FTC busts Suntasia for telemarketing scheme
A Florida company called Suntasia is in hot water because it wasn’t upfront with consumers who bit on the bait of free memberships in travel and buyers clubs it offered.
Here are details.
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A Florida company called Suntasia is in hot water because it wasn’t upfront with consumers who bit on the bait of free memberships in travel and buyers clubs it offered.
Here are details.
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July 29th, 2007 at 5:48 am
Former Employees Speak Out Publicly About Suntasia’s Inside Operations
For those who don’t know how everything operated at Suntasia Marketing, I am going to link you to a website that gives you inside information on how these crooks got away with this scam for so long. Everything that has been posted here concerning the questionable practices of this company is true. Now here it for yourself.
Alex Eckelberry is the host of the website http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com where he did a podcast interview with two former Suntasia (aka Strategia Marketing) employees. The two women agreed to be interviewed providing that their REAL names be with held due to fear of retaliation. They go by the names Stephanie and Carol. Many of the things they revealed I experienced myself but the fact that it is verified by these two women proves what I and others have been posting all along.
They talked about how;
* they presented the script over the phone to the unsuspecting consumer and how the agents tricked consumers by asking the name & city location of their bank so they could pull up the routing number and pretend to have their account #
* they heard other agents (ballers: high sales people) misrepresent themselves by saying that they needed the account number to verify that they had an open checking acount.
* everyone had to use the main key word “TODAY” because that was stating in the recording that they are not being billed for that day, but what Suntasia’s agents don’t tell you is that the consumer is going to be billed the next day and the next days to come even though it was suppose to be a two week free trial.
* they rebuttaled the person over and over again if they didn’t want to give up their account information. The slick wording that was used.
* Suntasia management also scammed the employees when their paychecks were wrong and how hard it was to get it corrected.
* Suntasia doesn’t care about your experience and just wanted you on the phone to make sales as quickly as possible.
* they felt the area (company grounds) was very restricted because of all the so called “secrets” between each room that was selling different products.
* the three different offers had three different numbers to call in case the consumer wanted to cancel. Unfortunately the consumer wasn’t made aware of this.
* the sales person would claim they were in the shipping department and never would give details about the products being offered.
To hear the entire interview, you can download the Mp3 podcast by copying and pasting the link below.
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/ihs/interview2d88.mp3
A blank screen will pop up and a little white box in the bottom left hand corner will appear. Once the audio clip has finished downloading, the screen will show a gray Quicktime audio bar. From there you can click play. The interview is very lengthy but so worth it. I hope this helps you understand how massive this scam was.