As I had already taken up such advertisements with 2 other advertising agencies I advised the sales representative that I did not wish to take up their service and that should have been the end of it. As you can imagine, I was a very surprised she told me that “you have already agreed to this a few months back”.

I do remember having a conversation with them a couple of months previous when my finances were stretched (as they always seem to be) and I agreed that they could call in a couple of months to see if my circumstances were any better, but to the best of my recollection I had made no such agreement. I had no letters from them about this agreement, no emails, not even any notes to indicate that I had agreed to this, and with both of the other advertising agencies only charging around £200, this commitment of £495 is definitely something I should have been aware of!

Unfortunately, like almost everyone who is trying to keep a business running, I was so busy that I could not remember clearly what I was doing last week never mind a few months ago and so I resigned to the fact that I must have agreed to it and just forgotten about it. With a bit further discussion about it, being re-assured that I had agreed to it and basically emotionally blackmailed into it by constantly letting me know this was to help abused children they eventually lowered the price to £250 and I accepted.

With so many things confusing the issue like not knowing if I had actually agreed or not, feeling guilty about not wanting to supporting the cause, I basically felt like I had someone behind me pushing me on and on through the whole conversation until I had put the phone down and had seemingly agreed to the £250 advert I did not even want!

At first I sat there and basically wrote off that £250 as an error on my part and thought I had better be more careful in future to avoid any repeats of this incident. As a day or so passed and my mind had time to sort through things and get a better understanding of what happened I became more and more convinced I did not agree to this and decided to do a bit of digging.

Google revealed some interesting results which although were not indicating any foul play by this particular company did put a whole lot of doubts in my mind about them, and indeed the 2 others I had been dealing with. I distinctly remember one of the other companies (Chestnut House – Which has since been ditched by the charity it represented because of their dodgy practices – http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/investigations/2008/10/honeyrose-foundation-needs-cas.html) advised me that all the money went to granting terminally ill people their last wish when in fact it appears that only 5% is actually donated to the charity and the sales agent earns 25%-30% commission per sale.

None of this is mentioned on any of the correspondence I’ve received but to be perfectly honest it does not sound very charitable to me!! The other company (Vardis) is more forthcoming and actually mentions on their initial “thank you for helping out” letter that 12% will be directly donated to the charity they’re associated with.

You can find a lot of information about these types of scams on The Mirror – Charity Archives – Investigations and the 2 companies mentioned above, Chestnut House and Vardis.

I have advertised in both wall planners for 2 years running and have only just realised that my charitable contributions total £88 instead of around £800 which I have paid these companies and to this date I’ve not received a single enquiry about my services via one of these wall planners which makes me wonder if they actually produce any more than the sample ones they send you. When they call to get me to re-advertise I will be informing them, in no uncertain terms, that I do not wish to renew my contribution!

Based on this newly discovered information I was not prepared to let yet another company con me out of money I cannot really space in the name of charity I and decided to follow this up. I wrote a letter to the company (no more getting confused on phone calls) advising them that I am certain that I had made no commitment in the telephone conversation made a few months back and that this contract was achieved only by misrepresentation by advising me I had agreed to it previously when I had not.

I also requested a copy of every conversation between myself and their company so that both myself and their company could be certain if the agreement was actually made or not, and that if I was not provided with these then I would consider this as an indication that the original agreement was not made as they claimed and that the contract was null and void. I kept a copy of this letter for my records and sent it recorded delivery so I knew they had received it.

A couple of days later I received a call from one of the more senior members of staff looking to discuss my letter and as it transpires this particular company only records the calls in which the agreement is made and not any of the calls to try and hook you in. As a result they could not confirm with 100% certainty that I had agreed to help with the wall planner just that same as I could not confirm with 100% certainty that I did not commit to it. The caller decided it would be best to speak with the directors and get back to me and a couple of days later he did.

When he called back he advised me that there was an account mix-up and that the sales agent should have been calling someone else, my account would be closed, I would not have to pay anything and I should ignore the invoice I received. Personally this sounds pretty much like a cop out because the situation back-fired on them and I’m sure they would have been perfectly happy to carry on with this “account error” and taken my money if I had not questioned it.

A couple of things that threw up red flags for me were (apart from not recalling I had made the agreement)

1) The amount for the advert (£495). With financing being so limited this should definitely have rung some bells especially since the previous 2 companies I had been dealing with were around £200 each. If the amount for this advert had been around the same value I may have thought it was one of the other companies I had been dealing with and not have realised that there was a problem.

2) If I had already agreed to an advert in their wall planner then why did they reduce the price from £495 to £250? It’s not in their interest to reduce the price if I’ve already agreed.

Conclusion

Be extremely cautious when you are asked to participate in anything like this especially if you hear things like

- you have already agreed to this a few months back
- you were in it last year, do you want to go in on the same terms this year

Do not be pressured into anything because of the cause. i.e. terminally ill people, abused children etc… the sales pitch is all geared into making you feel like you have to participate.

At the end of the day I have had no benefit to my company from dealing with these companies (in fact I have lost about 2 days of work trying to get myself out of this latest scam), I feel cheated and all of the good I felt about helping the charities involved has gone and I am left with a bitter taste in my mouth.

My recommendation is to turn down all calls of this nature and if you feel you have to donate, for whatever reason, then research the charity (Blagger.COM would be a good place to start) and donate direct to the charity themselves and miss out the middle man. This way you will most likely be donating far more than you would via one of these wall planner advertisements and you will also know that 100% of what you donate will actually go to the charity.

A further recommendation is to register all your telephone numbers with the Telephone Preference Service (I use a 0845 number but it’s mapped onto a standard UK landline number so both numbers need registered) to stop unwanted sales calls. If you receive any further sales calls after 28 days from registering then you can make a complaint against the company in question. I did this and the sales calls all died off very quickly and I hardly get any these days. Any that I do get I politely inform that I’ve registered with the Telephone Preference Service and they’re not on the line long!