Small business owners who fail to carefully review their monthly phone bills could end up paying the unauthorized charges for months. One unsolicited fax hitting Central Kentucky businesses in the last week offers a free 6 page web site creation and free domain name registration. All you have to do is fill out your company name, contact and telephone number. With that information, they can cram your phone bill with an unauthorized monthly charge. And in fact, hidden in the wording on the fax, you are told that as a condition of this free offer, you have to host your site on their server for at least a year, but what they fail to disclose is any cost associated with doing so.
Small businesses can protect themselves by knowing their rights.
If you receive bills for services you didn't order, don't pay. Assign purchasing to designated staff. And document your purchases. A company called Inet International operating out of California was charged with deceptively claiming investors could earn hundreds of thousands of dollars by marketing Internet access and Internet-related goods and services. Watch out for a company called Corporate Personnel.