The following is our opinion.
We would like to warn people about Tele King Communications Corp. People should beware if they see the Tele King advertisement on television or video because they are very misleading.
We are retired and with what has happened to our retirement income recently, we very much needed to supplement our income.instead of supplementing our retirement income, we were ripped off by this company.
We believed what they told us and it has been a disaster.in Richard Goodman's spiel he makes you believe that you can make $30,000 per year if you purchase six of their units. He said they had done research and it had been proven that the units sell cards. These units have a recording device that acivates as customers walk by and it tells the customers to buy their telephone cards at that store.
The way Mr. Goodman explained the units made us think we were getting vending machines. We certainly paid enough. They are not vending machines. The units are hard to place in stores because the owners either don't have room for them, do not want to listen to them all day, or do not want to be responsible for them.
On May 30 we purchased nine units for $16,429. We didn't received our cards until June 17. They said they were researching what would sell in our area. If this is true, then why don't the cards sell in our area.
Richard Goodman gave us names and telephone numbers of people to call who supposedly are in this business. These people tell you they are doing well and how great Tele King and Richard Goodman are. They write down your name. We wonder why? Are they being paid for doing this?
They tell you they have applied for a license to sell in California. They say that in the meantime they will use their Miami, Florida address as your address but will ship the cards to your home address. We asked several times if this was legal and they said there was no problem with doing this.
When we received our initial order of cards we were shorted $450. We were supposed to receive $10,000 worth of cards and instead we received a total of $9,550.
Mr. Goodman said he would authorize 16 locations for us. When we talked to the locator, Xiomara (Cee-o-mar-a), she told us that they were going to give us all the locations we could handle.
What she didn't tell us was that some of the locations were going to be in places like bakeries, beauty salons, furniture stores and restaurants, where telephone cards don't sell, and that some of the locations would be up to 40 miles away.
At this time they have given us 66 locations and we have 16 left.
Xiomara did mention that we would be changing locations all the time. (No one told us this before we went into this.) Little did we know this was because either the cards don't sell or the store gets complaints and they ask you to remove them.
They keep saying the cards are good. If this is true then why don't they sell? Why do we have to keep changing locations? We have noticed that other cards companies don't have to do this.
When we received the cards we found they had sent $5, $10 and $20 cards. We asked if we could exchange the $20 cards and some of the $10 cards. We were told we would have to get this exchange approved by Andrea. We talked to Andrea and she approved a $2,000 exchange for us.
We took the cards to the post office and the clerk told us we should send and insure them through UPS. He said that was the safest way to send them. That is what we did.
When Tele King received them they returned them to us. Andrea said they were returned because they had been sent UPS. She said they use FEDEX not UPS. (They sent the nine units to me by UPS.) Also she said her name wasn't on the package and therefore they would not accept it.
Andrea then asked how many cards were in the package. We told her we had sent $1,800 worth because she had told us she approved a $2,000 exchange for us. She said they would never accept that many cards and said she never approved a $2,000 exchange.
Then she said she would approve a $1,000 exchange. We then sent $1,000 worth by FEDEX on 8-10-02. We talked to Andrea on 8-12-02. She said they had not been received. We checked with FEDEX and they verified that they were received on 8-12-02. We finally received the replacement cards on September 16, five weeks later.
Out locator, Xiomara, was off for a month. During that time a fellow named Coby temporarily took her place. We called to talk to him. He wasn't at his desk, so a woman answered the phone. We asked for Coby. She put the receiver down and we could hear her say, "Coby, you have a phone call." We also heard his answer to her. He said, "Tell them to hang up."
They say that they tell the locations how much the commission is before they send you out. When you get to the locations they say they haven't been told and ask what the commission is. When you tell them 25% some of them refuse to take the cards because they are getting 30% to 33% from other card companies.
Xiomara told us to tell our locations not to take the cards back. But we have had to take cards back because of irate customers and store owners. Xiomara told us to have these cards reactivated through customer service and she would send pin covers so we could resell the cards. This never happened. So we are the ones who are out the cost of the card.
More than two weeks before Xiomara went on leave, we asked for posters, rate charts, sticky tabs to hang the cards, and pin covers. We asked Xiomara for these three times. She said that if she said she would send them, then she sent them. We finally asked her a third time and she told us we would have to ask Andrea for them.
We asked Andrea for them and were told they would be mailed. About three weeks later we received the posters but no rate charts. About four weeks later we received the sticky tabs. We have repeatedly asked Andrea for the pin covers. She said she would send them. It has been over eight weeks since we started asking for these things and we have never received the rate charts or the pin covers.
Xiomara told us that she will have the locations faxed to us. She says she will give them to the girl that does her faxing for her. One day she wasn't there so I asked the operator to connect me with the girl that does her faxing. The operator said no one does the faxing for Xiomara, she does it herself.
People complain about not getting the minutes that they are supposed to get as shown on the rate charts.
The Mexi King card doesn't have a connection fee, but it does have a fifty-cent weekly maintenance fee. So if the customer doesn't use it up in a short time, their minutes are eaten up in maintenance fees and they are back at the store complaining and getting their money back and we are stuck with the cost.
Before we went into this we told Mr. Goodman that we didn't want to go into any bad areas. He said we would not be going into that type of area. Many of the locations they got for us were in duck and cover areas.
We have also been told that when a person calls the customer service number, quite often there is no answer or they are treated badly.
This business is definitely not producing the income promised.in fact, the telephone calls and gas have more than eaten up the 15% commission we are supposed to be getting. Of course they tell you that you can take it off your income tax.
We certainly would not have spent $16,429 to go into this business if we had known we were going to have to work and put out money all year just for a tax deduction. We needed and thought we were going to supplement our monthly income, not just work for a tax deduction.
Andrea has told us that Frank Schreiber is the president of Tele King Communications Corp.
I tried to call Richard Goodman about this and was not allowed to talk to him. Andrea said he does other things. She said he is very good at what he does. We agreed with her. He is very good at what he does to people.
We asked for our money back and were told by Andrea that the company doesn't do that. Gee, what a surprise.
We know we were dumb to believe their misleading adverising and we also know that our money is gone. We just want people to know this company is out there and to beware.
We would like to be contacted through this report by anyone who has had a similar experience with Tele King.
Ron and Nelda
Riverside, California
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