Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson claims in a lawsuit that Discover Bank telemarketers selling identity-theft and credit-score monitoring services fail to tell consumers when they are agreeing to purchase those products, according to several media reports.
The suit alleges that Discover's telemarketers lulled cardholders into thinking they were getting a "courtesy call," then read a sales script so quickly - often skipping over key words - that many cardholders reflexively said, "Yes," or, "OK."
Discover treated these responses as agreements to sign up for a new product, even when there was no clear consent and the customer did not understand the terms, the lawsuit alleges.
The credit card bank, a unit of Discover Financial Services, reaped more than $300 million in revenue last year from selling those products, Swanson said Monday in an announcement of the filing of the suit in Minneapolis.
"It is particularly ironic for credit card companies like Discover to charge people's accounts for optional fee-based products without their informed consent because the credit card company touts its fraud prevention capabilities," she said.
