I was a cloud based storage customer of Sugarsync and in Jan my business computer was attacked by a nasty virus that required I completely re format my hard drive. Since all of my data was in the cloud at Sugarsync I thought this was a good thing. Following their online tutorial to retrieve my data was futile so I had to contact them to get assistance. They informed me that there was a $99.99 charge for phone assistance. Even though this seemed ridiculous, I was desperate to get my information restored. The info was restored to my computer and I have since paid my montlhy fee for cloud based storage.
Thankfully I have not had any other crashes or incidents. Just this week I was contacted by my bank that my business account was overdrawn. Since i knew there had to be a problem I reviewed the account activtiy to find that Sugarsync had billed me for phone support. I told them I had never signed up for phone support that I had paid for an issue I had a year ago. They informed me that alll of their billings were automatic renewal and in fact when I had called them a year ago, I was "signing up" for an annual agreement that was on atomatic renewal.
I informed them that I had never been told it was an automatic renewal program, nor would I have ever agreed to such a thing. They refunded the fee but I asked them about all of the NF fees they had caused me. There was no notice prior to or after they had debited my account. My only notice was my bank notifying me I owed $300 in fees? I went to my bank with the notification from Sugarsync that they were refunding the annual contract amount but they told me that I had to recover my NSF from Sugarsync since it was debited in error by them.
If anyone has any ideas of how to recoover this please let me know. How can a company charge you withut notification, written authorization or even verbal agreement. I thought there were consumer protections and laws that governed these types of transactions. I have researched and this appears to be one of those "negative option" types of scams. Problem is, I didn't even have a chance to option out. No notice, no warning, no authorization only the NSF fees to show for it. I called a supervisor at Sugarsync and was told that it was the same thing as an automatic renewal for a magazine. You have to tell them if you don't want auto renewal.
That would be nice if you were even asked. I beg to differ, I called them for support on an issue, I bought "the magazine "once! Not a lifelong commitment to subscribe. Then a year later just hit your card again! I should have such a business. Beware of of this scam. You pay for a service then when you need it you have to pay more and then they think they can charge you whenever they feel like it and cause all sorts of problems you are left trying to resolve and pay for. This is not then end of this. This is just plain WRONG.
0 comments