CyberRebate

Cyberrebate.com, Inc. was an online retailer founded in May 1998 that went bankrupt in May 2001, after the collapse of the dot-com bubble.

The company sold items at grossly inflated prices, as much as 10 times the list price, but promised customers a 100% rebate.[1][2][3]

The company relied on the assumption that 50% of its customers would neglect to apply for their rebate.[4][5]

History

Joel Granik, Joseph Lichter and Athan Vadiakas started the website on May 16, 1998. By November 2000, the company claimed to have rebated $39 million to its customers.[6]

In January 2001, it was the third–ranked online retailer in the United States and had 7.7 million web users per month.[4][7]

The company filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11, Title 11, United States Code on 16 May 2001, citing $83.3 million in liabilities and $24.5 million in assets.[7] Approximately $80 million was due directly to customers in unpaid rebates.[4] At the time of the bankruptcy filing and there were 9 customers that were due pending rebates of $79,000-$100,000 each.[8]

In April 2005, some creditors were awarded $0.08802 per dollar of allowed claims. A second, final disbursement was made to creditors in August 2006 for $0.0006276 per dollar of allowed claims, or roughly $1 for every $1,600 claimed.

gollark: Probably just use the default value for `dklen`.
gollark: `pass` is the password input, `salt` is the salt, `iter` is how many times to run it (you want a value which makes it fairly slow but not so much that server admins will consume your soul), `dklen` is the... output key length? I'm not sure.
gollark: Er, you probably want that, yes.
gollark: I have no idea about that specific API, I'll check.
gollark: Modern password hashing functions are designed to be slow to run (and to be fastest on general-purpose computing hardware and not ASICs) to mitigate this sort of thing.

References
  1. Dineen, J.K. (May 18, 2001). "CHARGE CYBER SCAM HIT BUYERS FOR $80M". New York Daily News.
  2. GLASNER, JOANNA (May 19, 2001). "THE DAY THE REBATES DIED". Wired.
  3. "Cyber Rebate". NPR. May 17, 2001.
  4. Edmonston, Peter (May 18, 2001). "CyberRebate's Plan Costs Web Buyers Some Big Bucks". The Wall Street Journal.
  5. Blank, Christine (May 29, 2001). "No More Checks From CyberRebate". DM Digital.
  6. "Free gifts at CyberRebate". CNN. November 20, 2000.
  7. Livingston, Brian (May 18, 2001). "Millions vaporized in CyberRebate collapse". CNET.
  8. Tan, Shannon (July 23, 2001). "Failed company provides expensive lesson in online-rebate risks". The Baltimore Sun.
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