Well, technology is at it again - the "technology comes around to bite us in the butt" thing. Some of you may know that many manufacturer's have begun offering coupons that can be printed from the internet. Most of them are for cents off a product, but there is the occasional goodie that is for a totally free product.
Unfortunately, the more tech savvy cheaters around the country have figured out how to exploit this. They do things like re-setting their printer settings to print hundreds of copies no matter what the coupon printing manager says - or capturing the image and putting it in a .pdf file - or just plain ol' scanning coupons. The scanning also comes in to play with coupons that come directly from manufacturers. Have you ever sent in a complaint to a company and gotten coupons from them, sometimes even a coupon for a totally free product? Well, the scanning people do that, get the coupons, scan them and then either make a .pdf file or print out a bunch of them, often on glossy paper to fool people.
Here's a list of many of the counterfeit coupons that are currently circulating. Every one of these was at one time a legitimate coupon, but are either copies of the original or even in some .pdf cases, have been rewritten with a new expiration date!
http://www.cents-off.com/reports_of_...it_coupons.htm
How to be safe? Never print anything that didn't come directly from the manufacturer's website, or authorized coupon websites like SmartSource.com, Coolsavings.com or CustomCoupon. NEVER buy "free product" coupons on Ebay, especially if it says they will mail you a .pdf file to the winner. (Regular cents-off coupons are usually okay.) If a friend emails you "this great coupon I found" then it's probably not legit. If you're not sure, try doing a search at Mycoupons.com or Fatwallet.com or feel free to ask me and I'll try to find out for you.
(Oh, to add to the confusion, there are a few manufacturers that do, in fact, use .pdf files for their coupons. American Greetings greeting cards is the only one I can think of right off hand, but I've seen others along the way.)
Many grocery stores are cracking down on internet-printed coupons because of the rampant fraud. This all started about 4-6 months ago, but they're just now finding out that they're not getting reimbursed for fradulent coupons that they took back then. (It takes a while for coupons to go through the system.) Kroger stores stopped taking ALL "free" coupons even if they came from a manufacturer, at least for now. (They're getting their policy in order, I'm sure they'll change it to "manufacturer's coupons are okay, but no computer printer coupons" eventually.) Other stores won't take any computer-printed coupons, some will take cents-off but not "free" ones.
If we all work together, maybe we can get the coupon game straightened out and back to normal. Savings ahoy!
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