Strategia - suntasia Marketing ripoff Largo Florida

It's what your company's agents DIDN'T say is the reason Suntasia is shutdown.

Suntasia agents never tell the consumer:

* There are 3 numbers to call if they cancel ALL three packages.

* The customer service number in case they want to cancel unless pressed by the consumer to do so which the agent was NOT allowed to do otherwise they would be written up by management.

* There was a $29 processing fee charged if they do succeed in cancelling.

* The $100 gas vouchers are only to be used $10 increments at a time and you don't get all of them at first

* The $400 travel vouchers cannot be used all at once either. Your travel ticket has to be $600 or more to get at least $100 off and even more restrictions after that.

* The second package (FloridaWay aka Florida Passport) was a timeshare which many people didn't want and the agent was not allowed to mention even though the consumer might of stated that during the sales call.

* Suntasia/Strategia DOES NOT track their package so the consumer nor the company never knows when the product will arrive.

More facts:

* Suntasia used at least fifteen different business names to defraud consumers across the United States out of tens, and perhaps hundreds, of millions of dollars

* deceived consumers into divulging their bank account information and later charged consumers without authorization for a series of negative option programs

* make it very difficult to cancel and get a refund by training their customer service reps to offer more worthless vouchers.

* indicating that they were calling in regard to the banking account of their valued customers, to make consumers believe that Suntasia was affiliated with their banks

* telemarketers did not tell consumers the date that Suntasia's charges would be debited from their account.

For the record Pure I am not frustrated and I have no regrets exposing such a questionable operation like yours. When I was terminated it was a sigh of relief the day it happened. Why? Because I told the truth. How many times was I written up or warned by your management because I gave out the customer service number or an address for the consumer to contact us? Many times Pure. Even your compliance manager told me the day I was fired that he over looked some things I would say when being monitored because I was well liked but he had no choice but to fire me this time. Thank God!

You can spin this any way you want Pure but the bottom line is your company was questionable at best. There was plenty of drug use going on in the company (agents, mgrs etc) and constant fights in the parking lot. Your claim that there were ONLY two customer complaints is laughable. Try 5000 my friend and it would of continued but unfortunately many didn't know how to report it.

Your statement about complaints lodged against Wal-mart is correct but you fail to point out that there are MANY Walmarts around the country just like there are alot of Mcdonalds so you expect ALOT consumer dissatisfaction. Unfortunately for you there was only ONE Suntasia not numerous ones like the other corporations. For ten years your company ripped off consumers and you guys thumbed your nose at everyone because employees there thought Suntasia was safe. Right?? Safe until the media and most of all the power of the internet took hold of the situation which the head honchos at your company under estimated greatly.

Not once did YOUR boss, owner Bryan Wolf answer the media's questions when they began calling the company for a comment concerning certain victims or even have a spokesperson which every company has, so as to deal with all the unwanted public attention. NOT ONCE ! Instead you had a customer service rep or some dialer manager make the comment. Pathetic! Think about it this way, if this was your company that you built from scratch, are you going to let some tv news reports go unanswered? Of course not but Bryan did.

Oh and those wonderful bonuses and sharing of profits with its employees. Yeah sure. Managers would often find many ways to take those away. Often times the paychecks were wrong because managers were constantly deciding whether to give this bonus or that to an agent. When the employee questioned their check they got the run around. Suntasia/Strategia was a revolving door that had a high turnover rate. They would hire anyone from the street.

As for your wonderful product it changed names constantly but the script stayed the same. Why? Because of too many complaints, so in order to "keep things going" they changed the name. This was said in a meeting to us the day it happened but of course you and others still stand by the worthless package. So let me throw out this challenge to you. If Suntasia had such a valuable product which was sold to millions of consumers then show me a list of REAL customers that truly used and benefited from your travel or discount packages. I am not talking about "Jane Doe" from Utah. I mean a REAL list of thousands and thousands of consumers who used your product and were satisfied. I guarantee you Suntasia can't because there isn't one.

Finally, just because someone is an ex employee doesn't mean that they can't speak up when they see something is wrong. Your assumption that ex employees speak from "Mount Olympus" is bull. If you saw wrong doing in your company then you're telling me you would stay quiet? I don't think so. And as for your last statement about God blessing Suntasia? Sorry buddy but if God REALLY was blessing them it wouldn't be in so much trouble today. I got news for you. God doesn't bless thieves who continue doing wrong.

As an ex-exployee also, because the company has closed down at this time, I'm very sorry for the above (and below) people. Some of their points may be valid, depending on how they're looked at, but, basically, Strategia was a great company to work for and I think they really did send people something of value, and were willing to work with people when it came to complaints.

Now I wasn't in a position to see what happened, but we were told that Strategia had only about two customer complaints that were not satisfactorily resolved; and, sure, it's good sensationalism to publicize complaints, but, hey, when you look at the complaints lodged against Wal-mart, for instance, you see that lots of companies get enemies just by trying to do business.

The travel industry is an industry in which there are actually free things, and, when you think about it, you know why. For one thing, various resort locations are promoting themselves. For another, airplanes and hotels have seats and rooms going begging when they're not booked. That's why there are all kinds of web sites promoting discount prices, because you're getting booked at times nobody else wants. But, hey, it's good for you!

I know people who rely on these kinds of perks to travel. Plus, there's a whole industry now in people running their own online travel agencies. Talk about risky! I mean, that may be okay, but I don't know how much accountability there is with all those mom-and-pop "agencies" springing up everywhere. At any rate, a company that was established, and here to stay, probably was a better risk as far as backing up its services.

I always figured the company could have been sending out holey t-shirts on a free trial as long as it made good on its promise not to charge anyone if they called back within their trial period. We took people through a recorded verification to try to make sure they understood what they were getting. If there was any fault, I think it lay more with unscrupulous reps who promised more than they should have to get the sale. Whenever the company monitored someone doing that, they were written up and/or fired. But, unfortunately, the company didn't always catch them. There should have been more supervision there.

This was one company that actually shared some of its profits with its employees, rather than making them absolute luckless drudges. The company has a beautiful facility in Largo, Florida, almost as big and certainly happier than the facility run by the granddaddy telemarketing operation of them all, Special Data Processing, just a few miles away. Talk about not caring about its employees. I warn you, this might not be true, so you try to find out for yourselves. But the skinny I've heard from an SDP employee is they lowered their pay from $8.50 to $7.50 an hour. That just happened to happen when Strategia released 600 employees onto the market when they were shut down. Sound caring?

As far as this young lady having her pay dropped, I'm sorry if she was told by a manager it had anything to do with not making enough sales. But I can say for a fact, because we all were all the time, that if she didn't work all her hours, she would be dropped. That was probably the actual case.

A word to the wise in all these rip-off reports: oftentimes, an ex-exployee sounds like he or she may be speaking from Mount Olympus. But, in reality, they may be representing something from something else that is Greek: the fables. Their words can be real sour grapes.

God bless Strategia! Hope things work out for it as well as they should

For those who don't know how everything operated at Suntasia Marketing, I am going to link you to a website that gives you inside information on how these crooks got away with this scam for so long. Everything that has been posted here concerning the questionable practices of this company is true. Now here it for yourself.

Alex Eckelberry is the host of the website where he did a podcast interview with two former Suntasia (aka Strategia Marketing) employees. The two women agreed to be interviewed providing that their REAL names be with held due to fear of retaliation. They go by the names Stephanie and Carol. Many of the things they revealed I experienced myself but the fact that it is verified by these two women proves what I and others have been posting all along.

They talked about how;

* they presented the script over the phone to the unsuspecting consumer and how the agents tricked consumers by asking the name & city location of their bank so they could pull up the routing number and pretend to have their account #

* they heard other agents (ballers: high sales people) misrepresent themselves by saying that they needed the account number to verify that they had an open checking acount.

* everyone had to use the main key word "TODAY" because that was stating in the recording that they are not being billed for that day, but what Suntasia's agents don't tell you is that the consumer is going to be billed the next day and the next days to come even though it was suppose to be a two week free trial.

* they rebuttaled the person over and over again if they didn't want to give up their account information. The slick wording that was used.

* Suntasia management also scammed the employees when their paychecks were wrong and how hard it was to get it corrected.

* Suntasia doesn't care about your experience and just wanted you on the phone to make sales as quickly as possible.

* they felt the area (company grounds) was very restricted because of all the so called "secrets" between each room that was selling different products.

* the three different offers had three different numbers to call in case the consumer wanted to cancel. Unfortunately the consumer wasn't made aware of this.

* the sales person would claim they were in the shipping department and never would give details about the products being offered.


To hear the entire interview, you can download the Mp3 podcast by copying and pasting the link below.


A blank screen will pop up and a little white box in the bottom left hand corner will appear. Once the audio clip has finished downloading, the screen will show a gray Quicktime audio bar. From there you can click play. The interview is very lengthy but so worth it. I hope this helps you understand how massive this scam was.

CLICK here to see why Rip-off Report, as a matter of policy, deleted either a phone number, link or e-mail address from this Report.