Archive for the ‘Consumer activism’ Category

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Tony Mitchell threatens to sue me over my blog postings

Tuesday, August 30th, 2011

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. (more…)

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Posted in Consumer activism, Fraud | 8 Comments »

Century Bank scorecard

Sunday, August 14th, 2011

Century Bank LogoMy wife and I recently closed our Citizens Bank checking account and home equity line of credit (HELOC) and opened new ones at Century Bank. We decided to do this after many unsatisfactory interactions with Citizens.

We’ve learned a lot about Century in the short time we’ve been doing business with them. I wanted to post this “scorecard” of our interactions thus far, for the benefit of anyone who might be considering patronizing them or comparing them to other banks in the area.

Executive summary: So far, I like Century and I’m happy with the switch. I have my complaints, but the positives outweigh the negatives in my mind, especially since there are some things I like a lot.

(more…)

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Posted in Boston, Consumer activism | 2 Comments »

More Citizens Bank shenanigans

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011

Those of you who have been reading the ongoing saga of my dissatisfaction with Citizens Bank will no doubt be pleased to hear that it is nearly at an end. Last week, my wife and I transferred our home equity line to Century Bank and opened a checking account there, and we applied for a Capital One Venture Rewards card to replace our Citizens Bank card. In another week or two the final details of the transition will be complete and we will close our Citizens Bank accounts for good.

In the meantime, however, I have yet another bit of Citizens Bank lunacy to report.

(more…)

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Posted in Boston, Computers, Consumer activism, Internet, Web | 3 Comments »

Semaphore Corporation continues to canonicalize addresses wrong and refuses to admit it

Thursday, August 4th, 2011

Long-time followers of my advocacy may recall my story from years ago of attempting to get the Social Security Administration (SSA) to deal with the fact that they sent several of my kids’ social security cards to the wrong address because the software they were using to canonicalize mailing addresses was buggy.

Some sleuthing on my part and help from people on the Web revealed that the most likely explanation for what was going on was that the Social Security Administration was using a software package from Semaphore Corporation to perform address canonicalization. To be clear, the evidence behind this theory was purely circumstantial — the SSA was canonicalizing my address wrong, and Semaphore Corp.’s software canonicalizes my address wrong in the same way.

Semaphore was notified in August 2005 that their software was canonicalizing my address and others incorrectly. As noted in my original story, their ridiculous response was:

The USPS has a large number of esoteric rules about which ZIP+4 to match when the address-city-state-ZIP inputs are incomplete or conflicting and ambiguous, and rules don’t even exist for many cases, so you’ll continue to see the logic evolve as CASS changes to include more of the above situations.

There are two reasons why their response was ridiculous:

  1. The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is by definition the authority on address canonicalization, and they canonicalize it correctly when given exactly the same input that Semaphore canonicalizes incorrectly.
  2. Neither I nor anyone else was able to find a single other web site or software package that canonicalizes my address the way Semaphore’s software does — everything else out there canonicalizes it the same way the USPS does.

I originally posted my story in August 2005. Tonight, six years after I first posted it, I received a long, convoluted email message from an unnamed individual at Semaphore which can be briefly summarized as follows:

  • “Our software is still broken.”
  • “We’re still not going to admit that it’s broken…”
  • “…because we’re too stupid to understand that if our software behaves differently from the USPS’s own software and differently from every other software package in the world that does address canonicalization, that means ours is wrong and everybody else’s is right.”

But you don’t have to trust me. Below is their email message in full, with some commentary from me. (more…)

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Posted in Computers, Consumer activism, Government activism | No Comments »

Google AdWords is still staffed by poorly trained monkeys

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

Last month, I wrote about Google’s surreal attempts to collect from me a debt I don’t actually owe, and my unsuccessful attempts to make it stop.

Things have gotten much worse since then.

I sent a letter (appended below) to the office of Google’s CEO over a month ago. There has been no response.

Today, I received notice that Google has turned the bogus debt over to a collection agency.

It’s looking like I’m going to have to hire a lawyer to sue Google for defamation of credit to make this stop.

I just can’t believe this is going on. It’s totally absurd. (more…)

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Posted in Computers, Consumer activism, Internet, Web | 2 Comments »

MADD cleans up its act

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

I recently posted about MADD’s failure, for over a year, to stop sending me junk mail.

I remain somewhat appalled by what happened, but I think it’s important to give credit where credit is due. Since I sent them the complaint which I posted, they have been quite responsive, culminating with this email which I received yesterday from a senior employee of the organization:

We have gotten to the bottom of what happened, so I wanted to update you.

We have two different databases – one ([elided]) that handles our online constituents and another ([elided]) that handles our direct mail and telemarketing supporters. We’ve only recently started to send mail to those who have signed up online and thus we’ve been pulling those names by hand.

What we discovered is that when our vendor ran the [elided] names against our do-not-mail file, they were only eliminating exact matches. Thus, if [elided]’s address had “Street” and [elided]’s address had “St.”, the two addresses wouldn’t be considered the same.

To prevent what happened to you from happening to others, we’ve taken a few steps:

  1. We are running all addresses through address standardization before checking the do-not-mail file; this should allow addresses to match regardless of how they are stored in the database.
  2. We are counting matches by household, not by name. Thus, if a husband asked not to receive any mailings, we would not send to the wife (or vice versa). This also prevents us from having problems when a person’s name is (for example) Bob in one database or Robert in the other
  3. We are working to sync our databases together automatically, so there isn’t room for human error (or, rather, there isn’t as much room for it).

Again, I’m sorry you had to receive so many extra mailings so that we could get our act together, but I do appreciate you helping us prevent it from happening to others.

While it’s unacceptable that it took them so long to solve this problem, it’s important to recognize that they’ve clearly now got their act together. This is definitely a case of “better late than never.” Thank you, MADD, for doing the right thing.

 

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Posted in Consumer activism, Junk mail | No Comments »

Daughter’s unintentional trip to Newark still occasionally in the news

Monday, May 2nd, 2011

See When kids are all alone at 10,000m, published May 1 by The New Zealand Herald.

The author of the article, Danielle Murray, did a remarkably good job of getting her facts right about what happened to me daughter, with the exception of saying that it happened “in June last year,” when in fact it was the year before.

 

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Posted in Consumer activism, Journalism | 1 Comment »

MADD enters the junk mail hall of shame

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

April 20, 2011

Kimberly Earle, CEO
Mothers Against Drunk Driving
Fax: (972) 869-2206

To whom it may concern:

My efforts to get MADD to stop sending me junk mail commenced almost exactly a year ago, on April 21, 2010, with a message sent to you through your web site. I received a response the same day, claiming that it would take “two to three months” for the mailings to stop.

(more…)

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Posted in Consumer activism, Junk mail | 5 Comments »

Pulaski Build-A-Bear loft bed: another safety issue

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

I previously reported about a safety issue with a risk of collapsing ladders on the Pulaski Build-A-Bear loft bed sold by Jordan’s Furniture and other retailers. I’m sorry to say that I’ve encountered another safety issue with this same bed.

(more…)

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US Airways: Another awful change-fee extortion story

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

Two years ago, I told the story of US Airways essentially holding my wife and children hostage in Georgia, demanding that we pay hundreds of dollars in change fees so that they could fly home a day later than originally planned. They couldn’t fly on the original date because my wife had a serious illness which (a) made it impossible for her to care adequately for all the kids on the airplane and (b) would have been contagious to all the other passengers.

The way we were treated was awful for two reasons: (1) US Airways policy no-exceptions policy about ticket change fees is offensive, insensitive, and unfriendly and uncaring to passengers; and (2) throughout our experience, it ranged between difficult and impossible to reach people at US Airways who could help us, and when we did, we were often treated with disdain.

As bad as our experience was, a story which was recently shared with me seems worse, so I wanted to share it with my readers.

This story comes from Andrew T. Draper, one of the pastors at the Urban Light Community Church in Muncie, Indiana. The following are his words, written in the form of a letter to the CEO of US Airways.

(more…)

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Posted in Consumer activism | 2 Comments »

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