My wife signed a contract for martial arts lessons for our 5-year old son on 1/5 with Ms. Sylvester of American Dojo and paid a $95 advance. My wife signed the contract only after Ms. Sylvester promised her that she could cancel the contract anytime within the first 30 days and the payment would be refunded. We had a free "30 DAY PASS" referral from a member for this offer.
We later found that the contract only gave us 3 days to cancel, not 30 days as verbally promised. When we attempted to cancel on 1/30 (my son attended only 3 lessons), they first refused. Later they agreed to cancel after I faxed them a strongly worded written letter.
However, the $95 advance has not been refunded after repeated requests. Ms. Sylvester agreed to refund the advance on the phone but later denied this when I asked her with Mr. Konley (owner) also on the phone. She called later and said that "she has no problem refunding the money" but after several months it has not been refunded.
It is our experience that Ms. Sylvester used heavy-handed and misleading sales tactics to get my wife to sign the contract. The contract is for $1500 for a whole year plus the $95 advance. She got my wife to sign the contract for a whole year on the very first day that she walked in to their facility (to request the "30 day free trial") before we even had a single lesson for our son. The contract had only the 3-day minimum required by Wisconsin law for cancellation, although she said verbally that "you can cancel anytime in the first month and we will refund the advance" so my wife did not read the fine print in the contract.
Ms. Sylvester has refused to honor the verbal promise that she made, and has lied about her own earlier promise to refund the money. I will no longer trust her or her business. Mr. Konley was also insulting on the phone, asking "Where in America do you get something for free?" when I was only taking them up on their own free-trial offer.
This place also employs an aggressive third-party collection agency to collect money, and we got a letter from the agency threatening to start billing our credit card even after I told them that the contract was cancelled.
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