Watch out for eye2eye Britain at BETT Show

[greenballoon]

Hello,

 

This company invites people to sign up at the BETT show in London. The small print states that you must PAY for the product if you do not return the product within 30 days.

We signed up for demo at the Bett show in London.

 

After sending the disc back we received an invoice for £150. The company said that they did not receive the demo back. We should have sent recorded delivery.

 

We are not using the product as we feel as though it is not worth the money, lacklustre features and can be easily topped by simply using Google Streetview and a little bit of research.

 

My advice is DO NOT sign anything. It seems like bad practice to provide a demo then charge if you do not want it. What happened to 30 days expiration on demo products.

 

Bruce

[fairm010]

Reminds me of when I got stung with Lovefilm charging after 30 days of 'free' use unless cancelled.

[spadam]

Yes it is extremely bad practice. Not sure legally what you can do about it if you signed up to it.

 

Might be worth complaining to i2i who organise BETT and see if there's anything in their exhibitor terms that prohibits this dodgy practice though if you don't get anywhere with eye2eye.

[RichCowell]

There was one online a while ago offering a free trial if you signed up, then billing the schools because they didn't cancel... I blocked access to their site from here with a sternly worded email, but I've heard of similar cases elsewhere... There should be laws against things like that... I don't think we paid it in the end though, probably because the member of staff didn't have the relevant power to commit to financial contracts etc.

 

Bunch of clowns :-(

[Linfit]

Interesting. We bought this years ago when it was an installable bit of software, one-off payment.

Last month we had an invoice from them - payment for access to on-line resources.

We have had no contact with them for several years, never visit their stand - I wondered at the time if they had sent a similar invoice out to any school that had ever bought the product and how many might pay it without checking: fortunately we have a very suspicious (and therefore very effective) finance team, who queried it with me.

They have now gone on the list of never deal with ever companies.

[Bananas]

Yeah we had this 2 years ago, very dodgy company, we never paid it and told them to do one, never heard from them again. Avoid like the plague!!

[MattHarwood]

We also fell prey to this rather suspect outfit. The disk was sent back, they denied receiving it. Then I received a ranting passive-aggressive attack on Google Maps via email.

 

They sent threatening letters, which is up to them, I suppose...

[linkazoid]

We was stung by this about 5 years ago. Same company and product exhibiting at BETT.

 

We ended up paying the cash as legally I had signed the paperwork. Finance here said it wasn't worth the hassle sorting out with LEA legal.

[elsiegee40]

Moved to correct forum

[witch]

We have eye2eye in one of my schools - the old version - I will check to see if they have had an invoice- thanks

[TomCollins]

Had the same here - they actually contacted & invoiced the school (I gave them my office address and details but the school's name [stupidly] that I thought would be interested, they obviously did some Googling).

 

Luckily sent by recorded postage. The guy from the stand was trying to make a sob story about the fact he had driven 150,000 miles to get the content for it.

 

Agree about the point to avoid this company. (Sorry for bringing up an old thread)

[DrCheese]

Just had this as well, a member of staff picked this up at a show & left it in a draw for a few months. We received an invoice recently to sign off, I naturally rejected this as having demo'd the software years ago found it nothing more than a streetview clone.

 

Rang the company & basically said I'm sending it back, not paying the invoice and this is terrible business practises. Was informed I should try the software before rejecting it, which I laughed off as the disc was sealed with the orginal sellotape & opening it would give them grounds to say we've accepted the product.

 

I don't see how this is remotely legal, anyone could write any schools details on the trial form & said school would suddenly be slapped with an invoice. (This is usually why items have to be delivered to the billing address!) There's no checking of if the member of staff has authorisation to spend money (in our case, they don't) & companies usually need a purchase order from a verfiable source before sending out goods.

 

I guess there's a been a lot of teachers who've picked this up, thought nothing of it. Got an invoice & just signed it off as it's "not a lot of money" or used the elearning credits they have laying around. It's appalling, especially given they actually have a demo version on their website that they could be given away for free instead.

[dastrix]

We got stung with this but for a bigger cost and product we did all the work migrating away from the service and when the renewal invoice dropped in we said not used it for 2 months so tough, anyway someone failed to read the small print and we needed to cancel 3 months in advance so had to pay a years subscriptions at 5k, valuable lesson learned