BEWARE: Able “Personalized Weight Care” App
As so many of these scam-type blogs start, my wife saw an advert on Facebook on her phone for Able App, a personalized weight care app for Android and Apple devices, according to their marketing. Erin signed up for a trial, for a cost of $9.99 + tax, which according to what my wife told me, had no indication of automatically renewing, let alone renewing for $19 per week, which is a lot of money for what it is.
The only reason I caught this scam is that a third charge caused an insufficient funds fee on our bill pay account, which as the name suggests is for putting money aside for authorized bills, and no bills were due, so that account had no money in it. I’m surprised I missed the first 2 charges, normally, I am all over it when a new company name appears on my bank statement, which I check several times every week.
The first charge came in from Able App through PayPal on January 12, 2023, and was charged to my wife’s debit card, which comes out of our checking account, this charge was for $13.21, which is not $9.99 + tax, the sales tax should have been $0.61, no idea what the other $2.60 was for. The second charge, also billed to my wife’s debit card was for $19, on the same day as the $13.21, which already reaks of a scam.
The third charge, which came on January 19, 2023, is the charge that exposed Able App, as our checking account had less than $19 in the account at that time, and PayPal used the backup payment option, which happened to be our bill pay account. As I wrote, this caused an insufficient funds fee of $32, Meritrust, our bank, rejected the payment, but charged us $32 for the automated task of rejecting the payment.
So, the first thing I did was log into Erin’s PayPal account, and see the three charges, two from the checking account, and the third from the bill pay account. Immediately I cancel the recurring payment to Able App, to stop any further charges. Unfortunately, because the third payment didn’t go through, PayPal automatically retried the payment on January 26, 2023, which almost caused another insufficient funds fee, taking $19 of the $22.95 out of the bill pay account, but luckily, the bill that the $22.95 was earmarked for wasn’t due until today, which is after Erin received her bi-weekly wages.
We are going to dispute the second and third charges with PayPal, as these are not authorized debits, and probably the first one too, as that was not the agreed-upon amount. Once this is done, and assuming that is successful, we can request that the $32 ISF is also refunded. The main thing is that no-more payments are taken, as I have canceled the recurring payment to Able App on Paypal, thankfully, because Able App was subscribed to using PayPal, Able App does not have Erin’s card details, nor our banking details.
You can do your own research about this company, but from everything I read, our experience is common. And, the service itself seems to be misleading, with many reporting they never got the service as advertised, and found it very hard to cancel. And, even when they were told their subscription was canceled, they continued to be charged, either the next week or in some cases, months later.
Don’t let the star rating fool you, I suspect there are a whole bunch of fake 5-star reviews, it seems incredibly odd to me, someone who works in online marketing, that reviews are mostly 5-stars or 1-star, especially when the 1-star reviews all have a definite theme to them, as the old saying goes, there is no smoke without fire. Also, there appear to be two apps for Able on the Play Store, which is not suspicious at all. I never tell anyone to not use a service, but it’s a definite case of buyer beware!!!
They have also been talking money from my credit card account since December 2021, I did not even suspect until i recently check my credit card statement to look for a particular transaction, then I saw a weekly payment of 19$ have been charged to my account… so far, they have collected almost 1400$ from my account, I don’t know if NatWest will be able to refund me.
Reuben, I’m sorry to hear that they took you for so much money. If it was paid with a credit card, you should at least be able (no pun intended) to get a partial reversal of charges, by disputing the charges with your credit card company, but there might be a limit to how far back you can dispute charges. I wish you the best of luck in getting at least some of the funds back!