Nicole's Savings Advantage -- Moneymaker or Scam?

Nicole's Saving Advantage claims to be a discount club where members can save up to 90% on their everyday purchases from hundreds of merchants by shopping through their special offer links. You can try it for only $2.95 for the first month, and $9.95 a month after that.

Nicole's Savings Advantage is so confident you'll love their program they're offering you a $25 Target gift card AND a $25 Starbucks gift card AND a FREE 6-week subscription to Celebrity Gossip Magazine just for trying their service for 30 days.

If you decide you don't like the program afterall, simply cancel your membership and the gift cards are yours to keep. You'll be out of $2.95 but you should get $50 gift cards in return. Pretty sweet moneymaker, eh?

Well, not so fast. If you blog hop a little in search of review of Nicole Saving's Advantage, you'll notice that there are quite a bit of disgruntled members. There are complaints of not being able to cancel and the site is not usable as none of the links work. If you can't cancel, then they'll keep billing you and at $9.95 a month after the first month, this deal could easily end up costing you more than the value of the gift cards.

Also, I read somewhere that you don't receive the cards right away. Instead, you get a postcard that you need to mail back to claim your cards. I don't understand the purpose of that. Why don't they just send you the cards right away?

Having said all that, I think I'd still sign up myself. I'll be using a card that only has $5 on it; enough to cover the first month's fee but not the additional months. If they turn out to be a scam, I'm only going to lose $5 and I can blog about my first hand experience about this discount club.

If you want to sign up for Nicoles Savings Advantage yourself, sign up here. Remember to use a card that doesn't have much funds (a reloadable card, maybe?) just in case.