LA Fitness - Impossible to cancel

Mr. & Mrs. Dwayne Winrow

3421 Ridge Brook Trail

Duluth, GA 30096

October 3, 2007

Office of the Attorney General

Attention: Mr. Greg Abbott

300 West 15th Street

Austin , TX 78701

Mr. Abbott,

We are writing you to file a formal complaint against La Fitness. Since August of 2007, we have been trying to pay our final bill and cancel our membership with LA Fitness.

Initially, we tried to pay the balance and cancel over the phone. Unfortunately, we were told we must come into the gym where we signed up. Once we journeyed to the gym, we would be permitted to cancel our membership.

We went to our local gym. The name an address is:

TOCO HILLS

2880 N. DRUID HILL

ATLANTA , GA 30329

(404) 321-2330

We told to speak to the “operations manager”. Her name is Ashley. Ashley told us we needed to update our account billing information. Since we were recently married, the old billing information was referring to our old account.

At that moment, we simply offered to pay cash, write a check or use the debit card. No payment option could be received at the club. Ironically, all forms of payments were accepted when opened the account.

Furthermore, we were told to go online to cancel our membership. Ashley asked me if we had an online account. We prompted said no. Ashley advised me that she could simply create an online account. Ashley asked to wait a moment so that she could create two online accounts. Once the two online accounts were created, Ashley assured me that we could login and cancel.

Once the account was created, we respectfully asked her to cancel our memberships. She told me that we had to go online ourselves to cancel the membership. She stated that she could not cancel our membership. However, instead, she would be very happy to go online and update our billing information. Ashley was very persisted with updated our billing information. This is weird anxiety especially if we were extremely desperate to cancel our account. Ashley told us that we had to go home and login to cancel the account.

We went home. We logged in an attempt to finally cancel our accounts. We prompted to download a cancellation form. Per the online instructions, we to complete the form and mail it to the below address:

LA Fitness International, LLC

2810 Trinity Mills #209 - #322

Carrollton, TX 75006

We did this. However, we are receiving calls from them asking us to update our billing information. We have been explained that we have cancelled our account and we followed the instructions to cancel our account by mailing in the form. We were told that they did not received the form. We demanded to be cancel while speaking to the representative on the phone. The representative said that they could not cancel our membership. They again, almost robotically, stated that they could go online and update our billing information.

Please review this web link for more detail as it further explains the ongoing pain of the cult-like activities of the gym.

“http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/153287/scammed_at_la_fitness.html?page=3

Under separate cover, I will be mailing LA Fitness another final payment for my wife. We are concerned that this may impact our credit.

We would appreciate if you could address this issue.

Respectfully,

Mr. & Mrs. D

Duluth, GA 30096

Comment On This

I'm in Seattle. I just tried to download the form. I had to set up an account on their website first and it wouldn't let me do this...so I can't even get to the form! I also spoke with a friend who had the same issue with them and she told me to keep being persistent. Better Business Bureau are you out there?

Comment On This

I have also been having a horrible time with them. I still can't get them to cancel. I have done everything as above. But when I go to get print a cancelation form it tells me I need to go into the local fitness center to cancel.

Comment On This

Sorry you all are going thru this, and when you have it put on a debit card, it was impossible for me to get them to stop so I ended up closing and opening a new account w/my bank. Just a suggestion, as crazy as it may sound, youmay have to do this if they are continuing to hit your acct.

Good Luck....

Cynthia-Texas

Comment On This

I am in Georgia also and just got off the phone with LA Fitness. I am fed up with them at this moment. My husband had lost his job in April 2008 so we went to the LA Fitness where we joined the next month which was June. We went at the time in McDonough Ga to cancel our membership. They gave us papers with a bar code on them that we were told to sign and write a letter telling why we were canceling our membership. We came home and did as we were instructed and mailed it in to them the same way we were told to do, reg. old fashioned mail. We also made sure that we were paid up before mailing this in. The next month we still had a payment come out of our account! We went back up to the LA Fitness and my husband used his card to get in so he could make sure he got everything out of his locker. They would not let him past the desk without using his card to get past. This was July 12th 2008, we requested papers again to cancel our membership. We went home and did the whole process again! We mailed them out that next day which was July 13th 2008. They call me AT LEAST 4 times a day trying to get us to pay them for July, Aug., and Sept. We canceled the credit card that they has access to and that is why they are calling the house all day. I just talked to a manager on the phone and explained to her what all has happened and that we did exactly what the contract said to do about canceling. All they can tell me is that I should have mailed it certified and I need to get paid up. They also said that if I pay half of one payment right now they will cancel our membership for good. CATCH: I have to do it today because there are 2 payments pending. I told her that the credit card is no longer active, that we have canceled that credit card when they would not stop taking money out of it and when my husband lost his job. She said "I understand but you still have to pay." I don't know what else to do with these people.

Comment On This

I also had difficulties with canceling my account. The website had no options for this, nor was the information in the FAQ or any other section of the website. I called customer service several times. Either I wasn't calling during the appropriate time of day, or my phone battery would go dead while I was waiting on hold. Today I finally got through after 19 minutes on hold, and it only took a few minutes to get the accounts canceled. Unfortunately this is several months after I had started trying, so I've been charged for months when I didn't use the gym. I feel scammed, as the representative couldn't do anything to help me. (By the way, the credit card that was used to charge my monthly payments has been expired, but they had no problems charging the membership fee each month anyway.)