I WISH I'd known about this site in advance of when I'd ordered John Beck's program. I was another dumb youngster, who just thought it was some great way to make money in real estate. Boy, was I DEAD WRONG!
I ordered John Beck's Free and Clear Program, which I saw on an infomercial a month ago. They try to sell you a bunch of extra stuff when you call. I didn't get suckered into the other stuff, other than paying an extra $10 for CD's. I assumed, stupidly enough, these would be audio CD's, which are usually what CD's are.
As it turned out, the CD's have nothing but small Adobe Acrobat Files on them. Most of them are nothing but a bunch of bogus website links. If I wanted to pay to read what seemed quite similar to an "online book", I could have just gone to the library and bought a book.
Secondly, the program package came with one DVD, which was called "Quick Start." This DVD was so fuzzy, it was completely defective and you couldn't even clearly watch the whole DVD. When I called up to complain about the defect, the person at customer service told me that it had to be my DVD player that was the problem, not the DVD itself. I had tried the DVD in 5 separate DVD players in two separate locations (3 at my own apartment, 2 at my boyfriend's home), and it still played the same way, in a defective matter.
In addition to the CD's and DVD's, they supposedly had mentoring they tell you is free. Well....this guy named Jason called me 4 times trying to sell me more stuff and laughed in my face when I told him this was the biggest rip-off program imaginable. He said it was my problem that I didn't want to make money with real estate, and claimed I was stupid.
When I called customer service back to get a shipping return label, I was told by some woman that I already had a merchandise return label with me. I told her no I did not. She explained to me it was on the bottom of my original letter I received with the program. I told her that contained nothing more than their address in Van Nuys to return the product to.
She told me that was all I needed. I told her, but it was not a postage paid return label. She said it wasn't supposed to be and that I had to pay to have it shipped back to them. I told her the product was defective and I wanted them to refund the whole product package, she said no way. She said they'd only refund the $49.95, which was the package price of $39.95 plus the $10 price for getting CD's instead of cassettes.
I asked her why they charged me $14.50 for shipping, she said that's what the shipping and handling charges are. But when I went to the post office to ship it back, it cost less than $4, including delivery confirmation. Thus, they rip everyone off by over $10 for shipping in the first place. And then to have to pay to send back a real piece of crap product is ridiculous.
I notified the lady that I had already talked to my credit card company and was already disputing the charge. She said if I did that, it would delay me getting a credit. I knew this wasn't true anyway, because the credit card companies already give you a temporary credit on your account while it's being investigated. Obviously this woman thought I was stupid or something.
Anyway, I checked today and it was confirmed that the item was delivered at 7:27pm 2 days after I shipped it back to them. This was on June 4, 2005.
I have read the other horror stories and just hope they don't attempt to charge other crud to my credit card account. If they do, I will end up contacting an attorney like the rest of you. But if you are all doing a class action lawsuit, I would like to be a part of it.
I would hope that anyone thinking about investing in real estate would do more homework than I did. I don't intend to call and invest in anymore infomercials.
Rachelle
Aurora, Colorado
U.S.A.