The fact that you still hadn't checked them before making your post doesn't fill me with sympathy...
Edited by - JigglyBoobs on 7/15/2014 2:10:15 PM
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Introducing Kalani Luana| Author | Post |
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AKperv  All-Star Member 1253 Posts 4/14 |  Posted - Jul 15 2014 : 1:55PMI just got through straightening out a big hassle with my credit card, caused by what I consider unacceptable behavior by HardX. What happened is that when I signed up for a one year membership, I was simultaneously and without my knowledge, signed up for a separate membership to a different website. The separate membership was a cheap 3 day trial that morphed itself into a recurring monthly fee membership. I find such behavior disgraceful. I'm sure it was hidden somewhere in the fine print, but it was definitely hidden. The money grubbers, whoever they are, should be ashamed. [Link] |
| JigglyBoobs Senior Member 1614 Posts 3/12 | Posted - Jul 15 2014 : 2:08PM The fact that you still hadn't checked them before making your post doesn't fill me with sympathy... Edited by - JigglyBoobs on 7/15/2014 2:10:15 PM [Link] |
| killbillvol69 All-Star Member ^Lucy Pinder 18631 Posts 4/08 | Posted - Jul 15 2014 : 2:35PM [Link] |
| CummingLinguist All-Star Member 5908 Posts 11/11 | Posted - Jul 15 2014 : 3:03PM I can't speak to HardX, but there are not enough hours in the day for anyone to read to all the "Terms and Conditions" they click through. So let me ask you a simple question: Have you agreed to let the NSA keep a secret file on you that includes a record of every phone call you make, every text you send, and every place you go with your cell phone? Assuming you have a cell phone contract, the legal answer is "Yes". But did you REALLY agree to it? Edited to add, extra ^. [Link] |
| jfarley Member 242 Posts 5/09 | Posted - Jul 15 2014 : 4:29PM Bordering on shady IMO. [Link] |
| FlyingMonkeyFeet Member 55 Posts 9/11 | Posted - Jul 15 2014 : 6:14PM [Link] |
| rtj2v0a Self-removed Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. ― Jonathan Haidt 222 Posts 10/13 | Posted - Jul 15 2014 : 6:39PM [Link] |
| Jacco All-Star Member "liable to deprave and corrupt" 2673 Posts 5/04 | Posted - Jul 15 2014 : 7:13PM Since I see GBP in the screenshot, here is the relevant bit of the UK guide for merchants: "I. Prohibition of default option for additional payments" "I sell online gift products and offer gift wrapping for an additional £3. I make this clear at the checkout and in order to facilitate the customer experience, ask them to tick the box if they do not want the gift wrap. As I am not pre- ticking the box, can I continue to do this? 2. No. The ban is not on pre-ticked boxes per se, although this has become short-hand for the principle. More properly the prohibition is on any practice which makes the additional payment the default option and where the consumer must act to avoid the payment. So in the case of the gift wrap, in order to avoid this optional additional payment, the consumer would have to act i.e. tick the box. This would therefore breach the regulations." Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/310044/bis-13-1368-consumer-contracts-information-cancellation-and-additional-payments-regulations-guidance.pdf Jacco [Link] |
| shalalin Senior Member 1733 Posts 11/07 | Posted - Jul 15 2014 : 9:40PM Edit: I should add that this is somewhat ironic as Gamma used to be notorious for making it very difficult to notice the upsell, until they seemingly got so many customer complaints that they changed to the current layout a couple of years ago. Edited by - shalalin on 7/15/2014 9:42:07 PM [Link] |
| shalalin Senior Member 1733 Posts 11/07 | Posted - Jul 15 2014 : 9:50PM [Link] |
| Mass Facialties Deactivated User "Facialized Vol. 7" 2021 AVN Awards Winner: Best Oral Movie 9308 Posts 9/13 | Posted - Jul 15 2014 : 11:10PM By the way, there are some good porn review sites out there, like Rabbits Reviews, that list cross-sales and pre-checked items for sites in all of their reviews. Sites like that are a good place to go, especially if you're somewhat new to purchasing porn memberships, before you decide on purchasing a membership for a site; not to mention, they've got some good discount offers, too. [Link] |
| joeblow123321 Member 319 Posts 11/09 | Posted - Jul 16 2014 : 2:21AM I'd say at this point about a quarter of the sites I sign up for now have that same pre-checked box; and I always looks for it. Often it's doubly scuzzy because they put it right next to the terms and conditions box... which HAS to be checked. So OP, what you identified is common, and kind of sucks that seemingly legit companies are basically relying on your lack of attention to rip you off. And it just about every one of these situations it was right there for you to see... but you just didn't see it. What's especially galling though.... is those "Three Day Memberships" typically don't let you actually download videos. They just let you see previews; so they are worse than useless (of course when they DO charge you the monthly fee, THEN you can download videos). [Link] |
| Jacco All-Star Member "liable to deprave and corrupt" 2673 Posts 5/04 | Posted - Jul 16 2014 : 5:46AM And just to clarify my previous post: as of 13 June 2014 pre-checked crosssales like this are illegal in the EU. Jacco [Link] |
| Flash Golden Age Classic 11018 Posts 5/01 | Posted - Jul 16 2014 : 7:58AM [Link] |
| LCF All-Star Member Non Prevalebunt! 10364 Posts 1/05 | Posted - Jul 16 2014 : 8:24AM the problem would be the competent Hall though ,if the site is in the EU as Europeans we could just file a claim to Bruxelles and the Authority would intervene , but if the site is placed in the USA could be a problem to get our money back , after all such practice is legal there. so the change rate is 1:1:1 $=£=€ which is another problem Edited by - LCF on 7/16/2014 8:26:58 AM [Link] |
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| charn fubar 2880 Posts 12/09 | Posted - Jul 16 2014 : 9:36AM [Link] |
| AKperv All-Star Member 1253 Posts 4/14 | Posted - Jul 16 2014 : 12:43PM [Link] |
| Lezlover Member 527 Posts 9/12 | Posted - Jul 16 2014 : 2:39PM It's all well and good saying that all you have to do is un-tick the box, but the box or boxes should never be pre-ticked in the first place. It should be entirely up to the customer if they want to tick the box and sign up for that service. People want to join a site and then get onto that site with the minimum of fuss, not spend time sifting around the sign-up page looking for checkboxes. It's shouldn't be up to those sites to pre-empt that a customer wants to sign up for another site. [Link] |
| Jacco All-Star Member "liable to deprave and corrupt" 2673 Posts 5/04 | Posted - Jul 16 2014 : 3:45PM Jacco [Link] |
| killbillvol69 All-Star Member ^Lucy Pinder 18631 Posts 4/08 | Posted - Jul 16 2014 : 5:45PM I don't know why the site says it's from the Netherlands. It could be that the site designer lives there. Or they're using servers there. Or something like that. I don't know what that means in terms of which country's laws they should fall under. [Link] |
| pat362 Senior Member 10081 Posts 3/10 | Posted - Jul 16 2014 : 8:06PM If you pay attention to cross-sells than you can easily avoid them but they everyone (except webmasters) agree they should not be there. The more honest sites either don't have them or they require that you activate them prior to processing your card so no danger of getting a membership that you did not want. Price difference from Country to Country is a little trickier because the jury is still out on if it's the owner of the site who does that or if it's the CC processor. The one thing I do know is that European customers are usually the ones that get shafted because it's quite common for the same amount written in US dollar to simply be written in Euros for European customers without actually applying a currency conversion. A 20$ US dollar site should really cost about 15 Euros but what often happens is that the amount stays the same but the currency changes so instead of getting the site for 15 euro they actually get it for 20. I offered a link to a review site that offers a very good discount on Hard X. I do not know if this will have any effect on conversion rates and what not but it's worth giving it a try. Just don't process your credit card if you find that they are trying to shaft you. http://www.thebestporn.com/review/hardx/ [Link] |
| shalalin Senior Member 1733 Posts 11/07 | Posted - Jul 16 2014 : 8:31PM However, it does appear that Gamma itself is also based in Montreal - no idea if there's also ownership overlap with Mile High or if they just happen to have developed concurrently. I suspect the reason the payment processor is based in the Netherlands is simply because Gamma took over an existing processor as they expanded their business, rather than set up their own from scratch. [Link] |
| Jacco All-Star Member "liable to deprave and corrupt" 2673 Posts 5/04 | Posted - Jul 16 2014 : 8:34PM The regional billing (as it is called by billing companies) is an option that the siteowner can decide to switch on or off. With some billing companies it's switched on by default, as I found out for one of our own sites, it was doing the same $1=1 GBP= 1 Euro. Of course I had them switch it off immediately after I found out. Onfortunately it's very well possible for a site owner to not even realize it's active, unless you use proxies to test it, as I tend to do nowadays. Jacco [Link] |
| budtugley Senior Member One man's trash can be the next man's treasure. 1187 Posts 1/04 | Posted - Jul 17 2014 : 12:02AM Sounds fishy to me, I'd never do it. Lo and behold an hour after he signed up, his credit card company asked if a $49.95 charge was authorized by him. They tried to sneak one in there hoping he didn't notice or would pay it confused by what it was since the name was different from the website. Most likely a fair amount of the 'there's a sucker born every minute' crowd that pays the bill. Pretty disgusting. It points out something to me. I have in 'my documents' file a letter I typed stating I don't do business with any company or corporation that uses deception as SOP. Some of the junk mail I received is deceptive so I mail the response envelope back with the letter after 'x-ing' out the return mark on the envelope so they don't know who is sending it. Sure it costs them $.49 but if enough people do what I do, the expense will dent their bottom line. Girls Gone Wild was famous for sending videos at $19.95 to horndogs who tried to buy a couple of videos at $4.95 each but didn't understand they'd be sent 2 videos a month a $19.95 each until membership was canceled and that was a difficult process, often videos would keep coming after cancellation and the credit card was still being charged. Lots of dishonesty out there. [Link] |
| dogzcatcher All-Star Member Fat bottomed girls make the rockin' world go round! 1551 Posts 5/09 | Posted - Jul 17 2014 : 1:37AM I had a similar problem with downloads via Hot Movies.com. They too, made things right and refunded my purchase. I like using cduniverse for purchasing porn. One time, they mixed up my order with someone else's order. I called their customer service and a polite woman answered the phone. She got my order records and read the title names back to me. Sexy! Free phone sex! I boxed up all the stuff I didn't order and sent it back to the company. They thanked me for sending the stuff back, sent the right items quickly and paid me for my cost to ship the wrong items back. ^ Three examples of good customer service. [Link] |
| RocketMan Member 678 Posts 6/08 | Posted - Jul 17 2014 : 5:08AM [Link] |
| Lezlover Member 527 Posts 9/12 | Posted - Jul 17 2014 : 9:10AM Seriously though, it may well take boycotts for it to finally twig with these sites that trying to rip people off is not the best way to conduct business. [Link] |
| charn fubar 2880 Posts 12/09 | Posted - Jul 17 2014 : 6:59PM [Link] |
| blackcountrytrapeze Member 26 Posts 9/13 | Posted - Jul 18 2014 : 7:01AM [Link] |
| LCF All-Star Member Non Prevalebunt! 10364 Posts 1/05 | Posted - Jul 18 2014 : 7:55AM they need a legal representative in the EU to work here, someone who may be legally held responsible for any legal or taxation problem [Link] |
| HardX_MC Deactivated User 150 Posts 4/14 | Posted - Jul 22 2014 : 8:01AM ____________________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________________ Current Service Status Business Hours Everyday - 24h / 24h Toll Free Number 1.877.392.7862 (North America) EU Number 00.800.0448.6115 (Austria ,Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK) International Number 1.514.448.6115 By email at support@openlife.com ____________________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________________ [Link] |
| Jacco All-Star Member "liable to deprave and corrupt" 2673 Posts 5/04 | Posted - Jul 22 2014 : 8:23AM Jacco [Link] |
| Lezlover Member 527 Posts 9/12 | Posted - Jul 22 2014 : 8:40AM [Link] |
| HardX_MC Deactivated User 150 Posts 4/14 | Posted - Jul 22 2014 : 1:42PM [Link] |
| CummingLinguist All-Star Member 5908 Posts 11/11 | Posted - Jul 22 2014 : 3:42PM I've been considering joining HardX, and this thread was giving me serious second thoughts. Let us know what action (if any) they take. [Link] |
| AKperv All-Star Member 1253 Posts 4/14 | Posted - Jul 22 2014 : 4:27PM [Link] |
| shenton Member 96 Posts 9/03 | Posted - Jul 22 2014 : 5:07PM Imagine you use your own credit card, you have a subscription issue, you need to deal with your financial institution (when the paysite won't help anymore) and it can be embarrassing to tell your financial institution "that transaction was for a porn subscription.." When you use a prepaid credit card, you don't have to go through the above subscription issue, neither do you have to worry about renewal issues, assuming you want to subscribe only one month, you tell them to cancel but the paysite still charge your credit card. If I want to subscribe for a month, I buy a prepaid credit card with enough funds to cover that single month, sign up and that's it. I don't have to do anything about renewal because the paysite won't be able to charge since there is no more funds in the prepaid credit card. [Link] |
| Mass Facialties Deactivated User "Facialized Vol. 7" 2021 AVN Awards Winner: Best Oral Movie 9308 Posts 9/13 | Posted - Jul 22 2014 : 10:23PM Good advice.If that's your position, well then, I guess you won't be signing up for many porn sites out there. Like I said in an earlier post: these cross-sales and pre-checked items are commonplace, at least in my experience, when signing up for the majority of porn sites. I can only think of sites that use CCBill as their credit card processor as ones that do not have items on the signup page pre-checked. I understand your frustration about this, but again, I don't think HardX should be singled out for this all too common practice. By the way, you never did mention what happened, were you reimbursed for those charges you weren't aware of when signing up? Or did they tell you "tough luck?"  [Link] |
| CummingLinguist All-Star Member 5908 Posts 11/11 | Posted - Jul 23 2014 : 6:01AM [Link] |
| Jacco All-Star Member "liable to deprave and corrupt" 2673 Posts 5/04 | Posted - Jul 23 2014 : 7:15AM Jacco [Link] |
| HardX_MC Deactivated User 150 Posts 4/14 | Posted - Jul 23 2014 : 8:17AM [Link] |
| pringles All-Star Member 1351 Posts 2/08 | Posted - Jul 23 2014 : 8:56AM [Link] |
| charn fubar 2880 Posts 12/09 | Posted - Jul 23 2014 : 11:10AM [Link] |
| AKperv All-Star Member 1253 Posts 4/14 | Posted - Nov 11 2014 : 6:30PM [Link] |
| pat362 Senior Member 10081 Posts 3/10 | Posted - Nov 11 2014 : 9:11PM [Link] |
| Mass Facialties Deactivated User "Facialized Vol. 7" 2021 AVN Awards Winner: Best Oral Movie 9308 Posts 9/13 | Posted - Nov 12 2014 : 2:13AM It appears that they're having some problems with both the membership site and also the blog. (HardX_MC recently mentioned that they were working out some problems with the blog.) And in regards to them "keeping pace" with the plan to put out two new scenes each week (two movies per month), it seems like they're having a hard time making that happen because the studio is essentially relying on just one director, Mason; HardX has had both Mick Blue and Manuel Ferrara each direct and shoot a crappy POV movie, but every other movie of theirs is shot and directed by Mason. You'd think that eventually the studio will hire at least one more regular director so that the responsibility of keeping the site going with new scenes isn't all on Mason. (I noticed that director William H, formerly of Elegant Angel and most recently Jules Jordan Video, has just become a "free agent".) [Link] |
| pat362 Senior Member 10081 Posts 3/10 | Posted - Nov 12 2014 : 9:17PM [Link] |
| Mass Facialties Deactivated User "Facialized Vol. 7" 2021 AVN Awards Winner: Best Oral Movie 9308 Posts 9/13 | Posted - Nov 14 2014 : 1:45AM Keep in mind that she's also responsible for the content for EroticaX. (The productions from that studio have really slowed down.) [Link] |
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