UFindus strike again
By Phil ~ February 1st, 2009. Filed under: Work.
This is going to be quite a long posting.
I used to be with a company called UFindus a year back. Saying that I was with them is something of a misnomer – they conned me into joining them!
I had a phone call just before Christmas 2006 from some smart Alec offering me the chance to get Webamaze listed with them and so the chance to attract new business for the website. Up to six definite requests/quotes for commissions would be coming my way each week and I’d have so much work I’d need to employ people to help me with the workload.
They wanted money for this though and I don’t pay money just for what is basically a search engine. I can’t remember the exact figures but it was around the £300 pa mark. I told him I wasn’t interested but he kept on and on. First he offered me eighteen months for the same price and then he offered me the first six months at a reduced rate but I told him I still wasn’t interested and put the phone down.
He came back ten minutes later and said how about the first month free? No, I said, but give me the first three months free and an option to say whether I was interested or not following that and I’d consider it. He agreed but then came the clincher. They wanted my bank details straight away and I wasn’t going to agree to that. I asked him to send me a three month contract to read first but he said that this was only being offered there and then and could not be carried over. Why not?
Again I said that if he wanted my bank details then it had to be on the condition that after three months the agreement was cancelled. Ok he said so I agreed, thinking that would be it until the agreed period was up and then they’d want some money.
He took down my details, put it through his system then turned round and said that he was now taking £105 out of my account for the three months. Hold on, I said, this is supposed to be free? Don’t worry, it’s just a formality and you’re not really being charged. It’s just to balance the books. Hmmnn!
Anyway like a fool I fell for it and agreed to carry on.
In the year I was with them I didn’t receive one single lead and for the first part of the contract they couldn’t even get my entry on their site right. No postcode and the map of where I live was somewhere around Wolverhampton. Eventually after numerous phone calls they got it right.
When it came near to the end of my time with them I sent a letter of notice of cancellation by registered post and also phoned them soon after to make sure they had received it and they understood that I was finishing my contract with them.
All told that little mistake cost me well over £380 and not one single person got in touch with me to ask for a website. So why have I now bought this up?
Well the electrician that asked me the other day (see somewhere below) to look at his site for me after being asked for another large fee for updating his existing site was with? you guessed it – BT Customer Street. He accepted that he was in a contract with them until September 2009 but wanted it changed now with the intention of leaving them when the time came and get me to make a new site for him.
When he first told me it rung a bell but I couldn’t quite think what it was until I did a WHOIS search on his domain name and saw it was registered to Iomart – the owners of UFindus and also Customer Street. BT use them for their online websites on their ISP page and it’s branded to them.
Did British Telecom actually realise who they were getting into bed with!
A quick search on Google confirmed it and I also took a quick look at the many complaints about all three of the group. One thing I noticed were the many complaints about Iomart charging for domain names to be re-directed to external servers and also various ‘other’ charges made to customers that wanted to leave them.
Rob, the R in R & J Electrical Services, had asked me to re-design his site to make it slightly more attractive and also make it more Google aware. Easy enough so we had a look at the back end of it but couldn’t actually do anything because the passwords they gave him didn’t actually work too well. We could get onto the Control Page for Customer Street but not at the FTP side of it and without that I couldn’t change anything.
Countless attempts got us no where and we even tried changing his password but that still didn’t work. In the end Rob went home with instructions to call the Customer Street helpdesk and ask them why we couldn’t access the FTP.
He eventually got back to me and said that he had spoken to someone there and they gave him a different address to access the page he needed where he would find tools for changing the look of the page. I found the page in question and had a quick play but straight away it was obviously limited in what you could do. All I would be able to change was any text on there but not the images or any part of the background to the template.
I found where the templates were and you could change the template for another themed template but none were too inspiring and basically were just image changes and where the navigation was placed.
I said to him again that without the FTP logins then I couldn’t really do much with it so he said he would phone them next day. It worked, well it didn’t really.
They told Rob that to have the FTP details they would have to ‘upgrade’ him and charge £600 for the ‘upgrade’. Iomart/UFindus strike again.
So now the job is on hold until September and Rob has promised to come back to me around August to discuss taking it further. I think he will but at the moment his hands are tied and, like I was with UFindus, he’s stuck in a contract with the masters of con.
