yellowpages.com

August 2007

To whom it may concern:

Re: (757) 644-3739

Disclaimer: I do not have a contact with yellowpages.com but my partner does and I pay the bill monthly. I have only been trying to reach someone who will care to stop my complaining.

My name is Kathy I am a Mortgage Loan Officer and my partner real estate agent with set up an account with yellowpages.com through Jim a local representative in Virginia.

A long story short we did not receive or were told in detailed what would be initialed, this was a bait and switch we were told what would benefit the representative and not our budget and needs with advertising.

Like many of people who are on a budget this was a big key to our advertising needs. So let me tell you how I approached our budget for advertising with Jim our Representative, I already have and ad with talking phone book (GREAT COMPANY!), and had an ad with YellowBook.com (did not work) so I was very detailed in making sure this was going to work as I had already lost money with the web thing already. I told Jim we were strapped financially with our budget to do more advertising and could only afford $150 a month, I even took a month plus to make a decision. So in knowing all of this and that the representative only makes money when we sing a contract how much information was left out to get the sale...

The Representative and the manager managed to blame the misunderstanding in services offered on the lack of communication between myself and Amy. Trust me we do not miss a beat when it comes to paying for advertising. We advertise with yellowbook.com the talking phone, superior internet solutions as well as an ad in the yellow book itself, so there was nothing to misunderstand. We know what we are doing and what we are looking for so for someone to insult our intelligence and say we miss communicated with each other is really aggravating.

I immediately called the manager, Marc and spoke to him to cancel as soon as the ad hit the web site as this was all done incorrectly and no one from the �design department� called to have this as made up to attract callers. According to Jim we would have someone from their design team give me a call to help with our ad. No one called! Shortly after Amy noticed we were already on the web and had no idea or even how long it had been up an running with crap listed for information about us.

When I spoke to the manager Marc there is no such department and that is Jim�s job to design and help with the wording of the site. So according to Marc, Jim lied to me about the a different department who helps me with the wording and what to write, I went back to Jim who then told me, �I thought what you emailed me was what you wanted on the web� come on now it was a bunch of thought on paper as he pushed me that �we could not get our ad running until he had a rough draft and then someone would call me to change it around.�

We are not happy with the service and do not want to keep our contract, we hate the service, Jim to me that you do not have a roster of tracked calls, number and times. According to their records we have 12 calls in July, nothing in Aug. and one of Jim�s sales pitches �you will get calls, I guarantee calls we have a thoughts hits for real estate and if you are not getting calls then we are doing something wrong.� Those are his words give or take.

The worst part of it all is this, normally with yellow book and talking phone book, we place our ad in writing in had in May 2007 no one regardless of how much they pay can go above you as it is priority. This is not the case with yellowpages.com they work differently which was NOT told me as I would not be making this complaint. According to yellowpages.com there are top that are in blue people who are willing to pay more money, fine we didn�t want to pay that price so we were told we would be guaranteed first page and about 4 down after the top blue, when the ad was placed, we were 11 down and then told that the other people who are above us signed up before us, and that they pay more than $150 a month to have their ad different than ours. So long and short the biggest deal baker that if our competitors saw our ad and wanted to be above us all it takes it more money to be onto of priority. Who in their right mind would spend that kind of money to keep being bumped lower an lower on the pages.

Jim�s defense was, I told you to go with the top blue, and again I went back that was not an option and we could not afford it.

We had made a change to our ad and it took over a month to get done and was still not done correctly! We have already had a call from another agent asking how we liked the yellowpages.com and we told them the truth, �You are a rip off and a joke.� According to Marc it was more important to keep our money and our bad word of mouth.

All I want is to cancel my ad and get my money back, I am disgusted with the service, in ability to track details of who calls and when, I am disgusted that it takes our Representative a month to make changes to our ad, I am disappointed that we can not tailor each heading Mortgage, Real Estate to fit what consumers are looking to read about, I am also confused how the representatives can make commission on a sale that was a complete �misunderstanding� I will use their favorite word and as soon as we found the imperfections to this company we requested to canceled not even a day after it went on the web, and we were told there was nothing they could do.

So now that you all know how this company has burned me I hope that you take into deep consideration that if you are not paying top dollar for your placement with them then you are getting ripped off.

If I was making money or getting calls from this ad that actually were not sales calls or renters looking for a place to rent I wouldn�t be so angry.

Thank you,

Kathy

9/4/07 I called customer service to have my payments mailed to me and apparently I am not able to do that. I have yet to receive receipts of payments to use for tax purposes and taking that I paid for this ad.

I was given Richard Muller to contact with my concerns 215-407-6531, I am waiting on a call back.

9/4/07 The phone number the ad is listed under is (757) 644-3739

This ad is under WainWright Real Estate but also has my information on it as the agent and I are partners.

The Rep has already been in touch with Amy about this matter but apparently is not thrilled to speak with me which I do not blame him. The Rep reminded Amy that we can not cancel our account and if there is anything he can do to help to let him know, unfortunately we are stuck and were not informed of being bumped by higher paying customers who can afford more than what we can. We also have not had any calls off this add since it started, and you know how the sales pitch works, we will get calls it works bla bla bla but it is not working and if I were receiving calls off this ad I wouldn�t be so perturbed but it is not working and it goes back to my point of things not being told that would have killed the deal from the start.

Charles Stubbs is President and CEO of YELLOWPAGES.COM

Comment On This

You are not alone in the yellowpages.com scam. We were in the Pittsburgh Home and Garden show last years where a rep from Yellowpages.com had picked up one of our buisness cards. My partner and I met with him at a coffee shop where we were showed the amazing amount of hits and leads our line of work generated. Tons of leads here. We fell for the scam and took out an ad that was around $236 a month. We had top spot and were under the impression you HAD to buy an ad to be on their web site. NOT TRUE!!! 2 months after placing the order it was becoming difficult to pay the monthly premium. It was coming dirrectly out of my bank account each month at an odd time. Keeping funds there was becoming difficult.BTW this was my personal account. I called our rep to tell him the funds would not be there yet could we post pone the date of withdrawl. It was out of his hands. So I called the main office in CA, they said cannot start a paper bill until after 3 months of automatic withdrawl. So managed to gets funds to pay for the 3 months. By this time they claimed we had several people we had talked to from their site. First off we always ask where they got our name so we know what advertising is working. I think we only got 1 person out of the 100 or so they claimed we talked to. Called again, no response and no paper bill. I had to get my bank to cancel and reissue my bank card. This took several weeks to sort out and became very disruptive to our business as we had to either pay for supplies COD or by certified check. I was also threatened if we did not pay the monthly balance we would have to pay the entire balance for the year and be removed from the web site. Today we recieved another collection call the other day we recieved one threatening us and to have our lawyer call theirs pending legal action. I hope they like dealing with the Attorney General because that is our next step. Not only did they remove us from the top spot on their web site, but they still have us listed along with several other companies that I have personally spoken to who have not nor intend on paying for placement on their site. So how is it we went from the only company listed to within 3 months every buisness in our line of work was also listed without having to pay 1 cent? Don't deal with Yellowpages.com they are a scam company.