If you look at the edit history of JustFab wiki page, you'll see most of the stuff related to their shady business practice was added after last year's discussion [3]
The credit card was issued by China Construction Bank. China's financial & banking system is not as advanced as the US, many Chinese people don't use online banking at all.
Her father was the main card holder, and she was using the second card, her father paid the bills every month as soon as he received the paper statement, he didn't notice anything suspicious.
Some people asked why it took her 8 months to find out [3]: she was studying for her Master degree in the US, didn't have a SSN, was using a credit card issued by a bank in her home country, her father paid the bill for her at home and didn't notice anything unusual until she finished her study and came home to look at the credit card bills.
My girlfriend was studying in the US at the time, she didn't have a SSN, she was using a visa card issued by the china construction bank, her father paid the bill every month and didn't notice anything unusual. She finished her study and returned back to China last month, only then did she find out the $39.95 charge for the last eight months. Basically JustFab robbed her $320 for nothing.
It kept me wonder why a company with very questionable (I will try to avoid using the word "fraudulent") business model was able to raise big money. Didn't the VCs have to do the due diligence?
I didn't have any direct experience with JustFab. The victim was my girlfriend. Back in January or so, one of her friends emailed her a link to JustFab, then she bought a pair of shoes from www.justfab.com and never visit the website again. Only 8 months later, in early September she was appalled to find out that her credit card has been charged a $39.95 fee for the last eight months. Yes, $39.95 for 8 months, without geting anything from JustFab.
I then did a bit research on the internet. It turned out my girlfriend wasn't the only victim. Apparently JustFab works like this: once you buy something from their website, you become their "VIP member". Then you will have to log into their website between the 1st-5th of each month and click “Skip This Month”. If no action is taken (either skip this month, or cancel your account), they just charge you a $39.95 fee every month.
According to the Business insider article, JustFab "will generate about $100 million this year" in sales, I wonder how much of this $100 million are from people like my girlfriend who simply didn't read their entire 2,500 words Terms of Service and were unaware that they were charged $39.95 a month for nothing.
"In the study, which follows up on another report done last year by comScore called the Power of Like, the research firm found that being a fan of a brand on Facebook causes people to purchase that brand more frequently.
For example, comScore tracked people who were Starbucks fans on Facebook against a control group of people who weren't exposed to those messages. ComScore found that over a four-week period, fans and their friends bought 38% more frequently at Starbucks than people who weren't exposed to the Facebook marketing."
social news, yes, but the larger part of the Pubup.org site is for research papers and scientific journal articles, I believe this is the first of its kind.
Yes, that's a good point. I think in addition to sharing research articles and reviews, the PubUp system can also be used to post or link to scientific news, blog posts, or anything related to the community, that's why we have a "News" category in addition to the "Bio, Chem, CS, Math, Physics, etc" categories.
We are trying to build a system where users can share papers (both published and preprint) they deem important, write a short review/commentary on the paper: why it is good or not good, what else can be done, whether the experiment can be reproduced, is the conclusion solid or not, etc, then people can comment on the paper, comment on the reviews, upvote/downvote, any everything.
This is our fun side project, and we just launched 3 days ago, so badly need feedback from the community. Thanks for your comment!
Thank you for your input, yes, it is hard to attract users in this field, reaching a critical mass is even harder, and feel free to share the papers your read with PubUp. We just launched 3 days ago, and welcome all kinds of ideas. Can you explain a bit "a researchblogging-like trackback system"? PubUp.org does have a trackback when users link to the URLs of other sources. I took a look at your site, seems a very nice blog!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6455391