I noticed a charge this month on my Business Visa Card for $79.00 [Posted Date: 02/07 Description: LINKTECH 800-5826200 CA Debit:$79.00]
I did not recognize the company or the charge. When I called, it turns out that they have been billing me since sometime in September.
The past few months in my life have been "busy". 3 deaths in my immediate family, and an extended deployment to SE Asia in November and December.
They apparently sold me an SEO service and a website back then. It was one of those set ups where you give them the credit card number, you get a month free, no fees if you cancel, month to month all that. What's the risk right?
Well, I never got any follow up from them. The number they had called on disappeared from the callerid. A company name was not searchable, and think about it. How generic are their DBA's!?! And, there are other valid charges on the card for technology companies, so this one just blended into the crowd.
So, this week when I sat down to get caught up on the last 2-3 months of statements etc, I spotted it, called, and found out they had been billing for a service when I have not received any service at all beyond a halfway finished website with only my name on it, and I don't even have a link to it, no login info or anything else to enable me to use it. Meanwhile, they claim they have been promoting my name and company to google search.
Wonderful. I can only hope they did not promote my name since the site they direct people to was not approved by me nor complete judging by the description given to me by the Customer Service Rep Shawn.
Shawn could have been nicer, but. He was not allowed to credit my account. He was a heck of a sales guy, doing everything he could do to save my account, but he never did offer to make things right. He never offered to reset the account and apply the previous payments to moths going forward and to rebuild the account as it should have been done to begin with. He was not able to refund the payments made when no service beyond a half-baked placeholder website were out there damaging my image.
All he could do was cancel the account. I had to convince him to remove the placeholder webpage to as he was striving for it to remain up and running.
They wanted to schedule a call with a manager, but he put me on hold so he could speak with one, so why couldn't he have had the manager who is obviously nearby, jump on the call? Besides, they apparently have my number. The manager can call anytime during business hours, but I am not going to schedule an appointment to speak with a vendor that does not provide any service at all. It's the principal of it.
All told they have taken us for $316.00 and have only delivered a placeholder website that they went LIVE with without any input, review, or approval from our side. And then they claim to have promoted us on Bing and Google, but have failed to provide any form of proof they did this.
Since the site is not representative of us, ironically I really do hope they are lying about promoting our business on Google. At least then fewer people would see a broken web page as representative of our company, a broken website they published without our approval.
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