I am retired and was looking for ways to supplement my income. So, I clicked on some Internet sites to investigate at home business opportunities. Within a day or two I received a call from a man at Start Up Essentials asking for information to qualify me by finding out my credit rating. He called me back to tell me I qualified and had another man phone me to proceed with filling out an applcation for establishing an Internet home business site. He told me I sounded like a good candidate and would receive a lot of help in establishing my own web site and all the training I needed to do so with Start Up Essentials Support and study materials.
I naively found this persuasive. He led me quickly through a process whereby I electronically signed portions of an agreement, including a 48 month lease with A-1 Leasing (Bond) of Grand Rapids, MI. Only after finishing this phone conversation was I able to download the Merchant Agreement I had signed with Start Up Essentials and the agreement with A-1 Leasing.
As soon as I read the pages of small print, I saw I had agreed to a non-cancellable lease obligating me to pay $6000 by the end of the four years in order to receive a lap top computer, an Accelerator 2.0 (which wasn't explained to me) and a merchant sales portal. The following day I received the computer (Acer Traveler) and a package of CDs. The retail values of these nowhere equaled the $6000 total I would be obligated to pay A-1 Leasing, which recently informed me it is really a finance company, which claims to have lent the money to Start Up Essentials to buy the items leased to me.
This past June, I wrote a letter to A-1 Leasing, copied to Start Up Essentials specifying the extremely one-sided, outrageously expensive terms of this lease and the lack of full disclosure in selling it to me. The letter I received in reply failed to offer in any satisfactory was of opting out, other than suggesting I would need to find some one else to buy me out of the lease.
From my own unhappy experience with these two companies and reading the complaints filed by numerous others, I have concluded that these companies are slick scam operators mainly interested in making a lot of money from well meaning people without providing them with the benefits they promise.
Like others I am interested in finding a well qualified, thoroughly honest attorney/law firm which initiate a class action law suit against these two companies which result in punitive and financial damages that will put them out of business, will void the contracts they have made with persons like me, also enable us to receover the moneys we have paid them.
0 comments