becomes is the online obituary a con job, a fraud?
Snippet From idlewords.com
Are Newspaper Obituaries and Online Obits a Scam
“I decided to see what the other end of this operation looked like. As an experiment, I visited the obituary section of the New York Times website and followed the steps to submit my own online death notice, stopping only at the final confirmation screen.
I learned the following things:
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The death notice section of pretty much every major US newspaper is run by legacy.com, “skinned” to look like the rest of that newspaper’s site.
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The first step in creating a legacy.com death notice, before anything else, is providing a credit card number.
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At no point, including the final confirmation screen, does legacy.com tell you how much you will be charged.
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At no point is there a link that you can follow to find out how much you will be charged.
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The site requires you to confirm that the transaction you are about to complete is completely non-refundable, even though they never disclose the amount.
Screenshots here: one, two, three, four. You can also try this for yourself, use 4111 1111 1111 1111 as a credit card number.
In other words, the site takes money from bereaved people without disclosing what it’s billing them, gambling on the fact that they’re probably too preoccupied to care. Whether or not this kind of thing is legal, it is completely unethical. Even an undertaker who has upsold you on everything from coffin to funeral buffet has to show you a number before you sign on the dotted line.
If you Google around long enough, you may find your way to the New York Times rate sheet, where the small print tells you that an online death notice costs “from $79″. But you won’t find this information from anywhere within the legacy.com payment funnel, nor will you find any more information about that evocative word from.
I find it odious and troubling that the New York Times, along with a raft of other major newspapers, partners with this kind of website. It seems like further confirmation that newspapers will now clutch at any revenue stream.
I would very much like to see an online competitor put these vultures out of business. I think a respectable and respectful business model would be to charge a small fee for death notices and make comments read-only after some interval unless the creator paid to extend a default moderation period.”via idlewords.com
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