Friday 26 June 2015

The Voice - Consumer's Voice

Can they keep my money?

We bought electrical supplies from a supplier in 2014, but did not collect all of them. When we decided to get the rest of the material, they kept saying tomorrow and now they claim they have ran two financial years and they wrote it off. They sending us from post to pillar.


To some extent I can understand the supplier’s problem. If you didn’t collect the goods for a year then this would be a considerable inconvenience to them, keeping the goods in stock, occupying space they could use for other purposes. I’m sure you can imagine how inconvenient it would be for a supplier to keep stock for that long when they could sell it to someone else. Given this I think they were probably within their rights to cancel that element of the deal and sell the goods you purchased to another customer.

However, while they can probably dispose of the goods they can’t just ignore their obligations to you. They owe you a refund for those parts you didn’t pick up. They can’t just keep your money. Their excuse about going through two financial years is not your concern. What they should have done is to call you months ago to tell you that they were cancelling part of the deal with you and asking how they should refund you the relevant amount. That would have been the decent thing to do.

Send over their contact details and we’ll get in touch with them to see if they’ll see reason and give you your money back. If they fail to do the decent thing you might need to involve our friends at the Small Claims Court.

Should I join Four Corners Alliance?

There is a group that's doing the rounds about making loads of money called Four Corners Alliance Group. Do you know anything about them and if so are they legitimate?

I'd really appreciate your help on this. Thank you.



We should all be very suspicious about any scheme that tells you that you can make “loads of money”. In particular we should all be cautious about Four Corners Alliance which is remarkably similar to a number of pyramid schemes we’ve seen over the years.

They say that their scheme is “based on three products. A six lesson set, thirty two book Financial Education set, an optional monthly Financial Education Newsletter subscription, and our Online Marketing Academy subscription, both of the latter can be paid for from earnings.”

However what you see when you visit their web site and attend their presentations will be what all pyramid and Multi-Level Marketing schemes really concentrate on: the opportunity to make money from the scheme.

Four Corners Alliance will tell you that they’re not a pyramid scheme because they sell products. Once you’ve joined their scheme you can buy a range of electronic books on financial literacy. But here’s the flaw. Four Corners Alliance will sell you these books for between $16 and $399 but you can also get these and similar books elsewhere for much less than those prices. However as with all pyramid schemes the key thing they encourage you to do is to recruit other people beneath you. In order to do this you need to spend significant amounts of money to buy the right to sell the books and so do the people beneath you.

Unlike some of the real Multi-Level Marketing schemes like Amway and Herbalife who have been forced to publish the income figures for their distributors, Four Corners Alliance don’t do this. They can’t prove any of the claims they make about people becoming rich.

I urge you not to waste your time, effort and money on this and every other pyramid scheme.

No comments: