Misleading & false claims - training courses

Sam83

Hi, I hope someone can point me in the right direction.

In January I went to an open event to learn to train for a career. I decided I liked what I saw and signed up. Before I signed up I checked as far as I could to make sure everything was up-front and legal, and it appeared to be. It was for incident, claims and fraud investigation (yes, the irony isn't lost on me)

The deal was - you pay £3,060 (or less), do the training and then be given work provider details to be able to become self employed after training. It is shown on their website what typical earnings are, implying that is it is possible to earn this from doing accident investigation. In fact, the money is made by referral fees.

All their coursework is copyright material (provable) belonging to another company, where the managing director learned his trade! So, I have been sold something that wasn't theirs to sell in the first place.

However, the marking criteria for all assignments was non-existant. On passing you get to to go to Masterclass, doesn't teach at all about being self employed but focusses totally on making money out of Personal Injury Referral fees.

Questioning them results in them making very angry phone calls.

The promise of support (for the higher course fee) isn't available on completion of the course; and if questioned they say the work we are doing isn't good enough so no-one will employ us (not true!!)

Our work providers are mainly for signing personal injury claims up, not accident investigation.

Can someone point me in the right direction to get my money back from this scam? Thank you in advance

Annisele

How did you pay?

If you're saying the course provider breached their contract with you, then a s75 claim might have some mileage if you paid by credit card.

TrickyWicky

These private learn from home courses are all pretty much the same. Pay us a few £k and we'll give you some shoddy photocopies of some junk we got from somewhere oh and here's a dodgy jobs website no-one has heard of except us and it has tons of jobs on it.

I signed up for a course with the Computer Training College moons ago. The material was absolute TRIPE. I cancelled within the 7 day cooling off period pointing out all of their mistakes in the coursework etc. It really was very bad stuff and I've since heard from others including a friend that they'd been suckered in, found the same but left it too late to cancel and had to pay. They also ran into legal trouble and got busted a couple of times.

I've also looked into other training courses but when doing research about them online they're all full of unhappy customers. It's the new 'fast profit' industry of the last 10 years where they can charge large amounts for trash and because you signed that contract...

I gave another one a chance recently.. they sent me a link to their website so i could look at everything in detail. Great.. except it was a promotional site which didn't show me any of their computer simulators etc. So.. i told them what i thought.. they 'arranged' access for me to login to their 'proper' system so i could look at it all etc. The simulaters were pretty bad and there wasn't anything else that looked impressive so i stopped contact with the company.

Unless its the open university (yeah.. takes years and doesn't help you anytime soon) then home learning these days is a minefield.

Sam83

Hi,

thank you for the replies -however, this is not a work from home course. it is a course from amalgam training. I am in my 20's and am desperate for a career and thought this was it. I have read on other forums and it seems quite a few people are feeling the same.

The awarding body is owned by the wife of the managing director of amalgam, you get to join the association of incident, fraud and claims,but this is a made up society, only offers membership to people passing their course.

The material they use appears to be copyright to another company, so they also sold something to me that was not theirs to sell.

I could do with some proper advice as I don't even know where to turn, does it come under trading standards, office of fair trading or should I speak to a solicitor?