True.com Fraud, Scam, Phishing, and Unauthorized Charges. Irving, Texas

My mother had come over for her customary Wednesday evenings to catch up on our favorite shows, and while enjoying the fun of I'd Do Anything, she discovered a charge to one of her bank accounts from a site of which she had never heard.  Upon research, we found that this site, True.com, has a history of unauthorized charging.

The dating site, which at one time did seem to be something genuine, reduced itself from finding people something wholesome in a relationship to a "sleazy hook up site" [1].  The more profitable angle was additionally supported by an intentional disabling of the user's ability to unsubscribe without jumping through elaborate hoops.  The site is not equipped with an Unsubscribe feature [2], and even calling to get the job done is lengthy at best.  Despite currently offering options to unsubscribe via e-mail, consumers allege that the only format the site accepts or acknowledges is exclusively done over the phone [3].    Even when the customer believes that they have been unsubscribed from the service, however, True.com's scam really kicks in.  Several former users have reported that after they believed they had successfully unsubscribed from the site and its services, they found additional charges often upwards of $60 on their bank statements.  Calls to dispute these charges were met with company claims that the former users had "resigned up for" [4] or "reactivated" [5] their services. 

Despite knowing that their underhanded tactics include keeping user information on file after supposed removal from the user system, it is at least easy to grasp how they are running the scam from this angle.  What is more disturbing, and what we are experiencing, is the appearance of charges from this site when it was never visited by us in the first place. 

As my mom explored her statements, which she had not been tracking recently for an account she uses exclusively to make payments rather than to hold all of her funds, she found that they had not, in fact, charged her just the $4.99, which had first caught her eye, but had started a month before with a charge of $9.98, followed immediately by $49.99 on the same day.  Her total charges were not, however, $64.96, because the withdrawls made by True.com left her with an NSF situation, adding an additional bank fee of $25.00, for a grand total of $89.96.

This company is non-responsive to customer e-mails, they have a no refund policy (for obvious reasons), and lies about not only their own nature, but the activities of their "customers" in order to maintain a status they somehow seem to feel is above board.  My mother is not the only victim of this particular process.  I personally suspect phishing to be involved, which puts them at an even lower grade of filth than they seem at first glance to possess. 

We're going through the bank itself to cancel the unauthorized charges and hopefully see a retraction of the NSF fee, since it was through no authorized transaction that the non-sufficient funds situation came about, but I wanted to be sure that everyone possible was made aware of this site and their practices.  If you could all repost, e-mail, print out and post at work, read to your dog, work into a song, angrily blog about, or do anything at all to spread awareness of this site and its unscrupulous and illegal practices then we'd all appreciate it.

On behalf of myself and my mother, thank you all for reading.

[1]/[2]  http://brettborders.net/true-com-ads-sleazy-scam-victims

[3]  http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2007/06/14/class-action-lawsuit-filed-against-truecom/

[4]  http://www.onlinedatingmagazine.com/letters/26-trueunauthorizedcharges.html

[5]  http://www.onlinedatingmagazine.com/letters/24-truecharges.html