Intelius
Complaint 293863 Details

Back on August 27th, I did a Google search for a person who's phone number I wished to look up. Any results I clicked on led me to the Intelius.com website. They site claimed to have a phone number for this individual, but that in order to obtain it, I had to pay a one time charge of 25 cents. Well after I submitted my credit card and email address and paid the 25 cents, the site didnt even have the phone number as promised. I didnt care because it was only .25 and I never gave it a second thought. On December 15th I was looking over my bank statement and noticed a charge on Dec 2 from INT*US Search Services 888-999-4384 WA for $49.95 and was not familiar with. I went back and noticed another charge of $49.95 from the same company on August 30. I called the number to see who they were and what it was about. They claimed that it was a quarterly membership fee from when I did the 25 cent search on Aug 27! I only authorized to be charged 25 cents for the phone number lookup. I was never prompted to accept or decline a membership, and it was never clearly stated anywhere when I approved to be charged the original 25 cents, and I never received any confirmation that I had signed up for anything. This was done without my knowledge or consent!! Upon researching this company, I discovered there is a class action lawsuit against them in the state of California, over 100 complaints to the Washington state Attorney General, over 900 complaints to the BBB, and hundreds of consumer complaints online also accusing this company of sneaking charges to their accounts with their knowledge or consent! I called my bank and the woman stated that they would not be able to dispute the charges from August because its too far back, as they are only allowed to issues credits 90 days back. Then upon further investigation from the bank, she informed me that its supposedly buried in the fine print in the website’s terms and conditions that when you use a service, you automatically sign up for their membership. She said because its stated that she has no grounds to dispute the recent charge and that what they are doing is perfectly legal. Further she said I would have had to call to call my supposed membership at some point before the charges, and then they could file a dispute if they had continued to charge me. Its pretty difficult to cancel something that had no knowledge of in the first place! I think this company purposely sneaks hidden charges onto people’s accounts hoping they will never I personally could not find any statement in the terms claiming that if you use one service that you automatically consent to sign up for a membership, and I was never presented with their terms when I originally agreed to pay 25 cents. Even if its stated in their terms, I still believe that this is a deceptive and misleading business practice and they should be out of business!