How to recover years of monthly payments to a scam website? (UK)

Question

Not sure if this is the best place to ask the question. It's kind of related to finances.

I somehow got tangled into a scam (in my opinion) called completesavings.co.uk

I found out that somehow 3 years back according to their records I accepted an offer while buying National Express tickets to participate in their programme. It is some kind of cash back programme I never willingly and knowingly agreed on.

They have been charging my card £15 every month for the last 3 years. Totalling £540.

If not the email in my spam folder, I would have never found out I am a member of it.

Is there any legal way to get that money back?

I have bought National Express tickets many times, and somehow this company Complete Savings got hold on to my personal details and my card details via the National Express website I assume. At least this is what they are telling me. Not sure if this is true or is it just their trick.

If anyone had a similar issue I'd be grateful to hear how to deal with it.

If this is not the best place to ask the question, is there a place on StackExchange I can post it on?

Many thanks!

Answer 1

Answering my own question in case someone got hooked up in this thing.

After contacting the customer support, via the phone, hearing American accent every time I called (just an observation), I managed to get the 3 months refund straight away after the first call.

They promised me to send a refund form within 24h. It didn't happen so I had to make a second call and this time they sent me the form straight away. The form looks like this:

Fortunately for me, I never used any of the rewards, bonuses nor cashback, so this was sufficient to get the FULL REFUND BACK

The whole process took maybe around a week or so to get all the money from all the years back to my bank account. 35 * £15 = £525 (not £540 as I stated in the question)

Can I still call it a scam?

I leave this one to answer yourself.

Answer 2

Not sure if this is true or is it just their trick.

There are online sites that do ambush marketing. Try and sign-up customers without them knowing about it. This may not be outright scam; but more like unknowingly subscribing to a service.

The article on which suggests that sign in for complete savings is not just simple accidental click; but involves filling up an elaborate form with details of credit card. Since this was quite sometime back; it is possible that you may have signed up for it without being fully aware.

Mirror reports a similar situation where a lady got full refund after she established that she was not aware of the scheme and has not used it.

Answer 3

Your first step should be to contact the company, if possible, and ask for them to refund the money. There's a small chance they will comply, but the main reason is that credit card networks generally require you to give the merchant a chance to resolve the issue directly. If they refuse, then you can file a chargeback. However, you only have 60 days since receiving the bill to dispute the charge, so only the last three months are eligible for chargeback (the charge from three months ago would have appeared on your bill two months ago). For the rest, the credit card company isn't obligated to refund the money, but you might as well ask. If they refuse, then getting the other £495 back is going to be difficult. You can file a police report, file a lawsuit, etc., but it's likely going to cost more to pursue it than you'll recover.