Adaptive Affinity have started threatening bloggers!
In 2007 I bought some business cards from Vistaprint. After that purchase clubprem.com and highstreetmax.com started taking money from my visa without my knowledge. Highstreetmax.com and clubprem.com are both owned by Adaptive Affinity. The total amount taken was £252.05. I did some digging on the internet and published my findings in this post http://www.hubbers.com/index.php/i-got-scammed-by-vistaprint-and-adaptive-marketing-and-adaptive-affinity-ltd-and-amazon/.
Well it turns out the honest people at Adaptive Affinity don’t like my blog post so they have threatened me in a nameless and unspecific way. what’s more they have threatened other bloggers with similar letters!
Does anyone have any suggestions on what I should do?
Adaptive Affinity’s nameless letter is pasted below.
Dear Sirs,
RE: DEFAMATION/LIBELLOUS STATEMENTS – I GOT SCAMMED BY VISTAPRINT, Adaptive
Marketing, Adaptive Affinity Ltd, CLUBPREM.COM, HIGHSTREETMAX.COM and
AMAZON!!!http://www.hubbers.com/index.php/category/scams/
We are writing on behalf of Adaptive Affinity Ltd and refer to the webpage listed above. This web page contains a number of allegations regarding Adaptive Affinity and its partners that are inaccurate and defamatory in nature. It is our view the contents of the blog is causing and could continue to cause
serious reputational harm, not only to Adaptive Affinity, but other organisations to which it also refers.The accusations made on this web page are simply untrue and no proof is offered to validate these claims. Here is a sample list of false and/or inaccurate statements made on this web page which warrant its immediate removal:
1. I did some further investigation…and found that the internet servers hosting http://www.clubprem.com/ and http://www.highstreetmax.com also hosts all of these dodgy websites also owned by Adaptive Marketing.
2. Strangely the call centre that I got through to in Jamaica were more than happy to refund all of my money in less than a week. (Adaptive Affinity’s call centre is in the UK and not in Jamaica).
3. Basically they steal as much money as possible and refund the people who kick up a fuss. I imagine most people ask for a refund at the end.
4. The following domains have been added since I wrote this post in September which means that the scam is alive and well.
5. Today I realized that I too fell victim of such scam and was ripped off by clubprem.comThese are but a few of the statements that have been made and there are many more on the page that are offensive.
The language used on the page, both by you and comments left by third parties is unacceptable and suggest to the ordinary user that the practices of Adaptive Affinity are unethical or at worst illegal. The entire web page in itself is an unfair attack on Adaptive Affinity and its partners. These are legitimate businesses with legitimate business practices.
Although the burden of proof lies with you to prove the truth in these statements made, as proof to you (and not for publication elsewhere) that Adaptive Affinity is a legitimate business we can confirm that less than
one half a percent of the millions of consumers marketed to and the many thousands of members enrolled in Adaptive Affinity’s membership programs complain about their memberships.Adaptive Affinity has always followed high standards of responsible corporate practice. We regularly undertake quality controls to ensure our respective business practices comply with or exceed industry standards and applicable law. These practices extend throughout the organisation. We rebut the assertions made in this Blog and accordingly we request that it is removed with immediate effect.
As the primary publisher and the person who exercises direct editorial control over what is published we would like to point out that you are responsible for all the posting on your site. This matter can still be resolved without incident if you act very quickly to our satisfaction now. However, if you fail to do so, we reserve all our legal rights and remedies in respect of this matter. We also reserve all our rights and remedies (in respect of all relevant posts) if you are involved with any other posts about us or if there is any other publication made as a result of your posts.
Please respond to this letter by return and in any event within 7 days of the date on which it is sent with full details of the actions and the timeframe you will be taking to urgently rectify this matter. Your cooperation in this matter is appreciated.
Yours faithfully
Adaptive Affinity
Cavendish House,
369 Burnt Oak Broadway, Edgware.
HA8 5AW. United Kingdom
t: +44 (0) 8701 432 343
f: +44 (0) 8701 432 344
contact@adaptiveaffinity.com
Update 20 September 2010
Adaptive Affinity have also sent the same letter to my web host in the hope that they will stop hosting my site.
September 13th, 2010 at 18:26
Burn everything. Change your name, hair and (if possible) your major facial features. Travel in guise of a student, or a housewife. Mostly, learn to blend in with the crowd.
September 13th, 2010 at 22:41
Wow! Personally, I’m dying of curiosity to know exactly what their “legal rights and remedies in respect of this matter” are. To find out, I guess you have two options: 1) Hire a lawyer or 2) Wait and see. If I were a scam business, I’d have this letter ready to send out to people who published the truth about my organization, and maybe not have the lawyers to back up the threat. But who knows?
Whatever happens, please keep your loyal readers informed. Whether or not you end up taking down the original post, the comments on it have confirmed that you are in the right, morally, if not legally.
September 13th, 2010 at 22:42
Ha! It’s clear that aquariumdrinker has never met you. :-)
September 14th, 2010 at 07:01
What should you do? Depends on your attitude to bullies really.
You’re not the only blogger they’ve mailed this to, and I doubt they’ll want to start a dozen legal proceedings. They also won’t want the Steisand Effect of the negative publicity suing bloggers will generate.
If you’re really worried by this attempt to scare you, consider this: If there’s anything that’s clearly illegal, edit it. Anything borderline, stick an “alledgedly” in front of it.
Wonder why they care that you’ve allegedly disclosed the alleged location of their alleged call centre???
September 14th, 2010 at 10:33
Big business thinks, and is often able, to get away with bullying people. I think your primary concern is the protection of you and your family from both financial and emotional risk. As Eric pointed out you and many other blogs, social networking sites etc have raised awarenes of this problem and I congratulate you. However just a few points to note about their letter:
- Regarding your own posts – should it get to court, the ownus will be you to prove that what you said is true.
- Regarding other people’s posts, I found the following information on the net:
“A blog isn’t exempted from the real world – just because a blog is, well, a blog and all webby and modern and stuff, it doesn’t mean that all of sudden the rules governing the rest of the world have suddenly been thrown away and we can write what we want. We can’t. The rules on defamation apply to blogs just as they do to all other media, be the author a business or an individual.
TOP TIP – Moderation method is surprisingly key – This is a tricky one. Comments on blogs can be administered by the blog “owner” in one of two ways.
1. “We never moderate, – all comments go up automatically.”
Or (the more common approach):
2. “All comments are read and manually approved”
In case 2, comments are manually reviewed to ensure that comments are genuine and not irrelevant “spam” comments).
The latter approach gives a better quality of comments BUT also brings with it a potential legal danger.
If:
• a comment has been reviewed and published by the blog owner;
• that comment is subsequently found to be slanderous; then
• it is the blog owner who is liable not the original author of the comment.
If there had been no “moderation” or “approval” of the comment, and the comment had simply appeared automatically, the blog owner would not be liable. A good analogy is a newspaper. If a newspaper knowingly publishes a slanderous article by a journalist, it’s not the journalist who gets hit, but the newspaper (fair enough). Same for blogging.
So, if you manually approve comments on your blog, then please bear the above in mind
The following link may also be of interest
http://www.urban75.org/info/libel.html
Finally, good luck with whatever you choose but I think you’ve done your bit (and helped me reclaim money) so don’t take any risks.
Paul
September 14th, 2010 at 13:03
The call centre one confused me too. Why would they care? And the lack of name. Why no name? And the formatting was aweful. The whole letter read with the professinoalism of a Nigerian 418 scam.
I suspect that since my blog post on Adaptive Affinity is the second result in Google for the search ‘Adaptive Affinity’ http://www.google.co.uk/#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=adaptive+affinity&aq=f&aqi=g4g-o1&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=da3e0a7a830a4626 that I might be at the top of the pile of bloggers they want to silence.
September 16th, 2010 at 03:57
Hi Hubbers,
I saw that you posted a comment on The London Plan – cheers! I received a letter from AA as well, almost identical to yours.
Although I host the blog in question, I am not the operator/author. I had thought initially that this was a reasonable defence as far as I personally was concerned: it is in the US, I believe, as they make a distinction between publishing and authorship.
After reading a bit more about libel, however, I saw my best course of action as being either retraction or substantiation of all claims, hence the removal of the original post+comments and the publishing of the new article.
I think that in most cases, simply making sure (and proving) that what you’re saying is true is an appropriate defence against a claim of libel. It depends on which regional laws will be governing any legal action.
I’m all for complying with legitimate requests from people who feel that they have been wronged, but I agree that AA’s letters seemed to be little more than bullying. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t have invested as much time in it as I did. :)
All the best,
Peter.
September 16th, 2010 at 12:42
Thanks Peter,
I have re-written the original post to remove emotion and just state verifiable facts.
I also have this feedback from a friend of a friend who is an actual libel lawyer:
So if Adaptive Affinity can provide a persuasive explanation for the abundance of online complaints about their actions then I will take the original post down.
December 17th, 2010 at 22:26
I agree they are a bunch of crooks, They waited a year before they took money from my wife’s account and cannot explain why. I intent taking them to the small claims court to recover the money and then asking the adjudicator to refer it to the police should I win. We all need to stick together and bring a joint action against them. This is the only way we can shut them down. Help clear these crooks out of cyber space.
January 15th, 2011 at 12:29
Don’t worry I now this company from my own expiriens and I now they actions are iligal, this action is cald Bait-and-switch and in England and Wales it is Banned under the Consumers Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008. Breaking this law can result in criminal prosecution, and unlimited fine and two years in jail. And now to this you can ad thretning behavior, wich is uswell cryminal act they want to fight then we need to united and get them down. Ow and you can add new company to your long list is cald QuickCreditScore.co.uk and Rewards Now.
March 19th, 2011 at 19:19
Let them take you to court and then punch them in their freaking nose.
February 20th, 2012 at 18:39
It comes under Fair Comment. Just make it clear that everything is marked as your own opinion, and your own personal experiences. Read up on the law of Fair Comment and Defamation from McNae’s Essential Law for Journalists – as it applies to bloggers too. If journalists were sued every time they were critical, they’d never get a paper out.
March 18th, 2013 at 07:57
Well I hate to say it I have been scammed as well to the sum of around £250 or so. They have been taking £14.95 from my Visa card for over a year now. I still have no knowledge of how they got my details, I am not 100% sure but it may have been Ebuyer if it is I will be very upset as I thought these were a reputable organisation.
I have tried to cancel my so called account twice now with no response, I have also contacted my Visa company who are going to investigate (dont think they will get very far) and I believe I have cancelled the payment to these people by my card company I hope I have time will tell.