In a nutshell, Honda Village lied to us when we bought our car, lied to us after the fact, ignored our complaints, sent us (and others) intentionally misleading junk mail and refused to stop when asked, sent us lots of spam and refused to stop when asked, and did mediocre auto-body work for us which took multiple attempts to get right (this last point was Village Collision, another business within the Village Automotive Group umbrella of which Honda Village is a part).

Nevertheless, Honda Village is where we bought our Honda Odyssey minivan, and they are the closest Honda dealership to our house, so when we need service done that is warranty- or recall-related and/or inexpensive and hard enough for them to screw up, we take our van there. Or so I thought.

A number of months ago, I brought our van to Honda Village for some simple service or recall or something; I forget the details. After looking up our van in the computer, the associate informed me that I had to speak to the service department manager about something. I went into the manager’s office, where he informed me that Honda Village would not service my vehicle.

Honda Village has never apologized for any of the things I complained to them about. They have never acknowledged doing anything wrong, unless you consider it an “apology” when they paid me the refund I demanded for the warranty which they convinced me to purchase by outright lying to me about its coverage (fraud!).

Their response to my legitimate complaints was not to acknowledge them and try to improve. No, their response has been to continue on with business as usual and refuse to serve me.

Judge for yourself whether this is a business which deserves your patronage.

P.S. I just realized that I never got around to posting what happened after my last letter to Honda Village’s lawyer. So, for those who are curious… Their lawyer sent back a response asserting that the precedents on which I was relying were out-of-date, and citing a newer precedent which he claimed precluded my filing a Chapter 93a claim against Honda Village. After reviewing that newer precedent, I thought he was probably right, and in any case didn’t have any more time to waste on it, so I dropped it.

Hey guys this is Sara Ellis here.

Hey we spoke on the phone last week [lie!] about possibly trying to lower your interest rates and reducing your monthly payments on your credit card.

So I wanted to let you know that I did find a solution.

Um we’ve got a program that can lower those interest rates to as low as 1.5% and possibly cut your monthly payments in half.

And since you were only making the minimum payments [lie!] this would be a great opportunity for you.

This will be my last courtesy call so please give me a ring today.

You can reach me here at 1-877-723-1419.

Again, my number is 1-877-723-1419.

If you Google 406-623-3644 or 877-723-1419 you will see that a bunch of people are getting this call. It looks like it may be a new scam that just started up.

I’ve filed complaints with the FCC, the FTC and the Massachusetts attorney general’s office.

Beware of unsolicited calls about consolidating credit card debt! At best, it’s a slimy debt consolidation service looking to charge you ridiculous fees for their service. At worst, it’s criminals looking to get their hands on your credit card numbers so they can then use them to make fraudulent purchases.

My letter contained all of the information that the AG’s office could possibly need to investigate the company in question.

They apparently forwarded my complaint to the Department of Consumer Affairs of Ocean County, New Jersey. Hey, Attorney General Paula Dow, it’s nice to see you passing the buck instead of doing your job and investigating large-scale fraud!

The Ocean County DCA sent me a form letter and a complaint form to fill out and send back. There isn’t a single piece of information requested on the form which I had not already provided in my letter. The letter said that only after I sent back the form would they “review the information to determine whether we have jurisdiction to process the complaint.”

I called the investigator listed on the form and told him that (a) every question on the form was already answered in my letter; (b) I had already received a refund from the company and had written to them only to encourage them to investigate the company to prevent others from being ripped off; and (c) I had no intention of wasting my time and money sending back their form.

The investigator responded, “We can’t investigate your complaint without a signed form,” to which I responded, “My letter was signed. If you’d rather enforce bureaucratic red tape than investigate criminals, that’s your choice, but I’m all done here,” and hung up.

Hey, Ocean County DCA Director Stephen Scaturro, It’s nice to see that your investigators are so dedicated to preventing consumers from committing the unforgivable sin of notifying you of large-scale fraud without using the proper form!

After researching online prices for this dresser, we found one site, PriceFalls.com, with a price significantly lower than all of the others. It turns out that PriceFalls storefronts other merchants as well as selling its own stuff, and this particular deal was actually being offered by Unbeatable Sale, a.k.a. UnbeatableSales.com, Bon’Cui, PlayingKitchen.com, ComfortMarket, TechnoOutlet.com, FunToyMall.com, ToolsChest, GreaterMedical, TravelBagsMall.com, HalloweenMall, PetShopUSA.com, WeddingPartyMall, and lord only knows what else.

I’ll let the letter I sent earlier today to the Cyber Fraud Unit of the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs pick up the story from here…

To whom it may concern:

On September 1, I ordered a dresser from Unbeatable Sale, 195 Lehigh Avenue, Lakewood, NJ 08701 (tel: 732-363-0606; email: david@unbeatablesale.com). The order was placed through pricefalls.com. A copy of the order is attached. Both pricefalls.com and unbeatablesale.com indicated then, and continue to indicate today, that the item is in stock; printouts from both web sites are attached.

Today, I received email from notifying me that my order had been canceled: “Due to high demand for the Carolina Furniture 415600 Cottage Double Dresser Furniture In White, it has become unavailable for the foreseeable future, so as a result we had to cancel your order.” A copy of this email is attached.

I called Unbeatable Sale and spoke to a woman who identified herself as Ashley. She put me on hold for about ten minutes and then came back and said she didn’t know why the order had been canceled but if I wanted she could give me the extension of a sales manager who would call me back later.

I told her that was not acceptable. Offering a product for sale, claiming that it is in stock, taking a customer’s money for it, and then refusing to deliver the product is an illegal bait-and-switch, and I did not have the time or inclination to play phone tag with a sales manager who would no doubt not, in fact, return my calls. I told her I expected her to solve the problem now and find out how to deliver to me the product that I ordered at the price for which they offered it.

She put me on hold for about another ten minutes and then came back with another story. According to her this time, my order was canceled because UPS refused to deliver the item because it was too large or heavy or something (I forget exactly what she said), and that the cost of shipping the item by freight instead would be $230, much higher than the $91.99 shipping charge I had been quoted when I placed the order. She offered at that time to reopen my order if I was willing to pay the higher shipping charge.

I told her that, too, was not acceptable. Unbeatable Sale was aware of the size and weight of the item when offering it for sale; if they calculated the shipping wrong, that was their problem, not mine. They were legally obligated to deliver the product for the price they offered, and if they refused to do so, I would file a complaint with the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs. I told her I wasn’t going to sit on hold for yet another ten minutes, and she had five minutes to come back onto the phone and tell me that Unbeatable Sale was, in fact, going to deliver my order as promised.

She put me on hold for another few minutes and then came back and told me there was no way they were going to reinstate my order unless I agreed to pay $230 for shipping, and if I didn’t like it I could go ahead and file a complaint with the government. Hence this letter.

When I search for “unbeatablesale.com” and “unbeatablesales.com” on the internet, which I should have done before I ordered something from them, I see that they have been scamming people like this for years.

This company is clearly engaging in unfair and deceptive business practices which are clearly illegal, and I hope that you will investigate their activities and bring the full power of your office to bear on stopping them.

If you wish to discuss this with me further, you can reach me at (___) ___-____ or by email (preferred) at jik@kamens.us.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

UPDATE [September 12, 2011]: Today, I received an email message from Unbeatable Sale saying they “would like to make this situation right” and offering to sell me the dresser at the originally quoted price. I responded as follows:

I have already placed a new order for the dresser from Linens N Things. Your offer is too little, too late.

Furthermore, since I am now convinced that your company knowingly engages in dishonest business practices, I would not willingly do business with you even if I hadn’t already ordered the dresser from someone else.

In addition, Unbeatable Sale is now showing a shipping cost for this item of $237.99 when purchased either directly from them or via PriceFalls.com, making them far and away the most expensive option for this item on froogle.com. This looks to me an awful lot like an ex post facto attempt to cover their asses should the AG decide to investigate my complaint.

]]> http://blog.kamens.us/2011/09/07/unbeatablesale-com-scam-artists-extraordinaire/feed/ 17 http://blog.kamens.us/2011/08/30/tony-mitchell-threatens-to-sue-me-over-my-blog-postings/ http://blog.kamens.us/2011/08/30/tony-mitchell-threatens-to-sue-me-over-my-blog-postings/#comments Tue, 30 Aug 2011 13:14:29 +0000 jik http://blog.kamens.us/?p=2379 Executive summary: Tony Mitchell threatened to sue me for exposing his company’s slimy telemarketing practices on my blog. I had to pay a lawyer to defend myself against his threats. See below for his letter and the one my lawyer sent in response. If you hate slimy telemarketers and opponents of free speech as much as I do, please consider clicking the “Donate” button to the right and kicking in a few bucks toward my legal defense. (Note: The previous sentence will be removed if/when I’ve recouped my legal expenses.)

I have written before about Mitchell Communications Group, a.k.a. Faithful Marketing, a.k.a. Vandell Communications, all different names for the same telemarketing firm owned and operated by one Tony Mitchell. Hereafter I will refer to them as “Vandell”, since that’s the name they’re using as I write this.

I won’t rehash here everything I’ve written about Vandell, but here are the high points:

• Vandell’s one and only line of business appears to be calling people on the phone, telling them that they’ve won a fabulous prize, and convincing them to attend a 90-minute sales pitch for a vacation club / timeshare rental club / whatever to claim it.
• Vandell claims that they only call people who have entered contests, but there are many testimonials on my blog and all over the internet from people who say they entered no contests and yet were called anyway.
• Vandell claims in their scripted sales pitch that they are not a telemarketing company, and yet they describe themselves as a marketing company on their web site, and their main business is making telephone calls; if they’re not a “telemarketing company,” then I don’t know what is.
• In a misguided effort to respond to the material I’ve posted about them, Vandell has posted numerous forged comments on my blog, including one comment purporting to be from a police officer.

As if all this wasn’t bad enough, Vandell has decided that the best way to silence their critics is to threaten lawsuits against any web site which criticizes them. Such sites are easy to find by searching for “Vandell Communications” or “Mitchell Communications”, or searching for the caller ID of the number from which they call you.

I’m an easy target for such chicanery, since I blog under my own name and my contact information is readily available. A couple of months ago, I received the following letter.

After gnashing my teeth and panicking briefly, I sat down and wrote a long, detailed response to Mudd in which I made it clear that his threat of a lawsuit was asinine; I would vigorously defend myself against any such lawsuit; Tony Mitchell would be made to look very bad if there were a trial; and I would counter-sue for damages and certainly win. I did not, however, mail this letter.

Instead, I spoke with Andrew Fischer, a friend of mine who is an attorney (and, by the way, a prominent civil rights activist and currently the president of the Jewish Alliance for Law & Social Action, although to be clear JALSA has nothing to do with his efforts on my behalf in this situation), and retained him to represent me in this matter. Using my letter as a starting point, Andrew wrote his own letter and sent it to Mudd on his letterhead. This was advantageous to me for two reasons:

1. Andrew’s experience as a litigator makes him more qualified to write a good “lawyer letter” than I am.
2. By retaining an attorney, I made it clear that I was serious about defending myself should he choose to pursue this any further.

The biggest way in which Andrew’s letter differed from mine is that he removed a lot of text. My thought, in writing my letter, was to make it clear to Mudd how foolish it would be for him to sue, by explaining in detail exactly how I would respond to such a suit and making it clear that my response would win the day. Andrew explained to me that showing your entire hand like that is bad strategy; it’s better to hint at the details without actually spelling them out.

Here’s Andrew’s response, posted with his permission:

I’ve heard nothing back from Mudd since Andrew’s letter was sent, which I hope means either that Mudd knew all along that he had no case and was hoping to intimidate me into taking down my blog postings, or that Andrew’s letter had the intended effect of making Mudd see the wisdom in dropping the matter.

As I noted above, I paid Andrew a fee to represent me in this matter — I wouldn’t ask a friend to do professional work for me without paying him for it! Andrew’s fee was reasonable, but it’s not like I’m rolling in cash or anything. If you hate slimy telemarketers, not to mention people who threaten to sue others for engaging in free speech, please consider clicking the “Donate” button to the right and kicking in a few bucks to help me recover my legal fees. I’ll stop asking if/when that happens. Thanks!

In response, the customer service representative told me the following:

• The fee for withdrawing currency from an ATM in Israel is 2%.
• The fee for exchanging currency at a bank branch is waived because I am a “Citizens Gold” customer, so this is cheaper than using an ATM in Israel.

Unfortunately all of this is incorrect:

• The fee for withdrawing currency from an ATM in Israel is actually 3%, not 2%.
• While the “exchange fee” is indeed waived for Citizens Gold customers, the bank charges a hidden fee by marking up the exchange rate by around 10%, so in fact exchanging currency at a bank branch costs 7% more, and is thus 233% more expensive, than using an ATM.

Relying on the misinformation, we exchanged $3,200 worth of sheqels. In addition, based on the misinformation that the ATM fee was 2%, we made thousands of dollars in ATM withdrawals for purchases in Israel which would have been cheaper if we had used our credit card (3% fee – 1% cash back = 2% net cost). In total, the wrong information provided to us by Citizens Bank’s customer service department cost us a little over $300 in unnecessary fees.

Aside from the telephone customer service representative, I dealt with several tellers at the branch where I did the exchanges. I mentioned to them that I was exchanging a lot of cash in Boston because I was told that it was the cheapest way to get sheqels from dollars. None of them felt it appropriate to point out that using an ATM in Israel would be cheaper.

When I discovered that I had been ripped off on the exchanges done in Boston, I sent a letter to the branch manager demanding a refund of the excess fees. He never responded.

When I later discovered that I had been misinformed about the ATM fee as well, I sent a second letter, this one to Stephen Woods, the Massachusetts President of Citizens Bank, demanding a refund of all the unnecessary fees. I also informed him that the bank’s failure to correctly disclose fees constituted unfair and deceptive trade practices under M.G.L. Chapter 93a, and that my letter to him constituted a 30-day demand letter, after which, if my complaints were not addressed, I would file suit against Citizens Bank not only for the unnecessary fees, but for triple damages as permitted under Chapter 93a.

Let me take a brief intermission in the story to remind readers of the cardinal rule of good customer service:

Mistakes happen. It’s how you deal with them that distinguishes you from everybody else.

Citizens Bank was already treading on thin ice because of the branch manager’s failure to respond to my first letter. Nevertheless, a frank admission of error and prompt refund of the disputed fees at this point could still have wiped the slate clean and left me feeling like the errors really were unintentional and the bank felt remorse.

I’m sure it will not surprise you to hear that this is not what I got.

About six weeks after I sent my letter, I received a response from an “Executive Services Senior Advocate” at Citizens Bank. She said that the bank hadn’t done anything wrong. She said that it was impossible for a customer service representative to tell me the cheapest way to get sheqels out of my bank account. And she said that since I was apparently upset about having been charged fees at all for currency withdrawals in Israel, she had “as a courtesy” refunded all of the ATM fees (which was about half of the refund amount I had asked for).

I sent Ms. Advocate a second letter in which I explained that (a) she had apparently conflated my two complaints and misunderstood both of them, since I was not upset about the ATM fees per se, but rather about the fact that I was charged more than I was told I would be; (b) it is ridiculous to claim that a Citizens Bank customer service representative is incapable of telling me that 3% is cheaper than 10%; and (c) if Citizens Bank didn’t refund the rest of the fees, I would sue, and there was little doubt that I would be awarded triple damages.

Ms. Advocate then sent me a second letter, in which she acknowledged that I had been misinformed about the ATM fee (wonder of wonders! an admission of error!) and then reiterated in more detail her fantastic explanation of why the customer service representative did nothing wrong when she claimed that exchanges in Boston would be cheaper than ATM withdrawals:

“As I mentioned in my previous response, our employees would not have knowledge of what method of conversion of a particular foreign country’s currency would be least expensive for our customers since there are numerous currencies and exchange rates of these currencies that may vary daily and other financial institutions may or may not have additional fees that you would be subject to. It is the customer’s responsibility to conduct transactions that they feel are in their best interest. Our employees do not function as financial advisors nor in a fiduciary capacity and thus are not responsible for ensuring that your voluntary transactions are the most financially advantageous.

“At Citizens Bank, our rates typically cover the costs associated with handling foreign exchange transactions on behalf of our customers while maintaining a competitive market pricing structure. We periodically survey the foreign exchange market in our foot print and find that our exchange rate are indeed competitive with other institutions and exchange houses for like transactions.”

In other words, “We mark up the exchange rate as much as we can get away with, and we think it’s perfectly reasonable for our telephone customer service representatives to fail to disclose this when explicitly asked to compare the cost of in-person exchanges vs. ATM withdrawals. Oh, and by the way, our lawyers wrote these two paragraphs.”

Ms. Advocate is obviously correct that there are other factors to consider, e.g., fluctuating exchange rates and ATM fees charged by local banks in foreign countries. However, the fact that these other factors exist by no means eliminates the obligation for Citizens Bank to accurately disclose the ones under its control. To suggest otherwise is patently absurd.

Ms. Advocate then informed me that the bank had refunded (again “as a courtesy”) the rest of the money I had demanded, but that, “The credits that have been applied to your account should not be construed as an admission of any wrongdoing or error on the part of Citizens Bank.”

In other words, “What we did is sleazy, but we don’t want to admit it, and we also don’t want it to end up in court where a judge might order us to disclose to customers that we mark up the exchange rate, so we’re going to pay you off.”

If we wished to give them the benefit of the doubt, we might hypothesize that if the bank were to admit an obligation to disclose their exchange rate mark-up, it would open then up to a class-action lawsuit on behalf of everyone who has ever done a currency exchange there. The only problem with this hypothesis is that I did not complain of a failure to disclose to anyone who walks in the door, but rather of failing to disclose to someone who specifically requested disclosure, which they are surely obligated to do.

If I thought the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office might actually do something about stuff like this, I’d file a complaint with them. As it is, because this is the last (and worst) in a series of bad experiences with Citizens Bank, we have decided to move our accounts to another bank as soon as possible.

Dear Mr. Mitchell,

A few months ago, I posted a voicemail message my wife and I received from your company about a prize we had supposedly won from a contest we had supposedly entered.

Since then, over 100 other people have commented here (and more have posted elsewhere) that they’ve received the same call. The facts and experiences posted by myself and others make it clear that these calls are a scam.

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m sure it’s true that anyone who follows your instructions will receive a prize as as you promise. Unfortunately, that that’s just about all that’s true; most everything else you tell people is a lie. That’s why what you are doing is a scam. That’s why I posted about it on my blog. And that’s why I’m posting about it again — because you continue to lie and deceive people while falsely professing your innocence.

In a recent comment on my blog, you said, “I dont [sic] not [sic] understand why the individual has made such a blog and if there is any support or evidence to this being fradulent [sic] I [sic] would like to be informed or just an explaination [sic] of why he has chosen to attempt to cybersmear my creditibility [sic].”

In fact, my blog posting and the comments following it explain in detail how we know you are running a scam. They also explain exactly what you can do to prove that what you are doing is legitimate. Instead or doing that, you have repeated the same claims of innocence over and over without any supporting evidence.

Several days ago, ten comments (seven of which remain posted; I removed the other three because they were redundant) were posted to my blog from your Internet address in Illinois. These comments claimed to be from five different people (you and four others), and yet not only were they all posted from the same Internet address, they were all posted from the same computer, and they all showed the same pattern of spelling, grammar and punctuation errors that appear in the comments posted under your own name. In short, they were all posted by you. Among the four false personae you took on were someone who claimed to be in Massachusetts and not an employee of your company, and an Illinois police detective. You overtly, knowingly told a string of lies to me and the readers of my blog, and thereby erased whatever small doubt remained in our minds that what you are doing is a scam.

As I mentioned before, the evidence for why you are scamming people, along with what you could do to refute it, was presented in detail in my blog posting and the subsequent comments. Since you apparently missed them there, here they are again, for your benefit and that of my readers:

1. The voicemail messages that your employees leave start with “I have made numerous attempts to reach you,” and yet none of the people who have received such a message are aware of any previous attempts to contact them (no previous phone calls, no voicemail messages, no missed calls on caller ID). Explain this discrepancy.
2. You say that we entered a contest. We say that we didn’t. Prove it. Either give us the details of the “brokers” from whom you purchased our contest entries, or give us some corroborating information from the contest form we supposedly filled out. On a similar note, explain why, when your “prize coordinators” are asked to provide such corroborating information, they are unable to do so and act all offended about this perfectly reasonable request.
3. When people return your calls, you tell them that the entry form they supposedly filled out says they are married, above a certain age, and above a certain income level, and yet many of the people you have called do not meet those preconditions and would never have claimed otherwise to enter a contest. Explain this discrepancy.
4. Explain why, if (as you claim) you are not calling to try to sell something and the “celebration” people are required to attend before receiving their prize is not an attempt to sell them something, winners are required to be married, above a certain age, and above a certain income level.
5. Explain why your employees claim in their voicemail messages that you are not a telemarketing agency when in fact telemarketing is exactly what you are doing — you are trying to get people to come listen to a 90-minute timeshare pitch.
6. Explain why your employees claim in their voicemail messages that they are not calling about a timeshare when in fact timeshares are exactly what the businesses you are calling for are selling.
7. Explain why, if you are only calling people who entered a contest (as opposed to robocalling), you called all three of the phone numbers in one commenter’s house in quick succession, one right after the other. Do you expect us to believe that this particular commenter wrote all of his phone numbers on the entry form?
8. Explain why you and your employees keep saying here and on other sites that if only people would return your calls, they would know it’s not a scam, when many of the people calling it a scam, including me, have returned your calls.
9. You claim that “Det Thomas Ware” posted to my blog from your Internet address because he was in your office because he is someone “who I have made a complaint with about your blogs.” Please tell us exactly which police department Detective Ware works for, and give us his badge number and telephone number.
10. Libel and slander are torts, not crimes. They are handled as civil suits, not criminal complaints. The police have nothing to do with them. Please explain how this can be reconciled with your claim that you have filed a complaint about my blog with the police.
11. One of your clients is Premium Destinations, a C-rated (BBB) business, two of whose founders, Larry Coltelli and Steven Schlossberg, have run a string of C, D and F rated (BBB) timeshare companies, and have in the past admitted to massive do-not-call violations. Please tell us if you are aware of these facts, and how you think they reflect on your company’s reputation and legitimacy.
12. Even if it is true that you purchased the phone numbers you are calling from brokers who claimed that they were from contest entries (it is worth noting that the brokers could have lied to you about that, just as you have lied about so many other things), you are still scamming people (as detailed above), because you are being dishonest to them in so many other ways, aside from the question of how you got their phone numbers.
13. It is illegal to operate a contest in the United States without published rules. Please tell us where on-line we can find the rules of the contests about which you are calling people. If they are not published on-line, then please share with us your thoughts about what, exactly, we should think about that, since it seems to us that legitimate contests are perfectly happy to publish their rules on-line and provide them to anyone who asks.
14. Please provide us with verifiable evidence, e.g., a newspaper article, press release, etc., that anyone has ever actually been awarded the top prize (usually a car) in any of the contests about which you have called people.
15. Explain why anyone in their right mind would trust that you are telling the truth about anything at all, given your antics of several days ago on my blog.

There you have it, Mr. Mitchell, the case against Mitchell Communication Group, a.k.a. Faithful Marketing. What do you have to say for yourself?

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

UPDATE [February 7, 2011]: As others have noted, they’re now making calls under a third name, “Vandell Communications”. I can confirm that’s how they’re spelling the name because, for some inexplicable reason, @VandellCom followed me briefly yesterday on Twitter before unfollowing me. D’oh!

UPDATE [November 30, 2010]: If you receive one of these calls, please report it to both the National Do Not Call Registry and the FCC. The latter is more likely to result in action against the caller, but it’s important to file both complaints.

UPDATE [November 7, 2010]: Please see my Open letter to Tony Mitchell, the owner of Mitchell Communication Group, a.k.a., Faithful Marketing.

UPDATE [October 29, 2010]: When this article was first published, on August 6, 2010, they were “Mitchell Communication(s) Group”, but now they’re “Faithful Marketing”. They’ve changed their name, but not their modus operandi. I’ve updated the title to reflect the new name, but I’ve otherwise left the article as originally posted.

Got a scam call today I wanted to let other people know about.

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 three 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 prize 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 with donotcall.gov and the FCC (both are important). 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.

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.