Wealthy Affiliate University Rip-off Gives Internet Marketing Black Eye

Is Wealthy Affiliate unethical? Is it an outright scam or rip-off? You be the judge. The FTC should pay attention to what Wealthy Affiliate is doing too.

This is a true story that has just happened to me and which may happen to you as well if you don’t read on.

I want to warn everybody so that Wealthy Affiliate University doesn’t take advantage of you as the company will certainly do this to everybody who is not aware of their greed and their disregard for their customers which they aren’t ashamed to rob.

If you purchase their subscription for a year like I have and have no desire to renew it the following year they will without any notice charge you for another year.

That wouldn’t be so bad if you could get a refund.

But Wealthy Affiliate will refuse to give you any refund even if you ask for it the same day they charged you for yet another year.

They bill in advance and will laugh at you if you tell them that you aren’t using their service and have no desire to do so in the future.

They will keep your money and will blame you for not reading their disclaimer which they point out to as saying that they don’t give any refunds.

This is how the Wealthy Affiliate contradicts itself in their disclaimer which I quote excerpts of:

..”If for any reason you are dissatisfied with the services of COMPANY after receipt of any services or electronic digital goods, COMPANY will work with you to try and resolve the issue.” …

“Under no circumstance does COMPANY provide refunds to dissatisfied customers”… “refund requests shall be ignored”…

You can read the full disclaimer here. Update July 22, 2018: The disclaimer page is no longer on there site so I removed the link to it because the link was now redirected to a page in which they promote themselves.

I have not read the disclaimer when I singed up and I bet that most people don’t. This is where the company hides and what they rely on.

After reading this you can form your own opinion but I doubt that you will want to deal with a company that contradicts itself saying that it will work with you to try and resolve the issue in one paragraph and that refund requests shall be ignored in another.

If this was a physical product it would still be refunded by any ethical merchant.

But Wealthy Affiliate is a membership site.

If you don’t use it at the start of the new subscription year and never intend to use it, what are they charging for? To see that there have been other cases of this blatant rip-off by Wealthy Affiliate you can view the Rip Off Report site.

Where is the FTC? Perhaps they should intervene in cases like this instead of trying to protect people from obvious scams.

Is Wealthy Affiliate University a scam? If so it is a well hidden one so far. The judgment is up to you and what I think is my qualified opinion.

You can check the Scam dot com forum if you haven’t done so by clicking on the link above to see what people say about the company. It is not always a favorable assessment.

I could understand if they didn’t refund a monthly charge but they are charging me against my will for the whole year.

Wealthy Affiliate is raking in money that doesn’t belong to them.

(But you wouldn’t suspect that if you read what Kyle of Wealthy Affiliate says about ethical internet marketing. Update July 22, 2018:That page was also removed from their site so I removed the link to it. He certainly knows the theory. What his company practices is vastly different from it).

Your credit card company isn’t likely to help you get your money back either.

It didn’t help me because the payment went through paypal first. The credit card company told me to contact paypal.

Paypal has canceled the subscription but says it may not be able to get the money back. They promised to file a dispute claim and they have done so right away. What a great attitude as compared to Wealthy Affiliate disservice.

(UPDATE: May 23, 2010 Paypal has decided in my favor. I hope that the people at Wealthy Affiliate University will cough up the money that they took from me  without getting a heart attack. I detest their practices but wish no ill to them as long as they treat people without underhanded tactics to separate them from their hard earned money).

Wealthy Affiliate and their kind need to be listed in Better Business Bureau as offenders and people users. I have told them that I would make sure they are in hopes that they would return the ill gotten money. But they just laughed at me.

Apparently they don’t care so I will keep my promise to warn others about their rip-off tactics.

What do you think of Wealthy Affiliate and the way they treat people?

Have you had any terrible experience like this with them or any other company?

What have you done to defend yourself? What would you do in this case?

Please comment and bookmark and tweet this story to warn others. If you have a blog, link to this story and post about it. People must be warned and hopefully the regulators will notice too.

.

Authored by Vance Sova

Subscribe to Vance Sova.com by Email

Subscribe for More Info

Filed under: Internet Marketing Course Reviews