This company's representative targeted my wife and babies in the mall telling her that they were scouting for Macy's. They convinced her that they were looking for two babies of a specific racial background to complete their catalog. My wife who was visiting New York from out of state came back home excited for the kids whom, up to that time, we never considered modeling or advertising work. We took time from work and flew back to NY at great expense because we wanted to give our children a chance at every possible opportunity. Once we got there the pressure started although it did not appear so at first, because the jobs were a guarantee. At the very least they would have earned enough to cover college.
They said we needed the fee so the children's pictures could be submitted to Gerber and others. They explained that because they needed children with the specific ethnic background, sex and ages When questioned about the necessity for a fee it was explained that it takes money to submit the info to their clients but that is a small price to pay because the returns are pretty much guaranteed since they are only signing children that they actually need right now. They were in a hurry to get the documents signed right away because the photographer was waiting downstairs and they wanted everything done "today".
In hindsight, they wanted signatures before we had a chance to think or worse, leave and have second thoughts.
Once they collected $3000, they hurried us downstairs where we saw lots of people apparently in the same predicament. We never saw that many people upstairs. Two babies waited for hours in the cold basement (this was the middle of winter and all they had was a small space heater). After about 5 hours in the brutal cold, two small babies eventually had their pictures taken by people who, obviously, were not photographers. To this day, over a year later and thousands of pictures of our children, the ones taken by New Faces are still the worse ever!
We requested our money back right away once we got home and read over the contract. The second stage of the scam was to make it impossible to speak with anybody. After many hours on the telephone, dozens of calls, numerous transfers and waiting for call backs we got a lady who insisted that she was the overall boss (I have her name recorded somewhere), she expressed sympathy for the way we were treated, and promised to make it right.
We wanted our money back right away however she had no intention of returning our money and instead promised that if the kids did not have a contract by a specific date that she would return our money. That sounded reasonable except that that date happens to be just after the 90 days to dispute the credit card charge would have expired. That was unacceptable to us so after several weeks of back and forth we eventually disputed the charges with the credit card company.
Whatever documents they supplied to the credit card company, it was determined that they have a valid contract and the credit card company let the charges stand.interestingly, they called us once during the stalling 90-days period for an appointment the following morning, which was impossible to keep as it would have meant that we'd have to both take days off from work without notice and fly to NY overnight for a "possible" photo shoot.in retrospect even though we were unable to keep that appointment we called up the photo studio and we never did have an appointment, which is what we suspected as the “appointment” was given after a threat to call the credit card company.
Since they collected our money $3000 from us over a year ago all we got was a CD with a couple grotesque pictures and a call for a fake appointment.
I just don’t know how these people can continue to do this, and worse, how they can continue to get away with it. I am sure that at least some of the children whose parents they have scammed out of their hard-earned money have probably gone to bed hungry as a result of it.
The $5000 claim consists of $3000 charges against our credit card and over $2000 of other consequential charges incurred because of their scam.
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