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eGumball A Bold-faced Ripoff Irvine, California
In late October, 2011 I
received an unsolicited phone call from an entity called Egumball offering me
SEO services. The person suggested that his organization was affiliated with
Google and had the ability to raise my business (a B&B) in the
rankings. The fee for this service
was $129 a month. They would charge my credit card each month.
After that I received 5 emails from Egumball stating what services they had purportedly provided to me
such as completed the production of our generic stock video for distribution
amongst your the [sic] relevant video portals.
I did not receive a contract. I did not receive an invoice. I did not receive a receipt for the
first charge on my card, which was for $288.
(When recently I checked the "Terms" page on their web site I saw that the first payment was supposed to be one month, not two, and they promised "refunds will be processed the same day.) I did not receive monthly reports of what had been done on my account. In fact, I ceased to hear from eGumball at
all.
Nevertheless, the monthly charges continued. In January I had an unrelated fraud problem with my credit
card and the bank cancelled the card and issued me a new one. My car insurance
company and my cable service notified me in writing that they were unable to
process my automatic monthly withdrawals and I furnished them with my new card
number.
But I never heard a peep from eGumball. I assumed that eGumball had just droped off. I was not planning
to continue using their service as I had seen very little results. And, in
fact, that is what happened for the month of February when I checked my
statement. However, eGumball somehow got around the new card number because the
charges resumed in Marchtwo new charges, in fact.
Now to be clear, I run a one-person show and am crazy busy all the time. I dont check my bank
statements for months at a time.
So it was with horror that I checked my statement in November, 2012 and saw eGumball was still deducting charges. I called eGumball and spoke with someone named Brandon Tomaiko who insisted that
eGumball had the right to bill me. He said he would notify eGumballs legal
department if I posted a bad review online. I also spoke with a person who said
her name was Kate Miller who was equally hostile. I said I would not post a
review but would post an account of what had transpired and let readers could make
up their own minds.
I called Brandon the next
day and asked what contract I had allegedly signed and he told me an
application had been sent to me via email and I had signed it via email by
sending it back. He emailed me the application, with my name TYPED on the
signature line but without my real signature. I had never seen this document
before. There was no such document in my email "sent".
I then called customer
service at my bank and asked, How did they get around the new card number? The
gentleman told me that if they had an authorization number from the earlier
card they could have used that for the new card.
I went to my bank branch
and had all the statements pulled from the time I was first contacted by
eGumball. The only consistent service provided by eGumball was that of
relieving my bank account of $129 each and every month.
The total charges amounted
to $1,935.
After 10 days had passed with no resolution, I emailed eGumball several times and the response was to state that my complaint was being "reviewed" or had been sent to the "legal department" for resolution.
I will be sending a report of what I have described here to the Internet Fraud Division of the FBI,
the Massachusetts Office of Consumer Protection, the Internet Crime
Complaint Center IC3, and the Better Business Bureau.
1 Updates & Rebuttals
eGumball Inc.
Irvine,California,
United States of America
Jane Daniel - Get Your Story Straight
#2REBUTTAL Owner of company
Thu, January 03, 2013
You say that you had some sort of credit card fraud last January? And that eGumball somehow obtained your new credit card after the fact? Really? You provided us the new number in March this year. Now you deny it.
You electronically signed our agreement to your email where our system logged your IP Address to your place of business. You also logged into your client control panel from the same IP Address on several occassions. Each time agreeing to our terms and conditions. You now state that we illegally obtained your IP address to bind you to agreement?
Our terms and conditions clearly state that payment is ongoing until cancelled in writing. It also explains your intial payment at start up.
There is no refund due as you have been using our service for over a year. Without complaint - until now.
Fraud seems to follow you Jane Daniel! With your credit card company and now us???