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

Surely, each of you has seen frankly fraudulent schemes. For example, job offers for a fortune, where you only need internet and seven seconds of free time a 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. More 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 your life peacefully, and then a charge appears for some subscription. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t monitor the number of services and recurring payments, then in the best case you’ll just disable that 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 from me. Therefore in any unclear situation I get to the heart of it and share with you what to do. Long ago I took advantage of a year of free subscription on Opodo – a travel-booking service with discounts. And I unsubscribed right away so auto-renew wouldn’t happen. They constantly send tons 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 email, and then forwarded the ticket to my sister, but one time I decided, why this extra step, and I 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 get a notification that Opodo charged €120 to my card. We were already one foot out the door, but I insist on waiting and write to them to sort it out and refund the money, because I know for sure there should be no charges. Moreover, they have no way to contact support – I wrote to Opodo Prime’s general email. No answer, but that didn’t matter; I just wanted to record that as soon as I discovered the problem I contacted them immediately. This is important. I decided that for now I couldn’t do anything else, and when I return 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, repeat, in the field “where to send the ticket,” I allegedly gave consent for them to create a new account for my sister! linked to my card!! and charged the most expensive possible annual subscription!!! And the funniest part, subsequent emails like “silence is consent” – they sent to my sister’s address, who didn’t suspect anything and wasn’t expecting anything, so the travel emails weren’t checked thoroughly, especially in German. Their argument was that I did this myself, so it’s all legal. And my argument was that if you scatter dubious traps everywhere and I fall into them – it’s still your fault. In my dialogue with support there were many funny moments, for example, they said “did you read the user agreement,” to which I laughed and asked where it’s written there, and in response I got silence. He doesn’t even know. Then they tried to prove that in that eighth volume, written in Japanese characters upside down and backward, it says everything, to which I said you can claim you’re my dad, but you won’t become my father from 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 issue without publicity. And after all this they offered, out of the goodness of their hearts, to refund half the amount as their final word. I said do what you want, but I’m not satisfied with this result, and I will continue to pursue justice. The post is already super long, so the next part on Wednesday. Write in the comments your stories about getting scammed! #useful #money