Opinion

Legalcare.co.uk review – “Whatever it takes to get your money”. Do not use them until they clean up their act.

I don’t normally go out of my way to badmouth a company, generally because 99% of them are able to resolve most matters peacefully..

My little adventure started off by searching for “free solicitor information” and eventually refining my query to “ask a solicitor”.  A Google PPC ad brought me  to a page like this:

legalcare.co.uk scamFREE is the keyword here, and when it’s this prevalent on the page, most consumers don’t think twice. Even a web savvy consumer like me actually missed their 14 day trial* statement and their tiny print at the bottom explaining the asterisk (I’ll elaborate on this point later):

* Your subscription will last for 12 months. We’ll collect monthly payments of £19 to cover the cost of your subscription once your free trial has concluded.
You may cancel at any point during your free trial, and pay nothing.

Then at the very bottom of this page, you’ll also notice some more small print:

The LegalCare service is offered on the basis of a 14 day free trial. If you do not notify us that you wish to cancel within the 14 day trial period you will then enter into a 12 month subscription.

What was my experience using the site?

I asked my question and got a sub-par answer back within a day. I wasn’t given the name of the solicitor and still to this day, I don’t actually know who answered my question. I’m not convinced that I was even speaking to a solicitor given the fact that this company recruits members in MLM fashion.

The answer was useless, but I didn’t think much of it because it was FREE FREE FREE, right?

What happened next?

Since I needed to activate my paypal account, I immediately logged back in to Paypal and cancelled this 12 month recurring payment. Job done, Paypal notifies the seller that a subscription has been cancelled. No harm, no foul.

Wrong. I signed up on February 15th 2013, cancelled my Paypal the next day (16th) and received this lovely letter on March 18th:

***************

Dear Mr Sottimano

We have been notified that your recent payment for your LegalCare subscription has been cancelled. 

In accordance with our terms and conditions, there is a monthly charge of £19 for your LegalCare subscription and we have not received your latest payment which is now overdue.

As per the user terms and conditions you have agreed to, ‘Access to the LegalCare service is for a minimum 12 month period and in the event of default we have the right to recover payment for the full 12 month period’.

Please find attached an invoice for the remaining subscription. Please ensure that payment reaches us within 14 days, you will find the suitable method of payment on the invoice provided. If you fail to pay as requested we will pass your debt to a third party for collection and our additional administration fees of £50 will be added to the total amount outstanding.

If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Kind regards,

Accounts Department

***********

Yep – I got mad. Wouldn’t you?


dave email

 

Apparently in their Terms & Conditions, cancelling the payment through a third party (Paypal) isn’t good enough. But on their website during the signup process I looked back and there is contradictory information. Here they mention that you need to inform them:

legalcare.co.uk 14 day trial scamYep.  Paypal can and usually will send the seller a notification email but these guys decided to hide a little clause in their Terms & Conditions  (see Free Trial section) that this just isn’t good enough.

legalcarecouk email

 

You know how most companies usually tell you who you’re talking to? Or maybe even give you a customer support number? Not these guys, because they don’t want you to know who they are.

At this point I knew I was in scammer territory, because when I offered to pay for the £19 (that equals 1 month of service), they refused, and they even demanded the full year’s subscription!!!!

legalcare.co.uk not a good company

Great customer service LegalCare! Woohoo, I’m going to tell everyone just how great you are!

Why am I so mad?

Good companies that value their customers would have done the following:

  1. Sent me and email at least 2 days before the trial was up, and given me explicit instructions on how to cancel
  2. They could have used this opportunity to get feedback on their service, and see if I was happy
  3. Given me a number to speak to someone
  4. Given me the name of someone rather than hide behind a generic email address
  5. Either cancelled the subscription  or accepted to let me pay for the £19

Instead, they hide behind their Terms and Conditions and employ a solicitor’s office to harass you for payments for a service you won’t EVER use again. Are there others like me? Yep, I posted this legalcare.co.uk forum post and recieved a flurry of emails from others who have experienced the same problem.

Look a bit deeper and you’ll notice a few other people who have voiced their opinion online too:

 

Legalcare.co.uk contact details

It’s pretty hard to find contact information, but here’s a few details I managed to find.

From their seller information on Paypal:

Phone: +44 843 642 0042 (Although this has never worked)

Known emails : [email protected],  [email protected] and I also found that [email protected] also doesn’t bounce back.

Business address: Maritime House, Basin Road North, Brighton & Hove, East Sussex BN41
1WR (Someone is actually in the office, it’s located in the industrial, fish packing district in Brighton and it looks just as dodgy in real life as it does on Google maps)

Known employees: Apparently Paul Careless is the CEO,  Mehdi Pourani and Steven John Jones

UK business information: Aska Professional Limited t/a LegalCare (Company number: 06672529)

Other facts

Legalcare.co.uk is a multi level marketing scheme (MLM)

Legalcare.co.uk and Rightsolicitor.co.uk are the same

GBP solicitors are their “collectors” - these guys won’t leave me alone, but when I return their calls, they have absolutely no clue as to what’s going on, who handles the legalcare.co.uk accounts etc..

What do I hope to accomplish?

Well, I want this company to be transparent and honest about their trial. I want them to be a decent company instead of a bunch of beggars needing to take £240 from unsatisfied consumers.

I want them to expose their contact information publicly.

I want them to acknowledge that they did not do enough to make me aware of their cancellation requirements.

I don’t want anyone  else to have to go through this, because it sucks.

I want a better company that cares about customer service to adopt this solicitor’s business model, because it makes sense – just not in the hands of these people.

I want them to stop harassing me for my hard earned money and actually do something to earn it, not try and scam me for it.

You in the same position? Let me know in the comments and I’ll do whatever I can to help fight :)

For those of you who are looking at this with an impartial, logical mindset – you’ll probably think I’m in the wrong. Maybe, but then again, butting in line and blowing cigarette smoke in someone’s face aren’t illegal either – they just piss people off and you shouldn’t do it.

 

 

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How to

How to install a template properly in Word 2007

Forget the rest of the incomplete articles you’ve found, just do this.

1) It doesn’t matter if you’ve downloaded a template or made one yourself, just make sure you know where you’ve put it.

2) Usually, the template folder is in: C:UsersYOURUSERNAMEAppDataRoamingMicrosoftTemplates and you can just drop the template file in there. Next time you click on the  Office button (circle button, top left of Word window), choose my Templates and voila.

Except you might have been a hero during the installation process and changed the installation paths.  Here’s how to find out where your template folder is pointing to:

1) Click Office button, choose New

2) Choose My Templates

3) Right click anywhere in the dialog box and choose properties

windows add template word 2007

4) You can double click on that location and copy it to the clipboard (Ctrl + C)

5) Click on the Start button (windows desktop), choose Run and past in the location. Now drag and drop your template file.

I highly doubt you’ll have questions, but if you can’t manage to do this, please leave a comment so I can make fun of you.

 

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How to

How to detect languages of webpages in bulk using Google docs

There’s a neat little function in Google docs spreadsheets that detects language. It’s  =DetectLanguage(), yep, that simple.

Except that it’s only detecting the language of the text in a cell, so if we use it alongside =ImportXml and we extract the <title> of a webpage, we can be more accurate.

Your formula would then become =DetectLanguage(importxml(“http://www.ebay.it,”//title”)). Heads up – you’re limited to 50 ImportXml calls per spreadsheet, so either copy and replace values or create a script that does this for you.

Below is a spreadsheet you can use to see what’s going on, you might need to make a copy from the File Menu. Also just be aware that the =DetectLanguage function returns ISO language code values.

Here is the link to the actual spreadsheet.

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How to, Scraping, Technical SEO, Tools

Bulk ImportXml tool & source (Google docs spreadsheets)

There’s been a few of you requesting a way to bypass the 50 importxml limit in Google docs so I’ve decided to release something publicly.

Click here to view the spreadsheet

Just make sure to sign in, then make a copy, then press the run button once to authorize the script. If the script doesn’t run, or isn’t there, see the section below.

How does it work?

Please keep in mind I AM NOT A PROGRAMMER, but I do ensure that my code works properly – so please be constructive with your feedback :)

The only way I could do this efficiently was to use a script to set up the ImportXml formula in the sheet. This means that I was never able to call importxml with the Sheet class, setFormula method and then replace the formula fast enough. Even if I did manage to copyvalues and clear the importxml formula from the cell, it would either timeout, result in errors or very rarely…work.

Another fun issue was that Google docs would store the results for importxml in cache, but would display N/A# when I ran through the first loop. WTF. Ok, so add in another loop and now it’s displaying the right results. Don’t ask, I have no idea, but it works.

The script isn’t authorizing, or it’s not there!

Yep, that can happen – here is the source code.

function bulkXml() {

  var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();
  var Num = Browser.inputBox("How many URLs do you need to scrape?");

  for (y=0;y<2;y++) {

    for (x=2;x-2 < Num;x++)  {

      var url = sheet.getRange(x,1).getValue();
      sheet.getRange(2,6).setValue(url);
      var xpathResult = sheet.getRange(3,6).getValue();    
      var counter = x -1;
      sheet.getRange("C4").setValue(" PLEASE WAIT...CURRENTLY FETCHING " + counter + " OUT OF " + Num);

      if (y===1){
        sheet.getRange(x,2).setValue(xpathResult);
        sheet.getRange("C4").setValue("PROCESSED " + counter + " OUT OF " + Num);
        SpreadsheetApp.flush();
      }

    }

  }

}

function clear() {
  var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();
  sheet.getRange("a2:b1000").setValue("");

}

Click on Tools > Script editor and copy paste into there. Make sure you save the script and then you should be good to go

.

When I click on the button nothing happens!

I’ve assigned scripts to the buttons, but they sometimes get lost when you make a copy of the Google doc

Right click on the Run button, in the top right you’ll see a drop down arrow. Select assign script, then enter: bulkXml

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