I signed up for the free trial of UltraLife PM online. I thought the product was lame when I received it. When I called to cancel the autoship program I dealt with a woman that was perhaps the rudest person I've ever spoken with on the telephone in my entire life. All I wanted to do was cancel and never once did I say anything rude or raise my voice. Yet she felt the need to ridicule me, laugh at me, and belittle me just because I didn't want the product. Eventually I got her to give me a cancellation number—which she read off very quickly and then hung up before I could confirm that I was free from autoshipment or all other aspects of this product.
I don't let what a phone operator says to me offend or upset me because it's not worth it, but I was shocked that a supposedly legitimate business would let their employee act like that.
After that experience I started researching the company and discovered this site as well as their track record from the BBB. I started to worry that I'd see another charge and low and behold it happened yesterday—the mysterious e-curves charge.
I saw this happened to other people so I decided to investigate before I called to complain. I went back to the site where I signed up for the original trial offer. There are two pages you go through to sign up and no where on either page does it mention the name ecurves or any such similar program that will accompany the ultralife product. So I found the link to their terms and conditions and buried about five pages into ongoing copy there is mention of ecurves and a notation that you must cancel within 30 days or you're charged $6/week.
Even the terms don't state that your forced into an ecurves membership... They only note the terms to cancel such membership. And even if the terms DID say that, it's one thing to hide away complex terms about cancelling the product your signing up for. I glance through terms for cancellation rules. That said it's another thing all together to hide a completely separate product that the consumer doesn't even know exists. I didn't sign up for "ecurves" so why would I ever scour the terms and conditions for the rules about it.
It's one thing for a company to take advantage of a consumer's ignorance by hiding away cancellation terms. It's another all together to take advantage of a reasonable consumers expectations that they're only buying what they sign up for.
But even if I didn't know I was signing up for it, I should have at least received an email or SOMETHING about it so that I could take advantage of the 30 day trial. I've never received a single email about this ecurves product—and I do check my spam. I've never received any thing in the postal mail about it. So I never knew I signed up for it AND I never knew I even had it once signed up. I can't cancel something I don't know I have.
So I call. The operator has some attitude but is at least speaking to me normally. She tells me it's in terms and proceeds to read them. I tell her I think it's still deceptive but she doesn't care. I say that there are many complaints about the company and she says "that's OK". Then I say that even if I didn't know I was signing up for it, how could I cancel a trial offer that I never knew I had? She says that three emails were sent. Untrue.
She won't give a refund. I don't want to argue so I ask her if she can just cancel my account. She tells me to just log on to the website and cancel there. I have no idea what the website even is or what my login is or any of that.interestingly enough she doesn't seem surprised by any of this and just gives me all the info really quickly.
I ask her if she spends her entire day sitting there listening to people like me complaining. She says "not the entire day, just most of it." Wow... There's a human being hiding in there!
So I get off the phone, login to the website I never knew existed, cancel the account and screen capture the cancel page for evidence.
I just got off the phone with my bank to challenge the charge. The person I spoke with told me that as a consumer under the california law, I have the right to a reasonable understanding of the charges I'm authorizing. He added that they've been seeing more and more companies like this that build up, fraud a lot of people, and then disapear only to reform as a different company. They're issuing me a new card number to ensure I have no more charges like this in the future.
Beware. Stay away. This company is awful.
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