PURESHREDCLEANSE.COM Fraudulent Charges
On Saturday while catching up with some banking stuff I needed to do, I noticed that my account was overdrawn by a little over $20 when I knew it should not have been. Yes, the balance was low, about $60, but more funds were due to be deposited on Monday and no money needed to be spent at this time.
We think that all this stemmed from a singular purchase of Zenergy Fat Burner, which was a trial, however, the order page, on a different URL to pureshredcleanse.com, made no mention of further charges, if not canceled. When I went to pureshredcleanse.com and read all the terms and conditions, the amounts charged to my wife’s debit card was exact, from the trial charges to the monthly charges.
I wasn’t there when my wife signed up for the trial, but what I can say is that after the trial bottle of Zenergy Fat Burner, we have not received any more deliveries of whatever Pure Shred Cleanse is. This company has billed us under two different brands, PURESHREDCLEANSE.COM and PURE-SHRED-ADVANCED.CO, both out of Georgia, for a total of $359.62 in charges between 2/28/2019 and 4/15/2019.
The charges that were made under PURE-SHRED-ADVANCED.CO was in addition to what the terms & conditions stated on the pureshredcleanse.com website. Again, these terms and conditions were not shown or linked to on the original order page, that was hosted on a third party seller domain.
My wife tried to call pureshredcleanse.com, on the number provided on our statement, and she was greeted with a generic recorded message that said something similar to “thank you for calling customer service.”, continuing “all our representatives are busy, please hold.”, after an hour we gave up and headed to Meritrust, to stop more charges, a red flag for me is the lack of company name in the greeting.
We visited our credit union, Meritrust, who was amazing in dealing with this, Zac was friendly and exceptionally helpful in resolving this issue. My wife’s debit card was immediately canceled and a new card issued. And Zac sat down with us going through our statements to identify the fraudulent charges, passing this information onto VISA, who will follow up and refund the charges within a few days.
We used this opportunity to create a separate bill pay account with no overdraft protection, so charges like this will be rejected in the future instead of going overdrawn. Also, this secondary account will help us manage money better as all bills will come from this new account and only have funds for bills deposited.
Moral of the story, be careful what you sign up for online. A virtual credit card, which is a card number that can be created and deleted readily is one solution to limit your exposure to fraud. Another option is a pre-paid VISA card, which you can load with just enough money to cover your purchase. Or at least use a credit card, not a debit card as credit cards have inbuilt protections. We were lucky that our credit union is amazing, not all banks will be as helpful with fraudulent purchases on your debit card.
Disclaimer: I am not saying that pureshredcleanse.com, walnutcreeklabs.com or SPH Media Group, LLC, all named on the terms and conditions are fraudulent companies, what I am saying is based upon a single purchase, we have been billed five times for products or services we never agreed to.