Over the last few months, my wife and I have used our credit card miles to pay for some airline tickets. Therefore, when I saw a $10 charge in January from Reservation Rewards, I thought it must have been one of those little surcharges that you pay for trading your miles for flights. Same thing in February. Well, I just opened my bill for March, and it's there again. Hmmmm.

I went to the ReservationRewards.com website to check it out. They claim to be a discount service for all sorts of internet services. But a quick internet search using "reservation rewards scam" pulled up thousands of hits. It hit me that I've been scammed, and so have a lot of people, and it has been going on for years. Reservation Rewards is part of a larger operation called Webloyalty.com. Many people have filed Better Business Bureau complaints and FTC complaints, yet they are still in operation.

Here's how the scumbags do it (or at least one way they do it). They offer legitimate businesses, such as priceline.com or fandango.com, either shopping cart services (providing the technology to handle online transactions) or a discount coupon service where, at the end of a transaction, a window pops up offering the consumer a discount on their next purchase. If you click OK, then you are unwittingly signing up to be a member of Reservation Rewards and here's the key: they take, without your knowledge, your credit card information from the purchase you just made with the business and start charging you a monthly fee. And what do you get for that fee? Why, nothing, of course.

I immediately called Reservation Rewards and, predictably, got a recorded message stating that, get this, their phone system is down for maintenance. Riiiight... I then tried to discontinue my "membership" online but, of course, their system does not recognize my email address. I sent an email to their customer service, but I am not holding my breath that they will actually respond.

The good news is that my credit card company agreed to dispute the charge for not only this month, but last month too. So I may escape from this having lost only $10 plus about two hours of my time -- unless the charge appears again next month.

So what business did I patronize that started this nightmare? I'm guessing it was fandango.com, movie tickets online. There was probably a popup offer for a discount on my next purchase .and I probably assumed that fandango wasn't going to transmit my credit card information without my knowledge to an unknown company just because I clicked an OK button for a discount code. How silly of me.

The lesson: never, ever click OK on any kind of offer that appears after making a purchase. Scammers like Webloyalty.com and ReservationRewards.com might be waiting...