In 2020, I became suicidally depressed after a #metoo scandal I was facing in my career got really out of control (in short: I got raped by my boss, his friends started bullying me, their friends started bullying me, their friends' friends started bullying me... then they got me fired, blacklisted, and kicked out of most of the things that were central to my career and personal life, and finally after seven years of that, I broke down). Like many people in extreme situations, I was looking on the internet for help. There was no psychological emergency ward in my city at that point, because all the people who usually would have been working there were on Covid duty. So, crying and out of my mind, I called the number on the Miracles Coaching website. I was then pressured into signing a contract, wherein I would pay something along the lines of $350 or so per month for an entire year for coaching. One person I spoke with said, "I'm not supposed to say this, but Joe's Miracles Coaching helped me get off meth!"
Can I sue for false and unqualified psychological "treatment"? No - because while I wept and begged for help and said I was going to commit suicide, I was goaded and manipulated into signing my rights away.
What I had signed up for was a company called "iachievetoday." This is basically a big phone room in Utah somewhere (there have been articles in recent years in several major papers about the scam phone rooms of Utah). My first "coach" was some guy who had read Jung for ten minutes and spent a week trying to figure out my "personality color," all the while complaining that his brother made much more money than he did. One of the reasons I'd been willing to pay so much was that they promised (a) I would work with Joe Vitale directly and (b) I could call as many times as I wanted, and one of their "iachievetoday" coaches would call back within a certain one-hour time frame.
(a) Joe Vitale came on a group call less than once a month. It was a one-way call, where he talked, everyone else listened, and only iachievetoday coaches were allowed to ask one or two questions at the end. All "Dr. Joe" talked about was his divorce and the storms in Texas. I guess he thought the massive sum of money I am sure they paid him wasn't enough for him to do better even at this pitiful "service."
(b) The coach sometimes called back an hour later, and sometimes not at all. I had to be there, ready to pick up immediately, or I'd have to start all over again. When I did get a coach, it was always amazingly amateurish and unprofessional. They sounded as bored as Good Samaritan volunteers. One young woman told me to read Sark. Several told me to read the Bible, even though I am not a Christian. Several talked about their personal lives - about the most interesting thing that happened was a guy telling me about the idiosyncrasies of nature, art, and small-town life in the state of Utah, which, while fascinating, was definitely not what I was paying $350 a month for.
As for the iachievetoday site itself, it was a bunch of videos they'd found on YouTube, plus some videos of themselves reiterating what they found on YouTube, plus "erasing limiting beliefs" meditations that any beginner with Insight Timer and a Casio keyboard could have made.
If I had been in my right mind - not sobbing into the phone that I had lost my career and friends and was planning on committing suicide when they pushed me to sign their contract - then falling for this scam would have been my own fault. But this crossed the line, hard, into false emergency medical treatment, manipulation, and robbery.
Joe Vitale has a book about P.T. Barnum. Instead of the real phrase we all know about our favorite American scam artist - "there's a sucker born every minute" - Dr. Joe substitutes the word "customer." Even several thousand dollars poorer, I've recovered from what happened to me a few years ago. Had I been of sound mind then, I am sure this alone would have been the biggest of all red flags.
Stay away.
0 comments