Live Traders Back Office

In some fairness, I refer you to my post on Live Traders Education. I probably didn't say enough good things about that aspect of the operation.

Business administration is a different matter entirely:

• I purchased a "$1, 30 day trial" of the chat room. Delivered as promised. The purchase (through PayPal) came with an automatic enrollment in a monthly charge for the chat room for the current price of $147. Fair enough, I anticipated staying in the chat room anyway, and I could cancel any time I felt like it.
• I purchased the Professional Trading Strategies course (reasonably priced though not cheap), which included one free month of the Live Traders Chat Room (LTCR). However, when I approved the PayPal transaction, I also got signed up for an automatic monthly LTCR payment. 
• The same day, I also purchased the "Live Trading Chat Room Offer" which included, among other things, a "Free" month of the LTCR. When the PayPal authorization came through, there was again accompanied by an enrollment in an automatic monthly payment.

Shame on me for not paying closer attention to what I was approving, so some of the responsibility lies with me - but the Live Traders setup should also have realized that they offered multiple deals each of which signed you up for the same monthly chat room renewal. Moral of this story: Pay attention to any automatic payment enrollments you get from Live Traders.

I didn't. A month after my first enrollment (and when I should still have had two "free" months coming to me), I got my first "next" charge for $147; within another 3-4 days, I got two more charges for the same chat room membership.

As soon as I discovered the overcharges, I emailed info@livetraders. A week later, I had received no response, so I forwarded another copy of the email, asking if I had missed the response. Another week later, still no response. So I decided to dispute the charge with PayPal. On the dispute page, there was a generic blurb from Live Traders saying hey, not so fast, let's talk about this. So I called and left a message. A couple hours later I got an email saying that two of the charges had been credited back to my account - but not the third. Again, I emailed asking if they could explain why the third credit had not been issued. That was five days ago, and again, no response. Yeah, there was a weekend in there, but the response should have been the same day. Guess I'll file the PayPal disspute tonight.

As part of the PTS course purchase, it included a "Gaps Scanner". I knew it had some warts, but I'm a software engineer so I thought No Big Deal. Guess what? Big Deal. It doesn't run. Lots of folks were having a problem, Live Traders knew about it, so they set up their tech support guy to do remote support over the web. Set him up with a calendar so we could make an appointment. The appointment came with instructions to download and install a remote support program, and to "be ready" with a username and password when the support guy calls at my appointment time. 

You can probably guess: no call. 15 minutes into my appointment I called the Live Traders office. "Sorry, the support guy is out of the office, he should be calling you on his phone". Oh, and have you visited our website and checked out the hot deal on a bridge we just posted?

These were not my first bad experiences with Live Traders, just the most recent. It's a good news/bad news situation. Caveat emptor.