I placed an order for a product on https://bagittoday.com on 24th August 2013. Within 5 minutes of placing the order I got a call from a certain Amit Verma from Bag It Today and told me that I had been entered into an exclusive contest for winning a car from Bag It Today for which I would have to buy lifetime membership from Bag It Today for Rs 1350 which would enable me to get extra discount of 30-50 percent on every product on bag It Today, In addition to the discount already available on the product.
After I expressed skepticism about the order, I was told that India Today is a reputed business group and we are doing this for our sales promotion as we want you to do word of mouth publicity for the company after getting this outrageously generous offer from us. I expressed my interest in this offer and Mr. Varma promptly transferred the call to the payment department of the company where I was asked to provide details of my Credit card, (a practice which I may point out is highly suspect and completely inappropriate). They asked for my 3D secure password which I declined after which they asked me to provide them my OTP(ONE TIME PASSWORD) after providing them with the same I was shocked to find out that they had gone behind my back and changed my 3D secure password to charge me an amount of 13, 499(THIRTEEN THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED).
Obviously I was shocked to find such a brazen display of thievery and misuse of personal data. After this I got a call from their verification Department for verifying my address who told me that I had purchased some diamonds for Rs 13500. I told them about the lifetime membership order which they declined to have no knowledge of and transferred the call back to the sales guy Amit Verma who told me that the confirmation department doesn’t know about the membership offer and told me to "Just say yes" to the confirmation department. After this when I got a call back from the confirmation department I told them to immediately cancel the order and refund the amount to my credit card. I also sent a mail to response@bagittoday.com and customersupport@bagittoday.com However in both the cases my pleas were ignored and I was repeatedly transferred from department to department in order to bamboozle and confuse me. I repeatedly called the customer care number everyday who told me that order cannot be cancelled and dropped the call.
After a few days they told me the order has been shipped(which I never ordered) and when I asked them about refund they told me their company does not provide any refund. You may note that I got a call from FedEx courier few days back who told me that that there was a package in my name with only the city name and mobile no mentioned. I declined to accept the package and asked the courier company to sent it back to its origin as I had not ordered it. After narrating this brazen incident of thievery to my friends and colleagues, one of my colleagues asked me to drop a mail to a senior guy of BIT as he had been duped by the company in a similar fashion on a previous occasion. I promptly sent a mail on the stated mail ID on 2nd September after which I got a response from a certain Farah Qureshi on 3rd September(onlinesupport@bagittoday.com) mentioning the following lines("This is to inform you that we have forwarded your concern to the concern person and requesting you to please allow us some time to get back to you.")
After this, I sent them 2-3 reminders on subsequent days to which they sent the same response. It has been 4 days and I have not heard anything concrete from them so far. I have realized that they are just buying time and are in cahoots with these sales guys recruited by them for looting innocent customers. The order ID(for this act of theft) was communicated to me as 33195053.
I have send a series of mails even to the top guys of the India Today and to my surprise all are game into it. India Today whole group including Business Today, Aaj Tak, Headline Today, Readers Digest, Cosmopolitan should be banned as they advertise the same as if they are selling the holy thing for a discount. In-fact I think their major source of Income is from these fraudulent activities and making a consumer a damn fool. By all means their staff are trained how to deceive the consumer. Once it is done a separate team will handle the frauds. Here there is a calculative risk of say 2% refunds and 98% is income.Aaj Tak news Channel was also promoting the same and it has lost its rRajeev_Vermact.