In late October I received an unsolicited phone call from an entity called Egumball offering me SEO services. The person suggested that his organization was affiliated with Google and had the ability to raise my business (a B&B) in the
rankings. The fee for this service was $129 a month. They would charge my credit card each month.
After that I received 5 emails from Egumball stating what services they had purportedly provided to me such as completed the production of our generic stock video for distribution amongst your the [sic] relevant video portals.
I did not receive a contract. I did not receive an invoice. I did not receive a receipt for the first charge on my card, which was for $288.
(When recently I checked the "Terms" page on their web site I saw that the first payment was supposed to be one month, not two, and they promised "refunds will be processed the same day.) I did not receive monthly reports of what had been done on my account.in fact, I ceased to hear from eGumball at all.
Nevertheless, the monthly charges continued.in January I had an unrelated fraud problem with my credit card and the bank cancelled the card and issued me a new one. My car insurance company and my cable service notified me in writing that they were unable to process my automatic monthly withdrawals and I furnished them with my new card number.
But I never heard a peep from eGumball. I assumed that eGumball had just droped off. I was not planning to continue using their service as I had seen very little results. And, in fact, that is what happened for the month of February when I checked my statement. However, eGumball somehow got around the new card number because the charges resumed in Marchtwo new charges, in fact.
Now to be clear, I run a one-person show and am crazy busy all the time. I dont check my bank statements for months at a time.
So it was with horror that I checked my statement in November and saw eGumball was still deducting charges. I called eGumball and spoke with someone named Brandon Tomaiko who insisted that eGumball had the right to bill me. He said he would notify eGumballs legal department if I posted a bad review online. I also spoke with a person who said
her name was Kate Miller who was equally hostile. I said I would not post a review but would post an account of what had transpired and let readers could make up their own minds.
I called Brandon the next day and asked what contract I had allegedly signed and he told me an application had been sent to me via email and I had signed it via email by sending it back. He emailed me the application, with my name TYPED on the
signature line but without my real signature. I had never seen this document before. There was no such document in my email "sent".
I then called customer service at my bank and asked, How did they get around the new card number? The gentleman told me that if they had an authorization number from the earlier card they could have used that for the new card.
I went to my bank branch and had all the statements pulled from the time I was first contacted by eGumball. The only consistent service provided by eGumball was that of relieving my bank account of $129 each and every month.
The total charges amounted to $1,935.
After 10 days had passed with no resolution, I emailed eGumball several times and the response was to state that my complaint was being "reviewed" or had been sent to the "legal department" for resolution.
I will be sending a report of what I have described here to the Internet Fraud Division of the FBI, the Massachusetts Office of Consumer Protection, the Internet Crime Complaint Center IC3, and the Better Business Bureau.
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