It is my professional feeling that Immigration Specialist Helpline is a scam company and that they take advantage of unsuspecting foreigners that are trying to enter our country legally. In our initial phone call, their sales rep Mark, who never gave his last name, misrepresented their services and 20 minutes and 17 seconds into the form process, we realized this was not the service that Mark lead us to believe it was.
(Before I start my argument, never once where we able to obtain the last name of any of Immigration Specialist Helpline employee that we spoke to. So, in the following statements, I only used first names of the Immigration Specialist Helpline employees involved in this dispute.)
First, At the beginning of our conversations with Mark, we asked the cost of the fees for a visa extension. Mark told us the fee of the extension form was $290.00. This surprised us since we had considered filling out the extension form ourselves. We found the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, a division of the US government, was charging $300.00 for the same extension form. We queried Mark as to why his company fee was lower. He told us that his fee was lower because of the volume of forms that his company does and that they get a discount from US Citizenship and Immigration Services. This was a lie! Taira, a secretary that Mark sent us to fill out the form, inform us that Mark's company did not pay a fee at all to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. But instead, we would be filling out a form that requested a waiver of the government from fees because of personal financial hardship. From this information we deduced that Immigration Specialist Helpline pocketed the $290.00 that they would receive from us and US Citizenship and Immigration Services did not receive any of our monies.
Our second feeling that Immigration Specialist Helpline is a scam company, during our initial conversation with Mark, we repeatedly asked him for a percentage chance of getting the visa approved. He would not give that figure. We asked Taira, the secretary, when we were transferred over to her and she said 50/50 chance.
We also asked Anthony and he stated 50/50. This was another reason we chose not to use Immigration Specialist Helpline service. This information should have been given to us from Mark at the beginning of our phone call.
Our third complaint is that Mark did not state his companies term and conditions before we started the form process. When we spoke to his company supervisor, Anthony, about lack of information that Mark gave us, he informed us that it was too late we had already started the form process and once started we could not backout.
He stated that it was written in their website.
1.We never saw the Immigration Specialist Helpline website. We obtained their phone from a google search. The phone number came up on the Immigration Specialist Helpline web address and under google Sponsored Links column on the right of google search results.
2.We only spent 20 minutes and 17 seconds with Taira, Immigration Specialist Helpline secretary, because of Taira' response's to our questions, the same questions we had asked Mark, we decided we did not want to use Immigration Specialist Helpline services. We don't think that Immigration Specialist Helpline should make $650.00 for not being forthcoming with information in their sales process. We did not receive $650.00 of service.
Our fourth issue, that bothered us about Immigration Specialist Helpline is when they asked for credit card information, Mark asked for my birth date. In the past 30 years of using credit cards, never has a company other than the credit card company asked for a birth date. We made a fraud to our credit card company.
Our fifth issue, I have included another victims on the website called RipOff Report that had the same problems as we had with Immigration Specialist Helpline. I wish we could contact this person.
The sixth issue as of 9-21-08 all of Immigration Specialist websites were not working.
Victim Customer
Canton, Georgia
U.S.A.