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Aug 26, 2008 5:16 pm US/Pacific
Online Coupons Deal Too Good To Be True
(CBS 5)
Some consumers were pleased to find online coupons for some basic household products, but the deal turned out to be too good to be true.
"I really need to save money and it's fun. Finding coupons and finding sales it really maximizes my shopping dollar," said mother of two Linda Doss, who was thrilled when she saw coupons for free Chapstick and $6 off of shampoo.
She found the coupons online, and started printing. Then she noticed blogs questioning the validity of the deal.
"Because they were high value coupons and they came from, not the manufacturer, they came from a third party…Vyrlmkt," said Doss.
Doss emailed Vyrlmkt and they responded with an email saying "someone has hacked into our development database."
They told her some of coupons were not to be used.
We sat down with Harry Soza of Vyrlmkt and asked how all of these coupons end up online that weren't legitimate.
"That's something I really can't address...I'm not certain," said Soza.
"We didn't put them back up after they ran out...so how people got them and so on is somebody else's matter," he continued.
It angered coupon users who question the company's hacking story.
We asked about the manufacturer's involvement in the couponing?
"I will answer this one, we had communication with senior representatives to tell them. Their answer was it's so small, so unlikely to be successful...to go with it...so that's what we went with," said Soza.
But Proctor and Gamble told CBS 5 they never agreed to this and would not redeem the coupons.
We asked Soza if in any way did this experiment backlash.
"Learning is always difficult and when you do an experiment you will always have things you learn that you never intended to learn," said Soza.
Vyrl Marketing tells CBS5 it has turned the hacking problem over to the FBI.
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