Naked wines - watch your bank account

Martin_Ternouth wrote: »

I too fell foul of this nasty little trick when redeeming a voucher. I threatened them immediately with the Small Claims Court and Trading Standards and followed this up with a threat to visit their offices in person. I have now received the £20 back in my bank account although this took days rather than the ten seconds they took to take it out in the first place. This is my email to them today.

Olly/Emma/Lewis/Rowan –

I have had to wait up for a call and so checked my bank balance at midnight – and noted the £20 returned to my account – for which thank you. I have no further issues and if asked shall tell any inquirers that you returned my cash when I insisted that you did so. However, I am posting a copy of this email on a site that provides evidence of other people's similar problems with Naked Wines.

You need to realise that folk like me understand your business model. In effect, in response to a voucher, you kidnap £20 of the purchaser's money and in the ensuing negotiations expect to overwhelm him/her with flattery and apparently favourable offers to induce the potential 'Angel' to agree to membership. The membership may or may not be good value, but the average wine buyer does not have the nose to make a determination.

What is at the fringe of legality is the fact that you conceal the sign-up. I have an email from your Emma Blackman that claims she has "a screen shot which is where you would have selected the 'Yes' option". (Weasel wording; like 'squirrel away' for 'cash in advance'.) I sent my first email in 1984 (possibly before Emma was born (if she exists)) and have had access to the internet since 1993. I am recently retired from a thirty-five-year career installing information systems that required a detailed knowledge not only of the back-office but also of the detailed screen customer interface. I would no more have unwittingly ticked a box agreeing to be an Angel than Roger Federer would walk out on court at Wimbledon with a cricket bat instead of a tennis racket. I am in the business and know what I am doing.

You rely on your "clients" to be nice middle-class folks who might or might not make a fuss, and indeed might feel that £20 or £40 or £60 is an embarrassingly small amount of money to make a palaver about. But given the spread of your £40 vouchers this shall not always apply. I am happy to give a £20 tip to a waitress or to the cab driver who brings me home after midnight from my nearest railway station, but £20 taken by you without my knowledge riled me to a white fury. The money is not the issue: if your voucher had told me that there was £40 off, with a further £20 for sign-up, then I might have agreed – although one of the things that would have worried me is that your company is rumoured to be posting horrific losses and that if my advance payments were not put into escrow then I would lose everything – as the Farepack customers have done. But I strongly objected to it being done covertly, and no amount of protesting your innocence or blaming me for ticking a box that I didn't tick will exonerate you.

You will also eventually have problems with clients who are not nice and middle-class and who see the theft of £20 as an issue that threatens their credibility. For such people, no loss, however trivial, can been seen to be accommodated. You work at the margins of the law, and at the margins of the law there are people who do not see the law as their first redress. You are on dangerous ground and need to explain to your employees the risks that you are running.