scam
Complaint
Sue
Country: United States
Beware if you say yes to a free credit report at www. Free3BureauCreditReport.com. If you say yes to the report, you are also agreeing to a trial membership at 24Protect. The same credit card or bank card you enter will be the one that 24Protect deducts their monthly charges from. This company is sneaky. There is no reminder that you agreed to the trial membership, and there is no phone number with a live person to talk to to stop the membership. It may be months before you finally get rid of 24Protect. I did receive an e-mail from 24Protect telling me this how they acquired my credit card number and why they keep billing me. I believe they are scammers.
Comments
There is no doubt in my mind that they have a system designed to deceit customers. I am describing my experience with them bellow:
1. Looked them up in a search engine - they advertise free credit reports from the 3 credit bureaus.
2. They enroll you into two free membership trials ("Credit Adapter" and "24Protect") as conditions for obtaining the free credit report.
3. After agreeing to terms and conditions (I actually read it) they redirected me to a different website: www.creditreport.com - which is a reputable site and they claim to have no connections with the prior.
4. After about one hour, I called them to cancel my "free trials". They said that I could not cancel it yet becuase my order had not been processed. And that it takes about 3 days for that to happen. BUT the actual 7 day trial starts upon the date of agreeing with the online disclaimer - which means that I effectively have a time frame of only 4 days to cancel it. I will have to wait and see what happens in 3 days (when my order will be "processed").
http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2005/08/consumerinfo.shtm
FTC even produced a spoof video of these "free" offers.
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2009/03/ftc-fights-free.html
As you caught, they are even manipulating the cancellation terms to prevent cancellation, which is another deceptive act. Adding conditions to cancelling AFTER you agree to the offer is on its face deceptive. Those conditions materially restrict your ability to actually invoke their cancellation terms.
FTC has in other actions taken the position that having cancellation terms, yet arranging things so that they cannot actually be exercised (such as by requiring a call to a number, that is never answered), are deceptive trade practices, in violation of the FTC Act.
As for creditreport.com being "unrelated", in most of these scams, it is part of the design of the scam to cloud and launder responsibility and liability between the party marketing, and the party charging, to make it harder for consumers to actually cancel or get their money back. Both parties deny responsibility, while they continue to take your money.
Their claim you cannot cancel now is a deceptive snow job, deliberately adopted to block your cancellation even though they claimed you could cancel when they made the original offer. Give notice of cancellation to both parties, and be prepared to dispute all charges as fraudulent with your bank, and to close the account due to fraud.
While you are at it, since they have already tipped their hand, file a fraud complaint with FTC, your state AG, and BBB, since they have shown their "cancellation" policy is deceptive, and they are about to use it to defraud you. They have already engaged in material deception by their refusal to take your cancellation.
Yet another victim of their scam. Needed to cancel my card and request a new one.
And thus never used it. When I called, they cancelled my membership and said that they would refund the last three months only. I agree that this is a scam!!! And am not happy with the money loss. Partly my own fault for letting this go this long, but thought it was something my wife had done. Be warned, it could happen to you!!
In the case of Credit Score Express, they do not provide a customer service phone number to call and cancel. I discovered this after signing up. They never even showed me any of my scores, instead trying to get me to jump through hoops by signing up for more memberships. It didn't take too many hoops for me to quickly become suspicious. I Googled it afterward and found that it has the same address as Credit Adapter, which I also apparently signed up for.
If I cannot successfully cancel out of these "membership programs" I will have no choice but to cancel my debit card and start fresh with a new one. And from now on always check out anything that could possibly be a scam. If the worst that happens from this experience is that I have to go to the hassle of cancelling my card and getting a new card, I'll consider myself lucky.