pimsleur-approach Stroll-handles their billing-? and shipping They suck you in with a cute internet commercial; sounds like it's $9.99, then you start seeing recurring bills for $64 a pop Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

I was surfing the web when I came across a really engaging web-commercial on a page of an e-zine that I was reading. The kind where as they are talking, it's showing graphics like someone drawing pictures to go with the speech, on a white board. It really draws you in. It explains who Pimsleur is/was, and his unique method of teaching foreign languages.

It's about 20 minutes long, but remains interesting all through the shpiel. As you can imagine, after 20 minutes, although your paying attention, by the time you get to the sign-up for the course, you're trying to figure out which language you'd like to learn, and what a great deal for $9.99. How they do it for that much, I don't know, but what a deal.

About a month later, while you're going through your bank statements, you see charges from them for $64 dollars. And a couple of them. You call to straighten it out, and the customer service people are very nice, but you have to talk to collections to get it straightened out. Then you get Satan on the phone, who accuses you of running a scam on them, and won't allow you to speak without interrupting you, and when you ask for her supervisor, she refuses or says no one is available, and as you start getting louder out of exasperation, she hangs up on you. It's your responsibility to read the fine print which says (according to her) that after 30 days, you will be billed 4 payments of $64 dollars (a total of $256). I sure as hell didn't see anything that stated that, and apparently many other didn't either. And I've been through it twice! The first time they claim they tried billing my account and it didn't go through so they sent me to collection. I received no letters of this, no emails of this, nothing. But I did have something, (I couldn't figure out what at the time), overdraw my account racking up $105 in NSF charges. I live on Disability and certainly don't have the money for that kind of thing. $9.99, yes and what a great deal, but $256? This is outright fraud on their part. So don't order thinking you're getting something on the cheap, because this is an outright SCAM.