Complaint Review: Advantage America

My husband got a call on his cell phone on a Saturday night, two days after Thanksgiving, from someone claiming to be from the U.S. government and saying we qualified for an $8,000 grant. I pleaded with my husband not to give out our account numbers and that if the government really wanted to give us a grant they would have contacted us by mail and would be willing to send us a check and not insist on getting our checking account information.

Unfortunately, my husband gave them the information, but when it got to part where you answer recorded questions, he repeatedly answered "no" when it asked if they were authorized to debit money from our account. This of course prompted the original guy to keep cutting in and telling him he had to authorize a charge of $49.95 in order to get the $8,000 put in our account.

The way it ended was my husband still said no to the authorization, and shortly after that, his cell phone battery died. We did not think much of it after that since he had said no. However, yesterday (Dec 9) I checked our account and sure enough, Advantage America had cashed themselves a check in the amount of $49.95. I called them immediately. What I heard was unbelievable.

They said they had it recorded... of course I asked them to play it and much to my shock, it was not my husband's voice, but a woman's voice, stating that she was me, and it was Dec 3rd- my husband had talked to them a full week earlier. I told the customer service agent that was clearly not my voice and she agreed with me. However, even though they managed to debit my account, they can't seem to credit it.

They told me they would send me paperwork which I had to fill out and send back in before I got my check. This is the 2nd time this has happened to me in the past year. In my opinion, they had one of their own employees make that recording.

Good luck, I hope everybody gets their money back, and take it from a former bank employee, NEVER GIVE OUT YOUR ACCOUNT INFORMATION
!!!

Betsy
Lynchburg, Virginia
U.S.A.