The Blog of a Programmer
Globat = Fraud
I don’t know how many people they have done this to, but I’m pissed! What have they done you ask? I took a look at my CC bill this month and I found a charge for $49.95 from Globat Business Services. Okay, odd I don’t remember ordering anything even remotely recently from Globat. Apparently I signed up for one of their free promotions sometime back, okay cool so we had a business relationship, no big deal there – where does the fee come from?
Well apparently it seems that Globat (Glob@at) has gotten into the habbit of charging all there customers automatic upgrade fees of $49.95 a pop!!! Going through my past statements and checking the Globat invoices I found that they’ve done this in the past too! A few months ago I was apparently charged the same amount for another “upgrade” without my consent. Oh I’m pissed by this point, checking the, now closed, company email I find that they were about to charge me for another of their automatic upgrades!
So okay, a wave of calm passes over me for about a 5 minutes as I log back into the globat control panel, head to the support section and write them an email requesting them to close my account, reverse their obviously fraudulent charges, and remove my information from their system as I NEVER want to hear from them again. I press send. I feel good, no company really wants to risk their credit rating with the amount of chargebacks that something like this could cause – I mean they would want to keep those customers who complain, quiet… right? Wrong!
A minute passes, I’m closing the window for the email account linked to globat – an email comes in from them. It’s an automatic reply, “Okay, great they recieved the message…. What…. The…. FUCK!” It read:
Thank you for contacting Globat!
Your original message was not received. This is an autoresponder. You cannot send an email directly to this email address. Please use one of the services listed below.
If ever I had more of a reason to be absolutely furious at a company, I can’t remember! I had sent the email through their control panel, this can’t be right… but it is. They are deliberatly blackholing these emails! Needless to say, I’ll be calling my CC company and having them do chargebacks for all the charges up to now. If you’re a current Globat client I suggest you take a look at your statements and watch out for this horrible act of outright theft!
About the author
I've been programming for awhile, have been having crazy ideas for much longer. Now a days I'm both a husband and a father, and quite happy for it.
| This entry was posted by JuanJose on December 13, 2007 at 11:43 pm, and is filed under Hosting, Services. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
about 2 years ago
Oh dear. It seems that I have lost money on this too.
They offer free services which if you cancel they charge you for!
about 2 years ago
Hey TT,
Yeah it was a bit of a pain dealing with this, I actually ended up calling my CC company and they called up Globat who reversed the most recent charge while AMEX reversed another change that had gotten through.
I did finally get a response from Globat a few days after I called up the CC for the charge back, stating that my account would no longer be charged.
Thank you, finally!
about 2 years ago
Another victim here. Same exact story except for the 5 mins of calm. They were very quick to un-”upgrade” me though and have said that they refunded my money. I will be monitoring my credit card to make sure.
As soon as I get some time, I am going to move my service to another provider.
about 1 year ago
Globat also redirects 404 errors to offsite domains,
in other words they are steaing your potential clients to other sites, in so doing the are reaping revenues and denying you your site activity.
I am going to discuss this with lawyers that live across the street from me.
They at IP Lawyers, Intellectual Property specialist.
They are not home right now since they have their work cut out for them in Los Angeles. I am serious about looking into this.
I too had them extracting $49 buck a pop for undesired upgrades.
Wish me luck. perhaps we go for a class action lawsuit.
about 1 year ago
Globat = Fraud
Me too. I have had to cancel my VISA credit card, because they always charge me upgrades that I never ask for.
Is there any legal action to take.?
about 1 year ago
More details:
I ordered a template for oscommerce from TEMPLATE MONSTER. On the order form, there was a check box for ‘Free Year of Web Hosting from Globat.com – Get 100 GB of space, 1000 GB (1 Terabyte) of Bandwidth/month, Unlimited Emails, Shopping Cart and much more from Globat.com! This award-winning package is valued over $95 and is yours free! Take advantage of this incredible FREE offer now! Free!’. There are no asterisks, no further details anywhere on the page, and NOTHING that indicates that will be passing your personal information and credit card information on to a third party company, without your authorization
about 1 year ago
Hi Horace,
“Me too. I have had to cancel my VISA credit card, because they always charge me upgrades that I never ask for.
Is there any legal action to take.?”
The first thing I would do in your situation is make sure you call up the card company if you haven’t already. Chances are they may reverse one or two of the charges IF they happened recently.
As for legal action I wouldn’t know that’s something you’d want to ask a lawyer.
Regarding the Template Monster and Globat connections I think that might be the reason I signed up in the first place! Impulse items I tell you!
about 1 year ago
This guys at Globat are criminal. I have been trying to transfer my domain name registration for weeks now. No telephone support, no chat support, email is a dead end too. These people should be put out of business and locked up.
about 1 year ago
Globat is scum, i have never lost money to them as I research a webhost before I buy from them, however as a web designer I have a few clients who use (now used) them.
Customer service is non-existant, fraudulant charges, terrible upload speeds, and irregular down time.
They take advantage of people who do not know what to look for. If you ever come across a webhost reviewer who says they are in the top 5, you know Globat is the one putting food on that persons table. Stay away from Globat at all costs.
about 7 months ago
Yet another Globat victim here.
I bought a one-year domain service. The next year, they informed me that they had charged my card for a renewal. They insisted it was in the terms. I would never had agreed to this, as I only wanted a two month test site.
Mastercard would not reverse the charges. Globat gave me the runaround when I tried to cancel.
I will likely have to cancel my card as this is the second time it has happened.
about 6 months ago
I though i would google around about Globat after getting an email informing me they would be taking money from credit card on the 3/2/10, i thought this is weird as i had canceled my hosting with them the previous year after my hosting account was hacked and my domain name placed on an unsafe website list meaning clients would not visit my site was when they tried to access it they where warned that the site was not safe and posed a virus threat.
I tried to contact Globat billing after reading the email and i have had no success, when i email they are auto replied saying i cannot contact the email address, and when i try and use there internet live chat it just says your the next in line but nobody ever replies to you.
I think i am safe as they do not have my current credit card details but i would like to clear up the situation for my own peace of mind.
about 4 months ago
I sincerely have sympathy for each and every person who has had problems with this company.
They charged me for 3 years – I only clicked on 1 year. Got that taken care of immediately! Couldn’t fefund the charge for 3 years of domain registration (it is througha different co.).
Never got anyone on the phone that spoke understandable english except for the SALES rep who set my account up, yet all the people in their advertising for their tech support people are/were white, american, women. Hadn’t finished building my site and learned that the name I had chosen wasn’t really a great decision from a search engine perspective. I checked globat did offer (at a few) the option to change the name. Supposed to take under an hour. I called each day for 4 days to see if this had been completed. I finally decided after all of the hassles with the unothorized charges to my CC from not opting out of their upgrades (which they don’t tell you about), and all of the other problems I cancelled my account. This didn’t set well with them. Later, after I finished building my site, I hosted it with another company and got it online and fuctional. I had a SEO tool that allowed me to see how search engines saw my site when they crawled it. I went in one afternoon to check and see how it was rating my site. Up at the top under the website title and header information I noticed something different. ALL OF MY INFORMATION had been REPLACED with propaganda for ………… you guess it………… globat. I got on the phone to the new host. They weren’t sure what I was talking about and suggested that I contact globat. I called Tim whom I had spoken with originally when I set up my account with them. He certainly seemed nervous when I asked about their information being on my website. I was telling a friend of mine, who is a computer tech, about this information showing up on my site and that I had NEVER uploaded a single file to globat etc.. He informed me that they had placed a worm in my computer. I was livid! I purchased an antivirus program for my computer and sure enough….. it found, and I deleted, a worm from my computer. Still, 2 years later I am having more problems with my computer. I have files that have had the program that opens them changed, I have files that have been moved (files having to do with my website), the program that I use to build my website has totally malfunctioned and had to be reinstalled more than once. All things having to do with my website!! I do have proof that their information was placed on my website even when it was with another host. I have a computer tech working on getting proof from my computer that they are continuing to remotely access my computer WITHOUT MY PERMISSION and I have also contacted an attorney. Apparently having told them previously that I would do this wasn’t enough.
about 4 days ago
Globat is a disreputable company. They rely on automatic renewals, automatic upgrades and other unwanted services to steal money from their customers. They billed a dormant PayPal account of mine for 94.50 for four years and for 11.95 for three years for renewal of a domain following my canceling it with them. Slimeball owners Ben Neuman and Chris Ueland are now running a new company NetDNA, so expect them to fleece customers through another company.