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You order for secial promotion Life Cleanse Diet pills as a trial, for £1.00 but in their Terms & Conditions have the right to send you more at a cost of £79 + £3.95 postage.
Be aware they aren't that good! The phone number isn't a UK based one so could be Premium rate, wouldn't confirm if they would do a refund on return of product, telephonist has just put the phone down on me saying they will correspond via e-mail only!
Think carefully before you use this promotion on the internet!
The complaint has been investigated and resolved to the customer’s satisfaction.
‘Free trial offers’ can be costly advises the Insolvency Service as 3 companies are wound up in the public interest
May 28 2010
Three companies involved in the mis-selling of health supplements including Acai Berry Detox, Life Cleanse and Resveratrol have been ordered into liquidation following an Insolvency Service investigation.
An investigation by The Insolvency Service on behalf of the Government found that customers of Vivera Limited, Viv3lab Limited and Trading Planet Limited were enticed to sign up to a ‘Free Trial Offer’ that required only a small charge to cover postage and packaging, typically £3.95. However, if the customer failed to cancel the offer within the cancellation period, usually 15 days, they were deemed to have agreed to an ongoing supply of the product from the companies, at a cost of around £70 to £80 each month.
The investigation found that the three companies were under common control and that between them, during March 2009 to November 2009, they dealt with over 947, 000 customer orders in excess of £25 million. Trading Planet Limited and Viv3lab Limited also used the trading style ‘Healthscience’.
Commenting on the case Alex Deane, of The Insolvency Services, Company Investigations said;
“Companies using deliberately misleading offers for financial gain is serious misconduct and it undermines the confidence the public have in business. I hope the action taken on this matter sends a clear and simple message; if you set out to defraud you will be closed down.
“This action should also serve as reminder to anyone interested in signing up for a ‘free with postage and packing’ offer, if it seems to good to be true, it usually is. Always check the validity of any company that requires your personal banking details and quickly inform your financial provider if you notice any subsequent unusual activity.”
The grounds for winding up the companies were that the promotion of the ‘Free Trial Offers’ was misleading. In particular:-
· The websites used by the companies misled customers into believing that the trial offer was risk free and limited in nature;
· The terms and conditions of the offer were designed to confuse the customer and were not provided in any durable medium;
· The length of the trial offer was not made clear. Customers were provided with a 30-day supply of the product, but had, typically, only 12 days from receipt of the product in which to cancel any future supply;
· Charges to customer credit/debit card statements were applied in one of up to 23 different trading names in a deliberate act to confuse and mislead.
The companies also failed to keep proper accounting records; failed to co-operate fully with the investigation and operated with a serious lack of transparency as to who controlled the companies. The investigation found that all three companies were controlled by a company registered in Malta.
From:
http://www.creditman.biz/uk/members/news-view.asp?newsviewID=11846&id=1&mylocation=News&chksrc=NNow4251
Hey Chuck Turner, Thanks for your info. I am so glad to here these [censor] have finally been caught up with. I hope they rot in hell. thanks for posting hti sinfo here, all of us who have been scammed can at least know that Kharma finally caught up with them.
A BBC item covers this fraud - a 40 million pound fraud
UK has taken action against Vivara Ltd, Viv3 Lab Ltd and Trading Planet Ltd
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009x5n3 (The You and Yours" section.)