A Crackdown Is Coming for People Hanging On To Student Discounts (msn.com) 47
Major U.S. companies are tightening eligibility requirements for student discounts, cracking down on graduates who continue to claim benefits years after leaving school. Amazon, Spotify, and other firms are partnering with verification services like SheerID to validate student status, ending an era of lax enforcement that allowed many to exploit discounts long after graduation.
While companies aim to build brand loyalty among young consumers, they're also guarding against fraud. SheerID claims it helped clients avoid $2 billion in fraudulent discounts last year. Most streaming services retain over 90% of student customers after graduation, according to SheerID CEO Stephanie Copeland Weber. "They're building trust and loyalty with those consumers," she told WSJ.
While companies aim to build brand loyalty among young consumers, they're also guarding against fraud. SheerID claims it helped clients avoid $2 billion in fraudulent discounts last year. Most streaming services retain over 90% of student customers after graduation, according to SheerID CEO Stephanie Copeland Weber. "They're building trust and loyalty with those consumers," she told WSJ.
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Fraud is a crime.
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But wage theft isn't. Funny how that works.
Re: Empty your pockets (Score:3, Informative)
Not sure I understand. Wage theft IS actually a crime too. If your boss says "you get paid XYZ", and your check is short, you can and should take them to small claims court. (Especially if they're refusing to pay if you just left the company.)
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And how many years will the small claims court judge sentence the wage thief? What with as you say, it being a crime.
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But wage theft isn't. Funny how that works.
Yeah it is. You're just confusing it with being underpaid. Wage theft has a specific definition and is punishable in most places.
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I don't see how any of this is fraud, though. The companies call it fraud, but that doesn't make it fraud according to the law.
Re: Empty your pockets (Score:2)
If you enter into a contract saying that you are XYZ and you aren't, they can and will charge you for the difference. And they should take you to civil court over it. (Again, because this falls under contract law.) But most of the time it's likely not worth it. That's why there's this third party service, which fixed that for them.
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I don't see how any of this is fraud, though. The companies call it fraud, but that doesn't make it fraud according to the law.
Lying on contractual terms is a literal textbook example of fraud. If you're not a student and are using a service intended only for students it is fraud.
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Fraud is a crime.
Yes, but it's very unlikely to be fraud and far more likely to be the fact that someone signed up while a student and since then both they and the company forgot that they had a student discount. At no point did they lie or deliberately deceive the company and the company is just as remiss as the individual if they never asked them to confirm that they were still a student.
However, as an academic who is sometimes eligible for "student" offers (since some companies open eligibility to academics) I've gen
Re: Empty your pockets (Score:2)
What if the contract specifically states that it is your responsibility to tell them, and any damages/overage of discount will be indefinitely due by you? "I forgot" is not a great legal defense.
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Re: Empty your pockets (Score:2)
That's why it's typically not "feels like a student" and something more tangible like taking a small minimum number of credit hours at an accredited college.
ok and? (Score:1)
do you really think those people are going to turn around a pay full price? Amazon and Spotify are both things i would drop without a second thought if they ended my secret little discount
side note: lets not paint the users as the problem here - they did what was legitimately offered to them, its the company's fault for not using their brains and rescinding that discount after 4 years (or something like that)
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Firing bad customers is one of the key things when endless growth ends and company has to work on sustainable business instead.
With zero interest rates and rapid growth phase largely behind us, companies are in fact starting to work on making business sustainable. In part by getting the bad part of clientele to quit.
You can see this shift in a lot of evaluation of companies reducing importance of "users" as a metric, and instead focusing on "revenue (per user and total)" instead.
It's what netflix saw when t
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I'm likely operating on about as much data on subscription numbers as you. That is "what companies involved revealed to us publicly". So I have no way of judging if your assertion is correct or not.
Personally, if I were the one making the call, and this data would be all I had, I would set student tiers. Student, ~1/2x, graduate first year ~2/3x, second year ~3/4x and third year on full price. Or something similar. Ease people in.
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I think your suggestions are quite reasonable: transitioning former students to full-fee tiers has the benefit of removing the shock of a "doubling-in-price !!!" change.
It's a little entitled to think discounts should / could be perpetual.
By the same token, those former students also have the option of dumping the subscription like a lead balloon if they object to any price increase.
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As I noted above, firing those sorts of users or getting them to quit is one of the major parts of being a successful business. Those are the people who will often cost you more to have than what they bring in, and/or will cause dissatisfaction and demoralization of the actually good customers who may hear about things like discount abuse and go "why not me?"
The issue here seems to be that once the proof of being a student is sent, it's never checked again. So the abuse is rampant, just like "family sharing
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Precisely this. In a former life I worked for a Satellite TV provider. With cord cutting and the decline of cable they were hyper-focused on making sure that they only kept "good" customers. It turns out that a lot of customers are just barely profitable, and many are actually unprofitable. The marketing costs for obtaining new customers was relatively high, and with some campaigns they found that they had added a whole bunch of customers, but the customers in question weren't worth the effort. The cus
Re: ok and? (Score:1)
They shouldn't just stop the discount. They should go after you for any fraudulent discount. Contracts are basically a "gentleman's agreement" until it has teeth when taken to a courtroom. Don't be a dick and ruin it for the rest of us that are honest.
Currently enrolled ... (Score:2)
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A lifetime discounts for you!
Use my old employers Corp Discounts 20 years after (Score:2)
A little funny (Score:2)
Most of these services just required a .edu email address to be eligible (and maybe self-certifying on top of that). Great, nobody gets a .edu email unless they are enrolled. Except a lot of schools now let you keep your email address for life. Oh and staff members usually get the same format of email.
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At lot of the educational discounts when you read the small print apply to staff or at least certain classes of staff as well. I got a stupid amount of a Surface Book from Microsoft because I happen to work at a University looking after the HPC facility.
Careful what you wish for (Score:2)
Most streaming services retain over 90% of student customers after graduation, ...
Hopefully a significant chunk of this group is not made up of graduates who continue to claim benefits years after leaving school. Otherwise, oopsie.
simple solution - offer a discount that doesn't (Score:5, Insightful)
simple solution - offer student discounts that don't cost you in the end, just limit the profit on it. Thought that was the obvious way to go from day one. (less profit does not equal loss/cost, just a lower profit margin... the mentality of max profit that the customer will bear to pay or you're "losing" money needs to go away)
Didn't they do the calculations in advance to find the term the discount will apply? what their costs would be? and price the service/discount accordingly?
Hunting down students and making it a hassle is the quickest way to have them cancel or find a way to circumvent the check. They'll be paying a company money to lose customers.
For those that say fraud is fraud - these are the same companies that can offer me terms and conditions, subscriptions, and then change the contract when they wish, change the prices when they wish, change the offerings when they wish and the customer has minimal recourse except to accept it or purchase from another service which has a built in cost in time and money for the switch. Fuck'em. Should have done their due diligence before rolling out a promo offer.
If they need to go this route, their shareholders should be asking some questions about how stupid the execs are.
On a side note - "SheerID claims it helped clients avoid $2 billion in fraudulent discounts last year", but what does that actually mean for the businesses?
Did they retain the customers and revenue growth? or just saved $2 billion in fraudulent transactions in identity theft? or pure Student discounts?
Hypothetically, If it was only student discount fraud, did those $2 billion result in additional profits? or a "we saved you $2 Billion in fraudulent discounts, your revenue will also be down $10 billion due to lost transactions, and as a result profits will also be down $3 Billion... but we saved you $2 in those fraudulent discounts."
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Your post is postulating the exact opposite of the "every copy is a lost sale" argument from the record industry. It's equally absurd to think that every identification of fraud will result in an account cancellation. The whole reason people go to the effort of doing something is that they like the thing they signed up for, and they see a chance for a discount. A significant portion of them will pay the full price when their con is exposed. No one signs up for student accounts just for the joy of using stud
Market sets the price (Score:1)
The difference between what the student discount is and actual price can be staggering.
Good luck getting me to pay $$$ for something I can get for $ at tons of other sites. News is a great one WSJ student vs pro is crazy and you can get almost all of the same news elsewhere cheaper or for free.
Differential pricing (Score:2)
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Just what Students Need, more ways to waste time (Score:1, Interesting)
Brand loyalty? (Score:3)
Discounts don't create brand loyalty. They create discount loyalty.
I was a student member of the IEEE back in the day. It was super-cheap. As soon as I graduated, I dropped my IEEE membership because the steep increase in dues was absurd.
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Discounts don't create brand loyalty. They create discount loyalty.
In many cases they create addiction. You can see that by the number of people who still haven't quit Netflix despite years of price increases. In many cases people aren't discount loyal, nor brand loyal. They are product/service loyal. No one shops just because something is discounted. ... Well except the wife, but let's leave her out of it.
I was a student member of the IEEE back in the day. It was super-cheap. As soon as I graduated, I dropped my IEEE membership because the steep increase in dues was absurd.
The IEEE thanks you for mentioning the IEEE in your post. The advertising was worth it. It's good to see giving you a membership in the past has kept us front and centre
Lazy and cheap companies (Score:2)
Where I went to university... (Score:2)
more ways for id fraud! (Score:2)
more ways for id fraud!