The caller ID was “Gorden Leslie” with the phone number 773-891-5581. Here’s a transcript of the message:

Hi, this is Patrick calling from Mitchell Communications Group. I have made numerous attempts to reach you [lie!] regarding an entry form that was filled out in your name within the last 12 to 18 months to receive a new car. [probable lie!] This will be my final attempt to notify that your name was pulled and you’re going to receive one of our top four major prizes. It would be in your best interest to give me a call back as soon as possible. The number is toll free at 1-877-279-3457 extension 243. We’re not a telemarketing agency [lie!] or a timeshare and this is not a cold call so please do not ignore this message. I’m very aware of the do not call list so I wouldn’t be calling unless you actually entered. [lie!] This is a time sensitive matter I do look forward to hearing from you. Once again congratulations my name is Patrick.

Just for kicks, I called back and was connected to a woman who identified herself as “Rhonda, your prize coordinator.”

She asked for my name and phone number. I told her that it sounded an awful lot like a scam, so to prove she was telling the truth about my filling out a contest entry form, she’d have to give me back my name if I gave her my number. She got all defensive and said it wasn’t her job to “prove” anything to me. Needless to say, this proved that it’s a scam, since a real, legitimate contest wouldn’t hesitate to prove that you’d actually entered. I decided to play along and gave her my name and phone number.

I took notes for the remainder of the call. Here are some highlights that I managed to jot down:

• She said “top four major prizes,” in contrast to “Patrick’s” four major prizes.
• She claimed that I had filled out an entry form at a “mall, sporting event or festival” 12 to 18 months ago and “the contest is now closed” and I’d been selected as a winner.
• She said the three prizes were:
  • 1st: 2010 Ford Expedition or $25,000;
  • 2nd: fly and stay holiday (she went into lots of detail about this; guess what the prize everybody wins is!); and
  • 3rd: 27″ flat-screen television.
• She said my wife and I had to go in person to find out what we’d won and sit through a 90-minute “award celebration and presentation” for the “grand opening of a new travel agency.” She claimed that the name of the travel agency was “GCI Travel”.
• The address she gave for the presentation was 800 South Main Street, Mansfield, Mass.
• No children or guests would be allowed to attend the presentation with us.
• We had to bring two forms of ID — a driver’s license and a major credit card — with us. “These are for identification purposes only and will never leave your hands.”
• She gave us a claim number, MCG534.
• She said we had to agree to let them publicize us if we won the car or we wouldn’t receive it.
• She claimed that I’d indicated on the entry form that I was married, over a certain age (I think it was 25 but don’t remember for certain) and make $60,000 per year. She said we would have to fill out another survey at the prize event and if the information didn’t match we wouldn’t receive the prize.
• She tried very hard to convince us that this wasn’t a scam. She said the point of the contest was to make us feel good about this travel agency so that maybe we’d give them our business later, although there was of course no obligation. The phrases “you don’t have to buy, sign or join anything,”, “nothing to be skeptical about,” “we’re not here to waste your time,” “just trying to show you guys a nice time,” and “no trick no hoax no scam” were all used.
• She said she was going to fax or email us a letter with confirmation of all this information and we would have to sign and bring it back with us.
• She said we could go to pick up our price tomorrow (yes, tomorrow!).
• When I told her my wife was out of the country for the next several weeks, she first asked if there was another married couple that could attend and claim the prize on our behalf, and then asked if my wife could fly back into town for the day to claim the prize and then fly back to wherever she was (really!). She said that once the Ford Expedition was won, the prize drawings would be over.
• When I told her that no, neither of those was really an option, she gave me her phone number (877-249-6405 ext. 126) and told me to call her back when my wife was back in town. She said she wasn’t going to send us the confirmation letter until then. It’s a shame; I really wanted to see it just for kicks (and to get more information about the scam).

Interesting fact: According to Google maps, one of the companies that does business at that address is “Premium Destinations Northeast.” Hmm.

I can’t find anything definitive on-line about a travel agency named “GCI Travel”.  But I think in fact they’re a timeshare company.

I filed a complaint at donotcall.gov. I’m pretty sure this is a timeshare scam, and I’m also pretty sure their phone call to me was a violation of the do-not-call law.

I also mentioned in that posting how the plumber who did the “inspection” quoted us a price of $238 to replace a broken toilet handle, a job that takes less than ten minutes and requires a part that costs less than $5 and is stocked all the time by pretty much every plumber.

Scott Adams says that human beings are “rationalization machines.” I’m sure I’m as guilty of that as the next guy, but I try to be aware of when I’m rationalizing. I have suspected for quite a while that I was giving Winters the benefit of the doubt more than they deserved. I hired them to replace our heating system for a higher price than some of the other companies quoted because they seemed more reputable and trustworthy than the others. I wanted to believe that decision was the correct one. I don’t think I can maintain that delusion any longer.

Starting many months ago, I asked them repeatedly and through multiple channels (phone calls, email messages) to switch the billing on my monthly service plan from one credit card to another. They assured me repeatedly that it would be taken care of. It never was.

In short, they are apparently completely and utterly incapable of resolving a trivial, straightforward customer billing issue despite repeated requests and repeated assurances. This level of incompetence and disregard for their customers is entirely unacceptable.

But wait, it gets worse. When this billing issue finally pushed me over the edge and I decided that I was done with Winters Plumbing, I sent them a letter on June 18 telling them to cancel my membership in their service plan.

They did not acknowledge my letter. And of course, they charged my credit card the monthly fee for the service plan on August 2. I just disputed the charge with my credit-card company. Maybe that will finally get their attention.

Now that I’ve finally come to the realization that the problems I’ve had with Winters are not aberrations, but rather are part of a pattern of failing to deliver the level of service they promise to deliver, allow me to regale you with a list of all the things they’ve done wrong since I first hired them:

→ The subcontractor who installed our new ducts installed one of them in a ridiculous position, far lower than it needed to be. I had to make him take it down and reinstall it.

→ I asked several times when we were planning the new heating system to install screens underneath the vent covers to prevent stuff from falling down the vents. I made the same request directly to the subcontractor. Every time I mentioned it, I specifically said that I wanted the holes in the screens to be the size of window screens. I had to remind them several times about the screens; and the gaps in the screens they installed are about a half inch across, large enough for small stuff to fall through.

→ I’m not certain, but I think the screen material they used was taken from my work room without my permission.

→ The opening of one of the newly installed ducts was not quite wide enough for the vent cover to fit. Rather than enlarging the duct slightly so the vent cover would fit properly, they crammed it into the duct, thus damaging the (antique) vent cover and making it extremely difficult to remove later.

→ The interior of the ducts visible through the vent covers was supposed to be painted black to prevent reflective glare. The duct subcontractor forgot to paint several of the ducts before he left. I contacted him and Winters several times and asked for the subcontractor to come back and paint the ducts. He never came back; a crew from Winters came instead, and they did an astoundingly awful job painting the ducts. I chewed them out about it, and to their credit they came back and fixed it, but the ducts shouldn’t have been forgotten in the first place, and when I complained about it, the duct guy who knows how to do the work properly should have been the one to come back and do it, and Winters shouldn’t have had someone do it (the first time) who obviously didn’t know how to do it properly.

→ The duct subcontractor left trash behind when he left, including cut duct steel with unprotected sharp edges, even though we were assured that all debris would be cleaned up and removed by the workers.

→ The thermostat they installed has the ability to automatically control the humidity level in the house during the winter to avoid condensation on the windows and walls. This functionality requires an exterior temperature sensor which is connected to the thermostat; the sensor comes in the box with the thermostat. They didn’t install it. I had to call them and get them to come do it. To their credit, they installed it for no additional charge, but only because I knew enough to ask; most people wouldn’t.

→ The humidifier they installed uses an unbelievable amount of water. In the first month we used it, our water bill tripled to something like $100 for a single month. Most of it is literally down the drain; it seems like every time I turn around the humidifier is flushing itself out. I can’t believe it really needs to be flushed that often. I suspect that any financial savings we’re getting from lower heating bills is offset by the higher water bill. I’ve asked Winters repeatedly to find out how we can adjust the humidifier to use less water, and they haven’t responded.

→ I think the supposedly ultra-high-efficiency furnace they installed leaks a significant amount of hot air into my basement when it runs. I was running the fan last week to test something and could feel a ton of air blowing out the top of the furnace. I’m waiting until winter to confirm this, and if I’m right, I hope Winters will fix whatever the problem is, since the system is (supposedly) 100% warrantied for five years.

→ When I asked them how long the (expensive) air filters for the furnace last, different people gave me different answers ranging from six months to a year). In fact, it appears that the filters only last a few months.

→ The aforementioned “security inspection.”

→ The aforementioned failure to switch my service plan to a different credit card.

→ The aforementioned failure to cancel my service plan as requested.

If you’ve read this far, I’m impressed. So tell me, am I just being a curmudgeon, or am I right that these folks have propelled themselves through their actions from the “reputable, trustworthy” category into “time to look elsewhere”?

Remember how IsraelSims claimed that they had sent us a replacement pair of SIM card on July 27 when the ones they’d supposedly sent July 20 hadn’t arrived? They even repeated that claim to me in email on July 29, in which they mentioned “the 4 SIM cards we sent you.”

Well, the replacement pair of SIM cards still hasn’t arrived, six mail delivery days after they claim to have sent them. It appears that my suspicion was correct that rather than actually sending replacement cards, they just mailed the original set of SIM cards that they hadn’t gotten around to mailing for a week.

• Their Web site claims you can get sales answers from them by emailing sales@israelsims.com, but they don’t actually respond to sales inquiries at that address. LIE
• Their Web site claims you can get support from them by emailing support@israelsims.com, but they don’t actually respond to support inquiries at that address. LIE
• When you call after hours, their voicemail claims that if you leave a message they’ll call you back, but they don’t actually respond to voicemail messages. LIE
• Either their Web site lies about the cost of calls to the US on their SIM cards, or they lied when they told me the SIM cards sold at the airport are the same as theirs. LIE
• Their Web site claims, “All orders will be shipped within 24 to 48 hours of receiving your order.” LIE
• When I spoke to them the first time about our missing SIM cards, they said they’d look into it and call me back. They never called back. LIE
• When I spoke to them the first time about our missing SIM cards, they said they’d send us replacements via FedEx. They didn’t. LIE
• When I spoke to them the second time about our missing SIM cards, they continued to keep up the pretense that replacement cards had been sent. LIE Furthermore, they acted all surprised about the fact that their “warehouse” had “switched” from FedEx to postal mail. There is no “warehouse” — it’s a one-man business, LIE and that one man was the person who had “switched from FedEx to postal mail” (actually just mailing the order that he hadn’t bothered to mail before). LIE
• When I spoke to them the second time about our missing SIM cards, they said they’d figure out what happened and call me back. They didn’t. LIE
• Either the rate for calls to the US and Europe posted on their Web site is a LIE, or they LIEd to me when they claimed that the SIM cards at the airport are the same as the ones they sell. Or both.
• In email to me on July 29, they repeated the LIE for the third time that they had sent replacement cards which were in fact never sent.

In short, LIE LIE LIE LIE LIE LIE LIE LIE LIE LIE LIE LIE LIE LIE.

Please think twice before doing business with this company.

According to my credit card’s Web site, IsraelSims did, indeed, refund my payment to them on July 28.

Although I would like to believe they did it before I sent them my nasty email, there’s no way of knowing, since (a) that’s the day I emailed them, (b) they did not notify me that they had issued a refund until a day later, and (c) the bank only has the date of the transaction, not the time.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide whether they refunded my money because they “felt so bad about what happened,” as they claimed, or because they received the nasty email in which I demanded that they do so, or because they realized that it was better to refund my money up-front then rather than forcing me to initiate a charge-back. Charge-backs cost the merchant an extra fee and cause their merchant account rates to go up if they have too many of them.

I also leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide whether I should give a rat’s ass whether they “felt so bad about what happened,” when they apparently didn’t feel bad enough to return my phone calls or email messages or FedEx the replacement cards on July 27 as they said they were going to.

As you can see, although the cards were sent in a regular business envelope, the shipping label is on the envelope sideways. According to postal service regulations, this makes the envelope “nonmachinable,” which means that it has to be processed by hand every step of the way.

The label says that IsraelSims uses endicia.com for their postage printing. Endicia supports printing the recipient address, return address and postage directly onto an envelope in the proper orientation, as opposed to printing onto a label as IsraelSims did. In short, IsraelSims could be mailing out SIM cards as machinable letters, which would reduce the postage cost and speed up delivery time, but instead they are sending them out as parcels.

One would think that a company whose entire business involves mailing things to people, often with hard deadlines, would know this.

As I noted in a comment on yesterday’s posting, the author of Frommer’s Israel has informed me that he has heard stories about IsraelSims similar to mine from a number of people, and he is planning on removing the reference to IsraelSims from the next edition of the book. IsraelSims is going to lose a lot of customers over that!

I’m not sure there’s any point in trying to guess what the heck happened with IsraelSims, but my current theory is that they didn’t have enough stock to satisfy all their orders immediately, so they delayed shipping orders to nearby towns, assuming they’d take less time to deliver. Then they either continued to be low on stock and thus continued to delay nearby orders, or they simply forgot to go back and send them.

Do you know the really sad part…….we felt so bad about what happened that we refunded you fully yesterday without waiting for you to send back the 4 SIM cards we sent you.

No apology for ignoring two email messages and a voicemail message. No apology for promising on two separate occasions that they would call me back and then not doing so. No apology for saying they were going to send a replacement via FedEx and then (supposedly) sending it via the postal service instead. No attempt to explain why a package supposedly shipped on July 20 did not show up at a postal service facility until July 27. No attempt to explain why they were unable to provide a correct  tracking number for the replacement package they supposedly sent.

These guys really need to get some help.

(It remains to be seen whether they’re telling the truth about refunding my money yesterday. If they really did, then it’ll take another day or two for it to show up on the credit card’s Web site. I suppose it’s possible that they’re telling the truth about this, but given that they’ve lied about so much else, I’m not holding my breath.)

I ordered two SIM cards for about $150 from IsraelSims on July 19. There was plenty of time for the cards to arrive before my departure on July 28. Their Web site says orders are shipped within 48 hours, and first-class mail takes three days or less to anywhere in the continental United States. Not to mention the fact that IsraelSims is located in Worcester, MA, only a couple of hours from my home in Brighton, so delivery shouldn’t have taken more than a day.

I received email from IsraelSims at 4:10am July 20 claiming that my order had been “completed.” Oddly, no tracking information was provided.

On July 26, when the SIM cards had not yet arrived, I called IsraelSims and left an urgent voicemail message. I also sent them email. Both were ignored. It is worth noting that they had also ignored an earlier email, which I sent them to inquire about exact rates before ordering the cards. In retrospect, I should have recognized this as a danger sign.

On July 27, a day before our trip, when the SIM cards again were not in the day’s mail delivery, I called them again. This time I got to speak to a person, who told me that his computer said the cards were shipped on July 20 and he just couldn’t explain why they hadn’t arrived yet. He said he would see if there was still enough time to send us replacements via FedEx and promised to call me and let me know the result. He never called.

On July 28, or day of departure, when the SIM cards again were not in the day’s mail delivery, I called and spoke to the same guy again. After typing on his computer briefly, he informed me that although he had told “the warehouse” to ship the replacement cards via FedEx, they had overridden his instructions, since Brighton is near enough to Worcester that mail delivery should only take a day, and sent them via mail instead.

I was at the post office trying to find out if they could help me locate the missing packages when this conversation occurred, so I asked the IsraelSims guy for the tracking numbers of both packages — the original one supposedly sent on July 20, and the replacement supposedly sent on July 27 — for the clerk at the post office to look up in their computer.

Here’s what USPS.com has to say about the July 20 tracking number:

• Processed through Sort Facility, July 27, 2010, 10:31 pm, SHREWSBURY, MA 01546
• Electronic Shipping Info Received, July 20, 2010

In other words, IsraelSims printed the label for my SIM cards on July 20 but didn’t drop them off at the post office until July 27.

The other tracking number he gave me, for the replacement package supposedly sent July 27, was for a package destined for Greenwich, CT. When I pointed this out to the IsraelSims guy, he said he “must have copied it from the wrong slip of paper.” He then said that “nothing makes sense here” and told me he would have to figure out what happened and call me back. It’s an hour later, and he hasn’t called.

In other words, IsraelSims didn’t actually send the replacement they claimed they were going to send. What they did instead was to rush my original package to the post office last night after my phone call, praying that it would arrive today, and then lied to me about it.

Others have had similar trouble with this company.

In short, IsraelSims:

• ignores email and phone calls from customers;
• lies about when orders are shipped;
• pays for tracking for orders sent via first-class mail but does not provide tracking numbers to customers so that they can verify when orders are actually shipped (if they did, then I would have known all the way back on July 21 that there was a problem);
• tells customers they will call them back to get rid of them and then doesn’t call;
• tells customers they will ship replacements via FedEx and then doesn’t;
• lies to customers about sending replacement packages; and
• tells bald-faced lies convincingly and without missing a beat to customers who call on the phone with problems.

Here’s the kicker… If you go to the Cellcom booth at the airport in Israel and buy a SIM card there, it’s exactly the same SIM card that IsraelSims sells, and it’s slightly cheaper because you’re getting it directly from Cellcom rather than through a reseller.

The only reason we ordered the SIM cards in advance rather than buying them at the airport was so that we wouldn’t have to deal with the hassle of getting to the Cellcom booth, standing in line, buying the cards, etc. with kids and luggage in tow. It was for the sake of convenience. Does what happened to us seem convenient to you?

I called ZipCar immediately on my cell phone. The rep with whom I spoke first verified that everyone was OK and then went through the “customer was in an accident” script quickly, efficiently, and politely. I received email within minutes of our phone call telling me everything I needed to know and do. It was all quite reasonable.

The next day I received a phone call and followup email message from Gordon, the guy at ZipCar who would be handling the incident. Gordon reminded me on the phone that because I hadn’t paid for ZipCar’s collision damage waiver, I was liable for up to $500 of the cost of repairing the damage. This was not a surprise to me. I was pretty pissed at the hit-and-run driver for sticking me with a $500 repair bill, but that was the driver’s fault, not ZipCar’s. I was resigned to pay the $500 when I read this in the followup email from Gordon:

If you have a credit card with rental collision coverage, now is a good time to start up a claim with them.

I pulled my credit card out of my wallet, observed the word “platinum” on the front which had never mattered before but might now suddenly be important, and gave them a call. Lo and behold, I do in fact have rental collision coverage, and with one more phone call, I was able to open a claim with MasterCard to be reimbursed for the $500.

The claim administrators at MasterCard demanded a whole slew of paperwork to process the claim, much of which had to come from ZipCar. I sent the list of documents to ZipCar later that day, July 13.

Two days later, only three days after the incident, the car was fully repaired and back in service, and Gordon had sent all the necessary paperwork to MasterCard.

Having somebody hit your rental car in a parking lot couldn’t possibly be described as a positive experience, but the folks at ZipCar managed to make it as painless as it could possibly have been. Yet another in a long series of positive ZipCar experiences. This company gets it.

(ZipCars are available in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, London, the NY/NJ Metro Area, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Vancouver, Washington DC, and more than 100 university campuses across North America. If I’ve convinced you that ZipCar is for you, click the ad in the sidebar of my blog, and you and I will both get some free driving out of the deal!)

(click for a larger view)

Our family is celebrating my oldest daughter’s bat mitzvah in Israel this summer in a somewhat non-traditional way. She chose the David and Goliath story as the text for her bat mitzvah study project, and she will be giving a presentation on what she has learned followed by a tour of the Elah Valley, where the battle took place. You don’t take a busload of people into the Judean hills in the middle of the summer without having enough water for everyone, and we decided a neat way to accomplish that would be to give souvenir water bottles to our guests.

The design to be printed on the bottles was produced by Deb Houben, who also did our invitations. She’s a fabulous artist and a fabulous graphic designer, and if you need some design work done, you should definitely drop her a line (more info here).

We turned to Google, of course, to find a company to produce the water bottles for us. We ended up at discountmugs.com, which has a huge selection of all different kinds of water bottles at reasonable prices and with easy, straightforward ordering. We ordered our bottles from them after business hours on July 15, and they arrived July 23. I was able to easily watch their progress of our order through a tracking page on their Web site. The end result is exactly what we wanted.

Overall, the experience was extremely positive, and I encourage anyone who is looking to purchase imprinted water bottles or any of the other merchandise that discountmugs.com offers (mugs and water bottles, obviously, plus lots of other stuff) to give them a try.

(Incidentally, for those of you who are familiar with Jewish life and are wondering why my daughter studied a selection from the Prophets for her bat mitzvah rather than a Torah parsha… We belong to an Orthodox synagogue which doesn’t go in for the whole women’s prayer group thing, so reading Torah for her bat mitzvah at our synagogue wasn’t really an option. There are other communities in which we participate where she could have read Torah, but she wasn’t really interested in doing that, and we were comfortable letting her observe her bat mitzvah in a different way that would be meaningful to her.)

Lawrence Fish
Executive Chairman
RBS Citizens, N.A.
1 Citizens Plaza
Providence, RI 02903-1344

Dear Mr. Fish,

Please find enclosed a complaint about your institution which I just filed with the office of the Attorney General of Massachusetts.

You promised me a $50 promotional credit and then never paid it. I spent almost 25 minutes on the phone with your customer service department today trying to get this resolved, only to be told at the end that it would be “researched” and it might take another two months before I am paid what I am owed, if indeed I am paid at all.

When I asked for this to be confirmed in writing, the representative with whom I was speaking said this was not possible. I had to escalate to a supervisor, Ana, who assured me that I would receive a confirmation letter within 7-10 days. Why I had to escalate to a supervisor just to receive such a letter is beyond me. It remains to be seen whether I will actually receive the letter I was promised, or for that matter the $50.

I would like to know what you are going to do to ensure that every single person who was entitled to the $50 promotional credit receives it. Promising a promotional credit which you then fail to pay is unfair, deceptive, and fraudulent. Are you going to let that stand or take steps to remedy it?

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

encl: copy of complaint to Massachusetts Attorney General

I’ve had run-ins of varying magnitude about this with numerous organizations over the years. The ones that I post about here are the worst of the worst. They have either overtly refused to accommodate my requests, or claimed repeatedly, but falsely, that they had done so.

Today, I am forced to add Yad Sarah to this disreputable bunch. I am sorry to do this, because the work Yad Sarah claims to do is important, and because they appear to be respected by other organizations which I respect and tend to trust. However, after my experience with them, I must wonder how efficiently and effectively they use the money entrusted to them by donors to perform their mission.

I have had to ask Yad Sarah to stop spamming me on no less than four separate occasions, in July 2004, August 2004, May 2005, and most recently July 2010. Each time I made the request, they claimed that it had been acted upon. Each of the first three times, it turned out that it had not. Although I give them credit for managing to stop spamming me for over five years after my May 2005 request, I must ask which part of “You must remove my e-mail address from any and all of your mailing lists, immediately and permanently,” which is what I wrote to them in July 2004, they are incapable of understanding.

I had similar trouble getting their American fundraising arm, Friends of Yad Sarah, to remove me from their postal mailing list. I wrote to them on three separate occasions, first by email and then twice by fax, before I finally got a response. The person who responded claimed, “This is the first request we received,” which means that either she was comfortable implying that a donor is a liar, or the organization is so shoddily run that they lose track on a regular basis of attempts by donors to contact them. At least they seem to have done the right thing when they finally responded — I haven’t received any junk mail from them since April 2009.

I encourage those who value Yad Sarah’s work and might choose to support them to seek out better run organizations that will put your money to better use.