I'm a simple emigrant and I'll tell you about a legal divorce in Germany Part 1

Surely, each of you has seen blatantly fraudulent schemes. For example, job offers for billions of money, where you only need the Internet and seven seconds of free time per day, or investment proposals, with a guarantee of 300% profit per hour. But among these there are also quite legitimate ways to squeeze money out of us. Precisely, they seem that way at first glance, especially for immigrants, because we don’t always understand exactly what they want from us or are sure we did everything correctly. You’re living peacefully and then here comes a charge for some subscription. If you’re the kind of people who don’t monitor the number of services and regular payments, then, at best, you’ll simply cancel this subscription, though you don’t even know how it appeared. But this isn’t about me: I know exactly where, when, and how much money should be charged to me. Therefore, in any unclear situation I dig down to the heart of it and share with you what you should do. Long ago I took advantage of a year-long free subscription promo for Opodo – a travel booking service with discounts. And I immediately unsubscribed so auto-renewal wouldn’t happen. They constantly send a ton of emails and often remind that with your premium subscription you can buy tickets for other people as well. I bought tickets for my sister a couple of times. At checkout they ask where to send the ticket. Before, I always entered my own email, and then forwarded the ticket to my sister, but once I decided, why this extra step, and entered my sister’s address. Everything was fine, we both flew home to Tyumen, and we didn’t use foreign services there. One fine day, I receive a notification that Opodo charged €120 from my card. We were already one foot out the door, but I insisted they wait and wrote to them to sort it out and refund the money, because I’m certain there should be no charges. Moreover, they have no way to write to support – I wrote to the general Opodo Prime email. There was no reply, but that didn’t matter; I just wanted to record that as soon as I discovered the problem, I immediately got in touch. This is important. I decided that for now I couldn’t do anything more, and when I get back I’ll call them. Two hours, literally, I spoke with their support. Watch closely: it turned out that by entering my sister’s email address, I repeat, in the field “where to send the ticket,” I allegedly gave consent for them to create a new account for my sister! linked my card there!! and charged the most expensive possible annual subscription!!! And the funniest thing, the subsequent emails like “silence is a sign of consent” they sent to my sister’s address, who had no clue and wasn’t expecting them, so travel emails weren’t checked thoroughly, especially in German. Their argument was that I did this myself, and therefore it’s all legal. And my argument was that if you plant dubious traps all around, and I fall into them – it’s still your fault. In my dialogue with support there were many quips, for example, they said “did you read the user agreement,” to which I laughed and asked where it says that, and in response I received silence. He doesn’t know himself. Then they tried to argue that in volume eight, all is written in Japanese characters upside down and backwards, and I said you could write that you’re my father, but you won’t become my father because of that? In short, I argued deftly in German (an important reason to learn the language) and proved that they should be grateful that I’m even giving them a chance to close the matter without publicizing it. And after all this they offered, purely out of goodwill, to refund half the amount, and that was their last word. I said, do what you want, but that result doesn’t satisfy me, and I will keep pursuing justice. The post is already super long, so the next part on Wednesday. Share your stories about scams in the comments! #useful #money