Unauthorised payment taken from my bank. I have no idea why as payment only states Payaug4me. I've googled this name and it suggests that the name is linked to dating sites. I joined a dating site over 6months ago and cancelled my subscription with them and Google pay after meeting my partner. I have no way of checking this payment is from this dating site or some other site I may have inadvertently joined. I'm no longer actively on any dating sites after meeting my partner. So confusing and frustrating as there appears to be no way of contacting anyone.
MU
Mr U.
Avoid any dating site run by this company
Payaug4me (significantly a company registered in the Isle of Man) run a dating site called Costa Blanca Swingers (yes a slightly racy title but actually a dating site that also caters for more broad minded tastes)
This is a highly deceptive site in my opinion, and I would not waste your money on taking out a subscription. Any consumer lawyers out there who want to take these crooks on get in touch. There are a number of reasons for saying that as follows.
The site has members based in the UK, but when you see a site named "Costa Blanca Swingers" (CBS), all written in English, and you are English like me, and actually live on the Costa Blanca you might reasonably expect that a large percentage of members would be from the UK, but not a bit of it. The site is absolutely stuffed with Spanish women and men, a fact not immediately evident when you take out a subscription.
One might point out that it is an adult site based in Spain but the name in English is deceptive, and if you were not wanting to get involved with Spanish people for either cultural or language reasons, your choices are very limited indeed.
Second this is a highly deceptive site financially. So for example when you sign up and take out a three month VIP membership at 89.87 euro (as I did, to a company called Payaug4me.com which operates out of the Isle of Man), you are, in addition without it being made obvious, charged an additional 12.99 euros for 10 so called "super matches" which you send to other members you think you have a lot in common with. You won't know you are going to be charged this until after you have signed up - in my view this verges on fraud.
The financial deception does not end there either. As for most online subscription services CBS has auto- renewal whereby your card is charged for the same amount at the end of the subscription period. for a further however many months you first subscribed for. This would be normal for such online sites, but this is not at all obvious when you join CBS and I had to ask for a copy of the terms and conditions to find out. There is a reference buried in the section on membership on your profile which gives a date for auto-renewal but it is arguably not obvious.
My experience trying to cancel my auto-renewal can be summarised by saying that in addition to obscuring the fact that your subscription will be auto-renewed, Pay4aug.com make it as difficult as possible for you to cancel auto-renewal with a highly confusing online form system that often does not work, and when it does you only have the option of cancelling you membership subscription as their system does not separate out cancelling auto-renewal from cancelling membership. In other words if you want to cancel auto-renewal you have to cancel your membership. The only reason I can think for this bizarre set up is that CBS hope that you will forget to cancel your membership at the end of your subscription period, so they can re-charge you.
In this context, it is interesting to see Pay4aug.com's very aggressive statement about chargebacks on their website which reads as follows;
"Please be aware that all chargebacks are thoroughly investigated and may result in you being added to a blacklist with our processor. This will complicate future online purchases. Denying a purchase that you have made is a criminal offence and an investigation, leading to heavy fines or other legal action, could be made against you. False claims of fraud can also have a direct effect on your credit rating."
This is interesting because they know full well that many members will not be aware of auto-renewal at the end of their subscription period, and have to resort to a chargeback when that happens. My guess is that this happens on a very regular basis hence the specific and aggressive statement on chargebacks.
Finally, there are one or two other deceptive aspects of this site. Their system sends out fake messages purporting to come from a member, whose profile you might have looked at, but this has clearly been generated by the system. That is in addition to quite a few fake "phishing" profiles.The search facility is extremely poor meaning for example that if I did a search in the UK, very often the search results would return a list in Spain - it is hit or miss whether you can get searches to work,, due presumably to inadequate software and programming which also means you won't see all the profiles local to you.
My advice, would be to pass CBS by and use a more reliable site like Adultfriendfinder (much more professional set up) or one of the sites affiliated to a recognised association. Don't waste your money on CBS, in my opinion it is a scam and fraudulent.
