If these companies are indeed selling their customer's credit card information so the customer can be charged, that's a pretty serious offense. However, I believe the AG is making statements that could be interpreted that way in order to bolster his position.

I frequently buy on-line and get the offer to "receive $10 off the order you just placed by trying our club." Often I will take them up on it, but I always read the fine print. You are usually given 30 days to try it out, so I set a reminder on my calendar to call and cancel in 21 days.

And if it's true that, "Because of the relatively low dollar amount of the charges, the fees may go unnoticed for some time.", then people need to start checking their credit card statements more carefully.

I don't deny that some of these come-ons are a little sneaky, and that should absolutely stop, but if someone is being charged for a membership in one of these things for months without them noticing it, then that person needs to take a little responsibility for managing their finances better.

Any word if Zynga is on their list as well?

On my last job, I took customer service calls for them in billing.  Quite a few of the people who called fell into three or four distinct categories: 1) Those who were charged that had never, ever played a Zynga game, let alone used Facebook or Myspace, 2) Those who were charged and did play, yet never spent a dime, 3) Technical support calls (Even though we had a live line for billing, there was no such line for tech support.  Go figure.) and 4) Those who played the poker games and reported that their chips had been stolen (I never understood this one.  Why would someone try to steal poker chips for a game that you wouldn't win any real money playing?)

Some of those who paid for points through the third party companies said they never got them.  Since our call center was an outside contractor, we had no direct line to Zynga's SF main office and the supervisors we had were barely qualified to handle the tough questions that many of these customers asked.  As such, we pretty much had to give our own explanations based on what information we had.  I would say that Zynga had little to no supervision over these third party companies and I advocated a caveat emptor approach when dealing with them.  What Cuomo would suggest here, if Zynga is indeed named (and thus could give the class-action lawsuit more traction) is that Zynga was more aware of these transactions than they let on and simply let them happen.  If it is true, then they could be in real serious trouble.