On January 16, 2008 I received a telemarketing call from Pearl Wills who is an employee of Cherryone telling me how good their company is in helping local businesses to promote their websites to the top of natural listings in all of the major search engines. She was very pushy on the phone asking me all the time how would I like to pay for the services they will do for my company. When I asked her some technical questions about it she would not know the answer and told me that one of her programmers will call me.
Next came the call from Richard Adamik who is also an employee of Cherryone and supposed to be a manager and more technical oriented with the process of Search Engine Optimization to answer any of my questions. Richard emailed me a proposal on 01/21/08.
After few more heavy sales inflicted phone calls and another email on 01/23/08 from Cherryone saying that "We never forget to make YOU money!"(Should be "We never forget to TAKE YOUR MONEY!!") I received another phone call from their "Top manager" Mike on January 25, 2008 who was very convincing in pressuring me to sign up with them at a cost of $2,000 as initial fee for website optimization and $200 monthly maintenance. He told me that my first payment would be $2,200 because they will charge the first month right away. I said ok and he faxed me a contract to sign with my credit card information and I faxed it back to him.
On the same day at 6.36pm I received another email saying: Hi Boris, Just a quick note letting you knows we're engaged in the SEO process. One of our SEO team members will be in touch to go over your target
keywords. Please send us your FTP username and password so we can implement our work into your website. If you have any questions please email seo@cherryone.com
RegardsNo name of the programmer or any information who I will be working with. With common sense I did not reply to this email.
I called Mike on Monday 01/28/08 at 10.31am asking him if I should reply and what about going over my keywords to implement them on my website. He told me that he is going to the tech.department right now and one of the programmers will call me back right away.
After waiting for about 3 hours without talking to anyone from Cherryone I replied to the above email at 1.16pm hoping maybe someone will get back to me through email system. Waiting for 4 days sitting patiently by the phone and computer I called Mike on 01/31/08 at 1.54pm, but he was not available. I called back at 4.12pm with the same result "voice mail". I left him a message that if I do not hear from anyone I will call my bank to dispute the charge of $2,200.
In one hour I called the company and after 2 attempts someone answered the phone and told me that Mike is not available and will be back on Monday. I told the lady who answered the phone and never asked me who I was that I will call him back on Monday. On Saturday 02/01/08 I was checking my credit card statement online and almost had a heart attack. There was a pending charge from Cherryone for $400.I thought it was supposed to be $200 monthly as per Cherryone agreement that I signed and on top of it I already paid for the first month even that nothing was done for one week (which is $50 wasted down the drain).
I called my bank right away to stop the charge. They transferred me to a dispute department. They said that you can not stop a charge once it was initiated but you can dispute. At the same time I did some search on Google about Cherryone and found this wonderful site which lists numerous complaints about them with the same problem (charging customers and not doing the work, overcharging, etc.) There are also 41 complaints on Chicago BBB site during the last 36 month.
P.S. On Sunday 02/03/08 I logged in into my account at cherryoneweb.com and printed out the invoices for my charges.
The first invoice was for $2,200.00 created on 01/25/08 as was agreed, provided they do the job and do not disappear after taking my money.
Second invoice was for $200.00 created on 01/26/08 with due date 02/01/08 and I thought I already paid for February on 01/25/08 or was it for 6 days of January???
The best one is the Third Invoice created on the same day 01/26/08 with due date 03/01/08!! YES NO MISSPRINT HERE MARCH 01, 2008!! and they charge me on 02/01/08 for March. Once again I thought it was supposed to be $200.00 monthly maintenance charge and not twice a month.
What can I tell to anyone here? I like Cherryone's newsletter. On the bottom of it they have a nice slogan in bold that reads:
"We never forget to make YOU money".
In my opinion they should change it to
"We never forget to TAKE YOUR MONEY!!" That's more appropriate to their practice of doing business.
Sincerely,
Boris@
Waxspa
North MiamiBeach, Florida
U.S.A.
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