I was told I was leasing a "shopping cart system", for my new website. The lease was $89.95 per month, for four years, directly taken out of my business checking account.
At one point, due to a small bookkeeping mistake, my account was overdrawn by about $30, which meant the monthly fee was rejected. No problem, I would be making a deposit that would bring it current and all should have been fine.
Well, a late fee was assessed, $15.00, and they tried to go into the account to get the late fee. Naturally, if the $89.95 was rejected, so would the $15.00. WHen the late fee was rejected, it automatically "told" the computer to apply another late fee, and to try to collect that one. (the logic is truly dizzying.) They tried to go into the account up to EIGHT times per day for the late fee, (not even for the monthly fee, but the stupid late fee!) for several days.
Over a period of about 15 days, they attempted to collect for the $15.00 late fee almost 30 times! Each time they went in, my bank would reject it, which naturally cost me $32.00 per transaction, and an additional $25.00 overdrawn fee. Every time I put in money to cover the fees, it would be more and more overdrawn. At one point I put in $550.00 and it was still overdrawn due to Leasecomm's overactive fee collection.
Now, of course, Leasecomm has no control over the bank fees. I understand that, and yes, it was my error in being overdrawn by a little in the first place. But I called them repeatedly, and asked them why they had gone into my account eight times a day - they said that it was "in the lease" that they could do this. Nowhere in my lease did I see anything like that.
Consequently, instead of contacting me after the first rejection with a courtesy call, or e-mail, they instead chose to repeatedly attempt collection, which overdrew my account by over $900.00 in a matter of days, causing the need to close my account and be put into colletion, and pay these ridiculous fees, on top of the fees that Leasecomm would now add on to my bill for being late in payment!
IN ADDITION: After several months of phone calls and unyielding service representatives, I opted to buy out the lease, (because I had no choice apparently, with the "non-cancelable lease) for about $1400.00 so I could be free and clear. When I made the payment, I asked how the shopping cart system would be applied to my website since I had redesigned it and moved web hosts. They then informed me that it wasn't a shopping cart system. What I leased was "the ability to have a secure site".
So now I paid them a lot of money, and I have nothing to show for it, since I have received no information about how to use this "thing" I purchased, that is really apparently nothing.
They abused their right to collect money from an account, forced me into a bad credit situation, misled me when selling the product, and refused to yield when contacted regarding the whole issue.
Oh yes, and they "forgot" to contact the proper agencies when I did pay everything off, so it stayed on my credit report for months and months, affecting a refinance application since it stated that I still owed Leasecomm money.
They should be called Lease-scamm instead.
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