ShopFreedom Online received my information from the credit reporting agencies after I had my credit pulled to buy a home. They contact you and tell you that they "heard that you are interested in making money from home". I informed them that I had no interest and asked to be removed from their list 3 or 4 times.
One afternoon, while driving back to work from lunch, I got one person who was particularly pushy, and I gave him the time of day. After arguing with him for 15 minutes about what a fraud this likely was, I decided to go for the bare minimum package (which they told me was actually cut in half from the original bare minimum they'd proposed to me).
I paid like $150 or $250 or so to have a website set up where several "fortune 500 companies" would use my site to sell products and give me a commission of sorts because they would ship it straight from the warehouse instead of having to send it to the stores. My logic was that if nothing else I would just purchase X-mas stuff and other necessary items from my own site and take that commission to offset the money I paid up front.
A week or so later I received a call from my "coach" that they promised would call me at LEAST once a week to help me build up this business and ensure that it was profitable. They assure you over and over that if you can simply afford to devote 1 hour of time to "building your business" that you will suceed.
Michael Micheli (sp?), my "coach", called me and began talking to me about the business. He was lucky enough to catch me on a rough day at work in which I was really hating my job and wishing that I was wealthy. He told me that I could make money on my own, but in order to be really successful I would need to spend $ on advertising to bring people to my site.
Well this made sense b/c I'm not going to go door to door to try to talk people into using my site to buy stuff, so I listened. He used the same tactic of initially offering me a package for $5,000, only to reduce it to $2,500 once I expressed concern. He said that they would guarantee that I would get that money back and then some, but then when asked later to put it into writing he came back and said that they make no guarantees.
Obviously this is where I should've walked away but didn't. I purchased an advertising package where they would guarantee some 200,000 visitors or some huge # like that. He said that in a worst case scenario I would make my money back. He also told me that he would continue to call me each week with updates and keep me posted on how everything was going. I never heard from him again once he had my money.
A week or so later I spoke with someone named Rob (don't remember his last name) and I thought that he was taking over for coaching for Michael. Rob explained to me that his job was to monitor the conversion rate of hits to web-site. He explained that typically 5% of the visitors to a shopping web-site will purchase from that site.in my case however, it was more like 2-3%. He needed to make sure that we stepped that up and got that % higher.
He told me that the best way to do this was to advertise through Google and went over this huge package with me. Again he said that the best offer was $7,500 one time fee that covered all kinds of "huge upgrades" over what I already had spent over $2,500 on. After going back and forth with him and trying to explain to him that I have two children under the age of 1, just bought a new home, and really can't afford to throw anymore money away... He assured me that this was a terrific investment.
Obviously I need to learn to be a better judge of character and stop giving people the benefit of the doubt. He dropped his $7,500 package down to $2,500 to lead me to believe that I was getting a STEAL on this great deal. Again, I took the bait.
When I got home, I spoke with my wife about everything and she helped me to pull up information online about these companies. They referenced people by name that I've spoken with... Jiggs, Sam, Rob. I called Rob back and explained to him that I wanted to exercise my 3 day right of recission and get my refund. This was clearly written in the contract.
I took the necessary steps to get the refund, but when asked if my fax was received I was put on hold for a solid 30 minutes. Every 4-5 minutes I could hear someone pick up and check to see if I was still on the line (hoping I hung up) only to put me back on hold. Finally, they told me that they received my request and it would be processed.
I was told that my request was received and the refund would be filed that day and would take 3-4 days to process and show up in my account. It has been over a week and still no luck getting the money back. When I call now, Sam picks up the phone, asks who is calling, then tells you that noone is available to help you. She also doesn't know anyone's schedule so she can't tell you when they will get back to you.
The conclusion of all of this is that this is such a fraudulent company that I'm amazed that they've been around for a couple of years. They don't deliver on any promise that they make, and they will rip you off at every chance. Stay away from them!!!
0 comments