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This is episode 163 for Sunday, February 10th, 2019. It's 6.30 p.m. here on the East Coast, and I cannot believe I fell for a scam, and I need to make you all aware of this scam alert. And tonight's scam alert is regarding a website called mylife.com.
And if you've seen the commercial that's running nationwide on your television for mylife.com, they simply say, go to mylife.com, type in your name, and see what information's out there that could be preventing you from getting a job, having a relationship, and so on and so forth. And so, I'll admit, I bit and was curious. And so when you go to their website, you simply type in your name or anyone's name for that matter. But specifically, if you go there and type in your name is what I did.
And after a few minutes, it generates this profile that looks like it's pulling all kinds of public information from LinkedIn, Facebook, everywhere on the Internet that it can pull public records. It showed my name. It showed members of my family that I'm related to under that category. It showed the value of my home and just all that funky kind of info.
But specifically, there were two areas that were concerning to me. And one was they have this goofy thing called your reputation score. And they tried to sell it as your credit score is important, but your reputation score is more important. And your reputation score is zero to five.
And it's based on any criminal records that are there, any legal records that are there, any negative remarks that people could leave on your profile under what's called reviews. And so I'm sitting there looking at the score, and it comes up and it shows my reputation score as a 2.8, right? And so I'm wondering, how do they get to that score? And so there it is flashing right under my name.
It says reviews, and it said that I have one review. So I go to click on that one review, and up pops the little window that says to read this review that might be impacting your reputation score, create your free profile. So I create my, or I'm sorry, it says create your free account. So I create the free account and give it all the info that it wants, and then I come back to reviews.
And I go to click on review, and now it opens up the second window, and here's the payment window. And it ranges everywhere from an annual fee to a monthly fee of $23 to a seven-day trial for $1. And I said, okay, I'll bite. I'll pay a buck to see who has reviewed me that has now impacted my reputation score.
So I go through the process, put in my debit card, pay them the buck. You know, within five seconds of doing that, I get the email that says they've charged me for the dollar. Here comes two emails from the company welcoming me to my membership. And then I go to click on review, and I click on review, and the review is not really a review.
It's a message from my life introducing the new review feature that they have that allows you to make negative or positive comments. And so I delete that review, and now it says no reviews. So I thought that was incredibly fraudulent and deceptive. Like, to me, any website I've ever joined, when the administrators of the website send you messages, it comes into an inbox because it's a message, it's not a review.
And I just thought that was horribly deceptive to get people thinking that someone has written something negative about them and then getting you to pay a buck to be able to read that review. So after I got done with that, I was so angered, like blood-boiling, angry over this, I'm now trying to find how do I cancel the membership because I don't want this to ding me in a week for $23.99 for the monthly membership. Come to find out, you can't cancel it online. You've got to call someone.
So I find the number, and I call the number. And, you know, the first tip off that this was going to be a scam was, you know, it starts off ringing, sounding like an American-sounding ring, but then it quickly got very staticky and sounded like a foreign ring. And then here comes the guy that answers the phone with his incredibly thick foreign accent. And I don't know what it was, don't know what his name was when he answered the phone, but all I could understand was, welcome to my life, how can I help you?
And so I explained to him that I wanted to cancel, and that process was 10 minutes of me having to give him my name, spell my name, give him my email address, give him the last four of my credit card, the expiration date, and finally we arrive at, why do you want to cancel your membership, right? And so I'm like, oh, let me tell you why I want to cancel this membership. And I explained to him that I thought this was fraud, I thought this was deceptive, and asked him if I can have the dollar refund. And again, I don't care about the buck, it's just the principle of the deception that I didn't like.
And oh, and then the other part of it was where it said, click here to see who's looking at you. It generated four profiles, four names with four pictures of four people, ranging anywhere from within two miles of where I live to 165 miles from where I live. And they're four people that, again, I have no clue who they are, none of those names sounded familiar, can't figure out why anyone would be looking at my profile in my life. And again, as a professional photographer, I could tell that these were all, you know, beautifully shot professional pictures that just did not match, you know, the person's name from New York, who's 66, or the guy's name from Lancaster, who's 58.
And, you know, it just didn't make sense to me. And so I thought that was fun. So I explained that to the guy too. The long and short of the story is he ends up reading me this 16-digit numeric cancellation code and is quickly trying to get off the phone.
And I slowed him down, wrote that cancellation down code again, and asked him, can you send that to me as an email? Because I would like an email in writing stating that you're not going to charge me in seven days. And he told me, oh, I'm sorry, we can't do that. Which I told him, well, that's bullshit because within five seconds of joining your site, you sent me two welcome messages.
I want an email that says that I've canceled and that I'm not going to be charged on this renewal plan. So hang up the phone with him. It takes like an hour or so to get the email from him saying that it was canceled. But then I started Googling this company on the Internet.
And lo and behold, you come across the lawsuit. They were sued in 2011 exactly for the things that I was angry about. People were suing saying that the people looking at them, they didn't know who they were. They seemed like they were spam bots.
And, you know, they got sued big time about eight years ago for this. And within that lawsuit, they discovered and found out that one of the other tricks that mylife.com does is once you join, they now hack your address book and your contact list, and they will send everybody an email that's in your list saying someone is looking at you. You know, you better click here to find out who it is, trying to get you to go to their website and join and to get your money. And, again, this website goes on to say that, you know, they provide search results that are inaccurate and made up just to entice you to join and become a member.
Yeah, here it is. Mylife hacks your email and spams your contact list with invitations from you to join. And here's another one. Another big complaint says they ask you to authorize your credit card only to be charged a certain amount, but then charges you far more than they often have said.
Some people have gone on to say they've been charged an extra $60 worth of fees. It's impossible to cancel. People claim they canceled and they got rang up for another month. Some guy here said he joined after reading all of this and typed in a bunch of gibberish that makes no sense.
Typed in a last name of SSGG, SSGG, SSGG. And when he joined, it said that seven people were looking for him and had left him reviews. So, again, I'm telling you, mylife.com, total scam. Don't do it.
If you're sitting at home and you see that commercial and someone in your family is running to a computer or a phone saying, oh, I want to see what's out there, just stop them, direct them right to this podcast because I'm telling you it is a total scam. I'm going to keep a close eye on this and make sure that I don't get charged the $23.99 or more beyond my seven-day trial. And I will certainly keep you guys posted if there's any follow-up. But, again, stay very, very, very far away from a website called mylife.com.
412-701-4323, paulfallavolidopodcast.com. Thanks for listening. To bring you the help you need, social workers hone the quality of caring into a career and prove their proficiency through licensing. This message brought to you by ASWB, supporting social work standards.