Complaint Review: Bridgeport Bankruptcy

Bridgeport Bankruptcy,

No other information is available in the way of a corporate address, phone number or even a standard e-mail address contact, which is of course questionable and should have clued me in to the very real potential for evaporation along with my money.

The very slick website though poorly written, sells the product effectively, however pay attention to the fine print, (if there actually was any at all, I personally never saw it) you will have just 20 days to complete your documents with them before they lock you out of your account and then require an additional $89.00, I copied this directly from my locked out account at a login attempt on 9/25/2009:

Account Expired

According to the service agreement, you had 20 days to finish giving us your bankruptcy data and now more than 25 days have expired. If you want to continue you can purchase a 10 day extension right here and now. After purchasing the extension, you will be able to return to the questionnaire where you left off. We allow only one extension, so use this period without delay. Please click here to go to the payment page. The fee for the extension is $89.

Credit Card or Bank Check Card

Please note that as per the agreement, we reserve the right to purge your data from servers. We purge old data as well as abandoned data to make room for other users. If you do not purchase an extension at this time and your data is purged, you will have to start all over again and pay the full price as opposed to the reduced extension fee.

(Why do accounts expire? All legal agreements must have a termination date or else they are not valid. In our case, there is the practical issue of data storage space. We purge old data from our servers to make room for new users. Also, you have hired us to prepare your documents within a set period of time and if we did not set a time limit, you could come back years later to have us finish your documents. We regret any inconvenience your delay may have caused you.)

End of copied text

I certainly never saw or acknowledged any time limit's for whatever agreements I made with them, and they most definitely never made it apparent, either at the outset or at any time during the preceding 20 day period that my ability to access my documents would expire.

This includes any kind of warning via e-mail, phone or even US postal service. Obviously if I had known or been made aware of this termination date I would have completed my paperwork, in fact I would never have utilized their service without at least 90 days to complete my documents.

Note also that they have even generously given me an additional 5 days, during which time of course I was once again, and very conveniently for them, never notified in any way shape or form of the impending cancellation/expiration of my account.

It makes sense to me that every legal agreement have a termination date, I wonder how long these actually are typically, 20 day's does not seem at all like a reasonable amount of time.

I am filing a chapter 7 not because I am a financial guru who can execute a perfectly planned bankruptcy as a part of their long term financial strategy, but because I am completely and totally flat on my back, I am not looking for anyone's pity here, but truthfully, I am living week to week with no light at the end of the tunnel in sight, and with a very definite time line on the poverty level income I am receiving at present.

I haven't worked in almost a year now and I have to express my total disgust and righteous anger at a company whose policies and practices are quite obviously orchestrated to extort monies from someone who is truthfully and by all evidence already in financial dire straits.

It's just absurd, and their threat to purge the old data (your documents) is again simply a form of extortion, you either pay now "right here and now" or you will very likely lose all of the work you have completed thus far and be required to again pay the entire up front amount of $149.00, so do it now because hey, we can't store your old garbage data with all the new customers coming in.

This is also utterly ridiculous, my completely free email service provider for instance give's me 2 Gigabytes of storage on their servers, no wait I just checked again, it is actually 4 Gigabytes of storage with no time limit's, yet miraculously, and to your considerable financial detriment, Bridgeport Bankruptcy just can't find room on their servers to somehow archive your documents, and I can just about guarantee these are not larger than 1 Megabyte total (there are 4000 of those in 4 gigabytes by the way) not to mention even possibly forwarding the partially completed documents to you, that you have already paid for.

They are just plain corrupt, crooked and clearly rip-off artists, thankfully however, I have so much time on my hands these day's that I will make it a point to report, reveal, render, submit, forward, store and record all of the time and date documented factual information pertaining to this and every single future issue I have with Bridgeport Bankruptcy to any and all known scam and rip-off revealing related website's, governmental agencies and all concerned persons and entities that I can find and contact for as long as I am able.

Yes I am very angry. To have this dagger driven into my back at a time when I am on my knees, literally surviving day to day, it is a little more than just frustrating.