Ad Trader Romance - SCAM Site AVOID AVOID AVOID

unluckyinlove

:oOk - not my usual name, as my tale is a sad one, but the personal side of it is probably best saved another part of the message boards. To cut a long story short, I needed to create an account on a dating website, and the site in question had to be Ad Trader Romance. After 20-odd years of marriage, I'd never looked into dating websites, and I had no idea what a nasty business the whole industry is. Of all of them though, this one uses the nastiest tricks in the book. Details below:


This site is a scam, which works on inertia selling. If you buy ONE MONTH'S subsrciption, you are locked into a 'revolving contract' which means that unless YOU RING THEM at least 72 hours before your month runs out, they WILL TAKE the next months subscription, right until the day you die, I guess. An email to them won't do. Writing to them won't do. You HAVE to ring them. Their response is 'Well, it's in the Terms and Conditions; it's not our fault.' Yeah, right. If that was the case they wouldn't sell their product as a 'month's subcription' or whatever aspect of the product you decide to buy; they'd call it 'Lifetime's commitment unless you ring us'. AVOID AVOID AVOID. Its a nasty business, and they're a shonky cowboy outfit.

:mad: Rant over.

(Funnily enough, they're not too keen on me using this text as the main body for my personal profile on the site! Shame. I'll just have to use this site instead, and hope it gets just as many hits, if not more. I simply couldn't believe their selling practices. Oh well, it's just one more lesson learned in a year that's been full of lessons learned. Not many of them nice, either.)

geordieracer

Quite a lot of companies do this nowadays including car insurance. Unfortunatly its legal and is another case of making sure you read the T&Cs thoroughly.

Its not a scam though..
Hope you have now cancelled your contract with them.

unluckyinlove

Thanks - well, it won't be nicked from me next month, which is a bonus, but I don't think there's a lot I can do about this month. Still, I think I got my money's worth for what they took when I made the phone call to customer services!

It feels like a scam - you think you've signed up for a month, and suddenly you're locked into something that writing to them and telling them you want to be released from isn't good enough, you HAVE to ring them. I hope that if just one other person reads this and it puts them off, it will be worth it. Friends Reunited dating deals much more straightforwardly - they want to keep your business, and email you a couple of times to try to persuade you, but they don't just take the next installment without authorisation. I felt like I'd been robbed with adtrader romance