On Friday March 15th, I received a call from “Joan Ruth” from Stanford Who ’s Who after filling out a “free membership” on a LinkedIn add. As the invitation for the free membership was coming from LinkedIn, I trusted it was a legitimate business. There was no mention at all of it being a paid subscription, the link only talks about a chance to be featured in the Who who's list. “Joan Ruth” gave me a "candidate interview" that lasted more than half an hour and went on to explain for the next 15minutes all the benefits that I would receive without mentioning once that it was a paid membership. She told me that I was more than qualified and asked me if I wanted Gold or Platinum. It turned out that the membership was not for free after all and she went on and on selling the membership. I explained to her that the reason I took their call was because I thought it was a free membership but she completely ignored me and continued her sales pitch. I told her clearly that I was starting my own business and was unable at this time to buy their membership and that's when she got aggressive and kept telling me there are publication deadlines, when I resisted she started reducing the membership from lifetime to 5 years to 2 years then a year and then a 1 year associate membership. She completely got me by surprise and after an hour of wrangling on the phone, I ended up giving my credit card and I signed up for the associate membership, $89 $108.95 (for an advance payment) totaling $197.95 (charged to my credit card as soon as I hanged up I guess!) plus $9.99 charged on my card every month. As soon as I hanged up I realized this was a mistake and within five minutes I called them back to cancel the membership. When I was finally able to talk to someone about my concern, I was quickly told that I could not cancel the membership as it was non-refundable. However, as I argued back the lady on the phone decided to take all my information and told me that someone from client services would call me back right away. 15 minutes passed and no one called me so I called them back again only to be told that the sales people were out for lunch but they would call me back before the end of the day. I could feel that something was wrong and started feeling anxious so I decided not to wait for their phone call and within 15 minutes I called back again and told them that I needed to speak to someone right away. After so much insistence on my part, I was transferred to someone called Lynn Thomas that I was told was one of the managers. She indicated that she needed to check my file and would call me back right away. As she did not call me back right away as she promised I called her back 10 minutes later and luckily was able to speak to her again. She indicated that she had already checked my file and it was impossible for her to give me a refund because my information had already being transferred to another department. I told her that I found that difficult to believe as I had called within 5 minutes of the initial purchase and had provided all my information and clearly indicated that I wanted to cancel. She told me that she did not know I had called before and only for this reason she was going to give me $100 USD back and cancel any future charges. I clearly told her that I disagreed for not receiving a full refund but she indicated that that was the best she could do. She told me that she would send me an e-mail with this arrangement (which she did within the next hour or so on the same day). I didn't want to argue any further with her so I hanged up. So far, four days later, no refund has been done. I truly believe that not giving me a FULL refund when I called back within minutes to cancel the “membership” I had just acquired is an extremely unethical business practice because I am being charged for a service that I don't want and I won't use. As I indicated, all this phonecalling and arguments happened within an hour that I “acquired” the membership. Hence, none of their services were used or will be used. I want a full refund as I don’t need and will not be accessing any of their services.in fact, I don’t want anything to do with this unethical business. I also want to make sure that they do not charge anything else to my credit card.
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