I was doing an internet search for information on my grandfather. My mom has always told me that he abandoned his wife and 2 daughters when they were young. Archivefee.com led me to believe that I could receive a report regarding his death, an obituary or some info about his death, for $1.00. I figured that for $1.00 I was willing to take a chance on the report. As soon as I gave my credit card info for the $1.00 charge, the archivefee.com site gave me a receipt for $19.95. When I protested through customer service, I learned that the $19.95 was just the first of TEN monthly payments of $19.95 they planned to charge me! I threw a fit, complained about being misled, said I never agreed to pay $19.95 much less $199.50, and that I wanted the whole thing cancelled immediately.
The customer service person then sent me a message saying "OK, I have closed your account and removed the remaining charges of $19.95. You have beencredited all subsequent charges of $19.95 effective today, these remaining charge (s) have been voided. Your confirmation number is:..."
This sounded to me as though they were cancelling FUTURE charges, but intended to charge me the $1.00 and the $19.95. I repeated that I had agreed only to pay the $1.00 for the report (which I told "her" I still wanted and was still willing to pay for). After some back and forth, "she" finally told me that all charges had been voided.
While I was going through this stupidity, I contacted my wife and told her about my stupidity and asked if she could contact the bank to stop any charges from going through. She did and eventually we got confirmations from archivefee.com and from the bank that nothing was being charged.
I then asked: "Why did we even have to go through with this? I wanted to buy a report, and I'd gladly have paid for it. Now it seems like a total scam, designed to take my money from me and give be nothing at all. What is archivefee.com's physical address? What state is archivefee.com's legal place of organization? Who are the people behind archivefee.com?"
The customer service person gave me an email address for her supervisor and a phone number, but never answered my questions.
What a royal pain in the rear end.
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