A Possible Explanation
Someone on teh intarwebs has suggested an explanation for why I got signed up for all these trial offers which mostly makes sense to me: affiliate partner fraud.
Assume that what all these acai-berry-mongers and auto insurance salesmen have in common is that you can sign up with them as an affiliate: if someone visits your website, you pass them along to the berrymonger's website, and then if that person places an order, you get a percentage of the sale for having referred the customer.
So the scam artist signs up with a bunch of these websites, acquires someone's personal information, and passes that person off to all those websites as being a legitimate customer. The percentage that the scammer gets of each individual sale isn't much, but if you have enough customers and sign them up for enough websites fast enough, it adds up. Then somehow the scammer is able to get their hands on their affiliate fees before someone figures out there's a problem.
This idea doesn't 100% work for me because I would think that the companies, if they were smart, wouldn't pay the affiliates their percentages until the orders were verified as being legitimate. However I'm open to the idea that the scammers have figured out a way to bamboozle the system just long enough to make a buck. Anyway, it's the best suggested explanation I've heard so far.
Assume that what all these acai-berry-mongers and auto insurance salesmen have in common is that you can sign up with them as an affiliate: if someone visits your website, you pass them along to the berrymonger's website, and then if that person places an order, you get a percentage of the sale for having referred the customer.
So the scam artist signs up with a bunch of these websites, acquires someone's personal information, and passes that person off to all those websites as being a legitimate customer. The percentage that the scammer gets of each individual sale isn't much, but if you have enough customers and sign them up for enough websites fast enough, it adds up. Then somehow the scammer is able to get their hands on their affiliate fees before someone figures out there's a problem.
This idea doesn't 100% work for me because I would think that the companies, if they were smart, wouldn't pay the affiliates their percentages until the orders were verified as being legitimate. However I'm open to the idea that the scammers have figured out a way to bamboozle the system just long enough to make a buck. Anyway, it's the best suggested explanation I've heard so far.