My wife and I looked into Allicance Law Center (ALC) for a modification. Our home was already in default and calls to our lender were unanswered. We checked out ALC. Confirmed the lawyers are California BAR certified and that they had no complaints from the BBB.
After talking with Mathew Markley, a salesman for ALC, in late Feb and his phone promise that our modification was a slam dunk, that he would 'personally deliver our $4200 to our front door if they could not help us out.' Mathew often used christian greetings and even his emails have scripture quotes. He promised to God that at best it would only be 6-8 weeks or so to get our modification done with a principle reduction and a fixed rate, we agreed to give it a shot.
After cashing our check and getting our documents via certified mail the salesman asked for, phone calls and emails from ALC stopped cold. After a couple of weeks of not hearing from them, we tried to contact them. We left numerous messages. Emails to Mathew no longer worked, in fact, all emails to this company bounced back as undeliverable. After about the 8th week of being 'under contract' with ALC and unable to contact them, we had to contact a Bancruptcy Attorney to save our house from foreclosuer.
We sent an email to ALC requesting our money back, even though we knew it would bounce. It was the best we could do to prove we had tried to stay in contact. We also have kept a diary of phone logs.
About 1 week after talking to our BK Lawyer, my wife did manage to contact Tishna, who identified herself as 'our' attorney on the phone. At this time, my wife made it clear that we would not use ALC for any purpose as we could not get ahold of them and had to hire a different attorney to stop foreclosuer.
Again, with Tishna, we requested a refund. Tishna was very nice on the phone. She explained that ALC had moved and many things had changed since we were under contract. She did not have our file and explained that it had been lost. She took a short history of our case from my wife and said it was very unlikely that ALC could get a principle reduction and a fixed rate as was originally promised. She said we should get our money back.
Over the next week or so, we were contacted 3 times by Cameron Edwards. His only purpose to calling was to try and convince us that we should stay with ALC. We made it very clear at every phone call that we did not wish too. At best, we talked with him 15 minutes over 3 phone calls.
Cameron then turned our account over to Nicole Corah. She advised via e-mails only that there would be some charges on our account as that ALC had done some work on our behalf. We could not believe this at all so we asked for an itemized account of what was done.
2 days later, we got an email from Nicole that said we would be refunded $2600 of the $4200 we sent them. She listed 6 phone calls to attorney's, plus she listed her time in finalizing what her company owed us. There are no dates or actual time periods of these phone calls from attorneys. There is also a very vague charge of data input for account.in all, we were charged 8 hours at $200 an hour, with most of the charges being to lawyer phone calls, including Cameron. The only time Carmeron was talked was when he orginated the phone call to try and keep our business, of which we kept declining. It appears to us Cameron was charging us $200 for eaech phone call, just to hear us say, please give us our money back.
It has now been 6 weeks that we were promised $2600 back. Todate, we still have not received anything. At best, only a lawyer consultation fee of 1 hour should be charged. Our longest phone call with any attorney was Tishna, and that was maybe 15 minutes. Techinally, once the emails bounced back and phone calls were not returned, our requests to dismiss our lawyer should have been the very first time with no fees at all.
We are convinced this company is a scam. They have done nothing to suggest otherwise. The only praise you can find from this company is supplied by ALC. Don't believe it.
ALC will take your money. You will lose your house. Paying them keeps their American Dream alive, not yours.
0 comments