My Citibank credit card statement had a brochure about offers from indiaplaza.in. When I checked the website of indiaplaza.in there was an offer of 100% refund offer via gift coupons for any purchase. Sounds interesting.... Hold on. On reading between the lines. This is all a fraud. When you end up buying anything, they will take their cool time to send you the gift voucher. The vouchers are valid only on indiaplaza.in and to redeem them you have to buy for a value of 5 times the value of the redemption coupon. This reminds me of the story of a business man who landed up in a village and told people that he would pay them Rs. 10 for every monkey that they catch and bring to him. All the villagers were busy catching monkeys by the dozens and collecting money in exchange from the businessman. Very soon the supply reduced and to infuse more demand the businessman hiked his price and told the villagers that he would pay Rs. 20. There was more activity for sometime and people went into the forests to catch monkeys and made a lot of money. sooner the supply dwindled. One was lucky to even sight a monkey leave alone catch it.
There were no monkeys anywhere and people gave up the idea of making money out of monkeys. The business man then came up with another tempting offer and he said that he would offer Rs 100 for each monkey and told the villagers that he had to go to town on some important business and that his assistant would handle the transaction. There were no monkeys in town and people were still ambitious to make money and visited the assistant every day. The assistant on the sly told the villagers that he would sell all the monkeys that the businessman had bought, back to the villagers at the rate of Rs 50 per monkey and when the businessman returned they could sell it back to him for Rs. 100. Suddenly there was a lot of activity.
People brought out the last penny they had and invested in the monkeys. After all the monkeys were bought by the villagers, the assisant vanished and there was no sign of the businessman returning. All the villagers were left holding their monkeys. Welcome to Indiaplaza.in.
What citibank and indiaplaza.in are doing is an unfair trade practice. But who cares. We are supposed to have a government to monitor all this. My stern warning to all individuals do not fall for such stupid offers on online websites. You will be taken for a ride you will be left holding monkeys which were in indiaplaza.in.