Engee F.

This company is NOT to be confused with ecigs.com. The only experience I have with ecigs.com is in calling their customer service number (877-676-xxxx). The agent there was very helpful and polite even though I was furious. They provided the correct website and phone number for ecigsbrand.com. Apparently they get a lot of furious customers mistaking them for ecigsbrand.com.

SCAN TO THE BOTTOM FOR THE SHORT VERSION.

I saw an ad for ecigsbrand.com among the many ads that are included with a story on the CNN Android app. It was $4.95 shipping for a free starter kit. We have been using e-cigarettes but I thought we might be more successful with a different brand.

It took me 20 minutes to click through the dozen advertisements that followed asking if I wanted to buy something else totally unrelated. I VERY carefully read each page to make sure I was NOT signing up for anything except the starter kit. I kick myself for not doing my research.

Starting the very next day, my inbox was FLOODED with spam, etc. I had spam down to one or two messages a day through Hotmail. But I figured I would be able to filter all that out within a month or so - Hotmail is good at that kind of thing.

Within days the kit arrived as promised. It wasn't any better than what we have been using but as e-cigs go it was a good enough product. We only used it one full day but the charge lasted all day.

A week or so later, I was balancing my bank account online and discovered a $99.99 charge from these people! My first thought was thank god there was extra money in the account! I immediately called customer service. (This is where I talked to ecigs.com and they kindly directed me to ecigsbrand.com.)

I spoke with Claire. To be fair, Claire was polite but then she is very used to getting calls from furious customers who have been duped. She never even suggested a mistake had been made.

It took 30 minutes to find my account. Claire kept telling me she couldn't find it and asking for more information. After repeating nearly all my information except my first born's name, she "found" my account.

I addressed all the spam I was receiving - no argument from Claire on this. She was well aware of this issue. She said she would take my information off "the list" and within a couple days I would not received any more advertisements by any means. To her credit, within a couple days, no more spam.

On to the money.

Claire told me the charge was for the monthly refill cartridges I signed up for. I NEVER signed up for this. I NEVER sign up for anything that will bill my account automatically. I read CAREFULLY when signing up well aware of this type of scam. There was nothing that said it was an automatic renewal.

Things got a little strange here. Claire said since the package had already been sent she could not refund the entire amount of the charge until they received the product at their warehouse. (I received the package later that very day.) However, she said she would immediately refund $49.99 and when they received the package she would then credit the remaining $50. She then went on to give me a string of various numbers that had to be repeated over and over because they were case sensitive letters with a few numbers thrown in. Seriously this seemed like it was done simply to give the customer something to **** up so the company could insist they couldn't find any such number.

One of the codes was to cancel the subscription. One was a "Refund Tracking Number" (which when referenced later did not yield any information at all - it couldn't be found). Another was an RMA number. She told me to write this code on the package. Then she told me to write REFUSED on the package instead. Then she told me to write the RMA code but if I wrote REFUSED I wouldn't be charged shipping. Really? I wrote both on the package and dropped it off at the post office the next day.

Again a little credit to Claire. The credit for $49.99 showed up in my account 4 days later.

Here's where the USPS did their job screwing the pooch. Because it was refused, the package used the same tracking number it had been assigned when it was mailed to me. Looking up the tracking number on the USPS even now only shows it being delivered to me. But what with the RMA code and the refused thing, who knows what was happening so I called USPS and listened to their automated system. (Oh joy!) According to their system the package had been delivered 5 days earlier but it did not say WHERE it had been delivered to.

I called Claire. She could not find my account. Big surprise! (Sense the dripping sarcasm here.) I had to provide all my information again - none of the codes she had given me existed in their system. Finally, she found my account but there was no record of it being received. She did the same thing I did - looked up the tracking number on the USPS site where it still said the package had been delivered to me. Of course, my saying the automated system said it was delivered did not do any good.

The next day I went to the post office and explained the situation. They SHOWED me (but would not GIVE me) the tracking page that showed the package being delivered to ecigsbrand. I came home and sent an email to their customer service telling them they needed to check their warehouse, that the post office showed me it had been delivered and it was up to them to find it and credit my account.

I received an email back thanking me for keeping in contact with them and asking me for information I had included in my first email. I simply copied the original email into the new email and sent it again.

More from USPS. My tiny rural post office called and said they could certainly provide me in writing the tracking paper that showed delivery of the package. I immediately ran down to get it and emailed it to ecigsbrand and demanded I receive my refund within 5 days. The email I received back again thanked me for keeping in touch and said they had been able to locate the package and told me they would process my refund within 5-10 days.

I did, finally, receive the rest of my refund.

SHORT VERSION:

While I did receive my money back, the charge for a service I never signed up for makes this a complete scam. It was obvious from the first time I spoke to them (and you can see other reviews here) that they dealt with disgruntled people all the time. While other people did their fair share of screwing this up, the fact remains this company is a scam. There are other ecig companies out there who are legitimate (V4L.com for one) so there is no reason to do business with these people. What started out as a $5 trial became a nightmare. DO NOT DO BUSINESS WITH THESE UNSCRUPULOUS PEOPLE!