Gordon G.

Sendgrid are Terrible.

I once considered using them for my email service provider, but then I noticed that they were using my email address to send me spam emails. I got email after email from companies I'd never heard off, and I identified them all as being sent from Sendgrid (Spamcop stated this when it sent my spam complaints to the originator of each of the spam emails - ALL were from Sendgrid).

NONE of these spam emails had an unsubscribe link on them, so I couldn't unsubscribe and so I kept on getting more and more.

Without knowing an email address to write to to stop this deluge of spam there was nothing I could do to stop them. As a last resort I used hunter.io to find out all the email addresses associated with Sendgrid and I forwarded some of the spam emails to each of the Sendgrid addresses.

Surprise, surprise, that woke them up!

It seems that Sendgrid doesn't like receiving spam emails either!

But the email I got from the "Twilio SendGrid Abuse Team" (Twilio is their parent company) did not provide much confidence in them. Their lame effort was:

"Kindly note that Twilio is a data processor, not a data controller, and we cannot remove you from our customers' databases. Because many companies use us as a provider, we are not able to prevent you, globally, from receiving communications from us.

"Whilst we share in your frustration, if you're not receiving mail directly from us, but are receiving mail from one of our customers who is using the SendGrid platform, you will need to unsubscribe from each customer's mailing list individually."

In other words I was made to unsubscribe from each spam list that I hadn't subscribed to in the first place! Sendgrid set up the system that allows this to happen and yet they are unable to stop it happening. So "Don't blame us: blame the people who use us". I've never heard anything so pathetic and lame in all my life.

They even phrased it so that I felt a bit guilty about complaining about all the spam...

Since that time about early March I've been getting spam emails from them still, and each one I have to unsubscribe from individually.

Then the next one comes along, and I have to drop what I'm doing and unsubscribe from that.

Sendgrid and Twilio do not operate within the CAN-SPAM code of conduct or any other anti-spam directive; they are a feckless and useless company.

So God help the people who sign up for their service. Do they know that a lot of the emails they're paying for is being sent to people who don't want it? Probably not.

Do not use this company.

Stripe in an incompetent company. I had opened an account before but had no need to use it until a year or so later, but I found it was locked, possibly because it had not been used.

It then asked me to verify my account by supplying the date of the last two Stripe transactions. But I had never used the account, so there have been no transactions. It took me two days to get the "support" agents to understand that this method of verification could not work.

I was then asked to send a photo of my passport next to the day's date on a piece of paper, which I did. But the agent said he could not see the date (even though it took up about a quarter of the area of the image).

It took two days to convince the agent that the date was actually there, and that he could see it with his own eyes like the rest of our species.

But then he decided to tell me that I must write the date in my own handwriting!

If they had a sample of my handwriting then this would be logical to verify my ID, but they didn't. So could have got my postman to write it (for example) or anyone else.

Anyway, I sent a new photo of my passport with the date written in my own HANDWRITING.

Then three more agents got involved over the next three days asking me to do the same thing. So I sent the same image back to them each time they asked, saying that I had already uploaded this to the URL they had supplied.

I then asked them if my account had been successfully verified. They did not reply for another day or so.

Then, after I posted my review of this shambles on Trustpilot, they responded by asking me to send an email to their "special" help email address.

So I did. Five days ago.

They have not replied.

Since then I have had more of the same emails from them telling me to supply ID (exactly the same copies as before).

I just did a count of the number of emails they've sent me. It's now 31.

I still don't have access to my own account.

I cannot imagine anyone in their right minds willingly choosing to use these morons as a payment processor; they must be the worst payment processor ever conceived.

They should not be trading at all.

I was initially drawn to Bark by a review (which it turned out had been written by... Bark themselves). Once they had my email address and the description of the type of work I was looking for I began almost immediately to get emails. This looks promising, I thought. But then I examined the contents of the emails. The type of work described was very wide of what I'd specified.

I wrote them at least one email telling them that they may be "barking up the wrong tree".

I also wrote "Have you done any field research on break-even points with smaller charges and much higher acceptance rates?" Because charging £288 just to allow someone reply to an inaccurate job posting was ridiculous, hence my suggestion that they would get a higher acceptance rate if they reduced their price significantly.

Then I looked at my online bank statement. Bark had taken £288 from me the previous week and I didn't even know about it.

I phoned my bank and explained what had happened. The bank insisted I speak to Bark. I told them I had looked for Bark's phone number but I couldn't find it. But my bank had their number (I wonder why the bank knew it?).

I phoned Bark and a delightful fellow explained to me that because I had "used their service" I would have been charged the £288 which was the fee for using their service.

I asked him where was any suggestion that I had given them any notice that I intended using their terrible service.

He simply said that I had used the service so the £288 could not be refunded.

The problem is that I still don't know how they got hold of my card details. There's no way I would have willingly paid for something like that which it was obvious was never going to deliver.

The investigation continues, and my bank has filed a case of fraud and cancelled my card.

So I truly encourage anyone reading this not to have anything to do with Bark.com. It seems that they have a reseller network (which is very possibly how they gained my card details) so steer clear of these as well, although it's almost impossible to know who these would be.

Bark is a scam. They are one of these companies who skirt very close to the edges of the law so that they never actually break it. But they are entirely dishonest and without a shred of integrity.