Yesterday, I received a call stating that my local search listing was being upgraded to a featured listing for 30-days, at no cost to me. My spidey sense kept telling me to hang up the phone, but as I listened to the caller’s “pitch”, there seemed to be no harm, as they weren’t collecting any payment information from me or anything. He said something about “If you don’t want to continue after 30 days, just let us know and we’ll cancel at no cost to you”. So I said fine.

I decide to do some searching on this company ZipWeb, and I’m just bombarded with BAD REVIEWS. The bulk of the posts talk about how they tack on a $49.95-$99.95 charge to your phone bill, a tactic known as cramming. Most people forget to cancel, or never heard when the CSR mentioned the fact that you have to cancel or else you’re going to get billed. It’s only when they get their outrageous bill that they find out what happened. Of course, ZipWeb won’t give you your money back, and that’s how they get you.

Articles like this, this, and this all show people who’s been taken by this scam. There have even been allegations that the company splices your recorded phone call to make it sound like you agreed to things that you didn’t.

Troubling, to say the least. In any event, when I tried to immediately cancel the service, I was told that I have to wait 5 days until my information appears in their central system. I’ll be calling them on a daily basis until I get written confirmation that my “account” with them is cancelled, so that I have something to fight them with should they attempt to bill me anyway.

I’ll update this post as things progress. Consider yourself warned!