In October of 2008, I signed up on GreenLivingRewards.com (owned by TheRewardDepot.com) for a “free” Vespa. The agreement was complete 12 offers on the appropriate pages, and I would receive a Vespa LX50. I've done incentive marketing sites before, so I'm familiar with how they operate. I read all of the fine print carefully. One of the terms was that I had 120 from signing up to complete all 12 offers.

I enrolled in late October, but a glitch on TheRewardDepot's end wouldn't allow me to sign in to complete my offers. After a month of emailing them, they fixed the problem and I was able to sign in on 11/29/2008. Although I'd initially signed up in October, I was told my 120 days wouldn't start until the date I was able to actually sign in (11/29). I completed 11 offers the same day. I did the 12th on 12/12/08. At the time that I signed up, the terms and conditions stated that there was a 30-day waiting period between signing up with a sponsor and receiving credit from TheRewardDepot.com. I knew I had plenty of time (120 days), even if one of my offers didn't credit and I needed to do a replacement.

By the time I was able to start offers, the waiting period had been extended to 45 days. A week later they extended it to 75 days. In mid-January, they changed their terms once again. It was now 105 days in between completing an offer and getting credit. The time limit to complete remained 120 days. This put my initial 11 offers crediting on 3/15/09, and my 12th offer two weeks later.

On February 20th (Day 83), my status showed that 8/12 offers had credited. I emailed TheRewardDepot to ask about the status of the other 4. They told me that the 12/12/08 offer was still in a waiting period, but to send them the confirmation emails I'd received for the other 3 and they would look into it. On March 5, they confirmed one of those 3, putting me at 9/12 complete. On March 9, they informed me that one sponsor reported that I didn't purchase their product through the link on TheRewardDepot's site, and therefore I could not receive credit. I did another make-up offer.

The problem began here. On March 9, TheRewardDepot wrote me again to say that they had not heard back from the last of the original offers (FreeCreditReport.com, or “FCR”). I began writing to TheRewardDepot weekly, asking them about the status of my FCR offer. They kept giving me the same answer: “Oh, we're still waiting to hear back from them.” Eventually, they just stopped responding to my emails. This went on from March through June. By then, even the replacement offer had credited, putting me at 11/12 complete. Still, they supposedly never heard back from FCR. In mid June, they finally emailed me back to tell me that oops, FCR HAD responded, and that my credit was denied. But now I was outside of the 120 day limit, so I was disqualified.

What TheRewardDepot did was set a time limit in which I had to complete all of my offers, but then intentionally made it impossible for me to do so by refusing to respond to my inqueries about the status of one offer until it was too late. I signed up for the offer on 11/29/08, and my 105 day waiting period was up on 3/15/09. As I'd begun inquiring long before that date, TheRewardDepot should have done one of three things:
1.Given me credit, since I sent them the confirmation emails and screenshots proving I'd done it
2.Let me know in a timely fashion that the offer refused (or at least wasn't responding) so I could do a make-up offer, or
3.Extended my time period to complete a 12th offer.

In short, TheRewardDepot engaged in immoral and borderline-fraudulent practices by intentionally impeding my progress and blocking me from being able to complete the offer within the time frame. They were intentionally giving me the run-around with their failure to respond to the FreeCreditReport situation, or failing to resolve the situation, so that they could stall while the clock ran out on my account.