Complaint Review: Bark.com - London

I have owned a DJ company (Solid Gold Productions) for over 35 years. I have used many lead sites to obtain leads for events. One such site is Bark.com. I have used Bark.com to selectively reply to leads for about 2 years. I purchased a pack of credits several months ago, each lead typically costs 6 credits (which I believe are worth about $1.25 per credit). Due to the cost of each lead and the fact that I already have a pretty full calendar of events, I only reply to a lead if it the date is available ad if the customer’s budget looks in line with what we charge. Many Bark leads don’t event provide an event date so I just delete it (why should I purchase a lead if I don’t know if we are available?). If I reply to a lead, I am charged the 6 credits and Bark follows up with an email providing the client’s phone number and email address.

Until a few months ago I didn’t have any big complaint with Bark. That is until I started receiving Bark emails providing the client’s phone number and email address….for leads I didn’t even respond to! Most of these leads I simply deleted when they came into my Inbox. Some of them I clicked on the Bark link to review additional details about the lead…then I deleted the email when I found I didn’t want to respond. Receiving the Bark email with the client’s contact information means I was charged the 6 credits for that lead. Again, these were leads I did NOT want and did NOT respond to.

I have contacted Bark’s customer support numerous (well over a dozen) times explaining that I did not respond to these leads and that there must be a bug in their software causing it think I did submit a response when I didn’t. I always get a response back from Bark stating that their system does not automatically respond on my behalf and that I must have “accidentally responded” to these leads. Mind you, this does not happen to every lead I receive and delete, it is intermittent but it does seem to happen at least once every few days (it just happened again today). I have told them numerous times that I have simply deleted these emails and there was no way I could have sent a response, accidentally or otherwise. In some cases I have received the lead announcement email followed 5 minutes later with the email providing the contact information (indicating I have been charged) and I hadn’t even checked my email to even know the lead was available!

Bark refuses to even consider they have a system problem, stating this is not a known issue. They refunded my credits the first couple times but then said they can't refund any more due to it happening too often! Well, if they would fix their system it wouldn't happen at all! They refuse to check their system logs or do any system testing to find out why their system is doing this. Instead they continue to blame me. Even suggesting that I am abusing their system by requesting refunds for all of the leads. This is ridiculous. There are no responses from me in any of these leads, because I did not respond to them. I have asked them to refund my remaining credits and close my account as I no longer want to do business with them, but they refuse to give me a refund. Instead, what appears to be happening is they are draining my remaining credits by charging me for fake responses. I have never done business with a company that blames their customer for their problems. I ended up telling them if they don’t fix this I will seek other avenues to resolve it. Their response was simply “Do whatever you want”.

So…. DO NOT do business with Bark. They are an unethical and fraudulent company.