I am absolutely mortified at what has happened to me, same as newcat. My partner set up a company in January. Advertised in Yellow Pages in April and immediately was contacted by Advertising Agencies. One was Yellow Partnership. Unfortunately he signed up to this and took the 5% discount by paying with his credit card on 4th July. On 11th July I received a phone call from Strawberry Educational saying that they were sending an invoice to us for payment of the advert. My partner had received a call from them but did not agree to sign up and did not give them his credit card details. To my horror, I found out that £699.13 had been debited from his credit card by Strawberry Educational. We contacted the credit card company about Fraud and Trading Standards who directed me to this website. I read one blagg that mentioned to ask your bank to check for unsuspecting pending debits. I then checked the credit card again and to my horror MPH Direct Ltd. had taken £699.13 from the card! I rang them up and asked who the heck they were and they said that my partner had signed up with them and paid. I told them that he had not and that they had taken the money fraudently. I wrote to Strawberry Educational, MPH Direct and Yellow Partnership and asked / demanded that I receive my money back prior to court proceedings. They are guilt under S.75 of the consumer credit card, the data protection act and humanity. I have contacted the Information Commissioner who should be taking up this case. We are out of pocket by £1398.26. We are a small business and in the current climate are not doing wonderfully. We can't afford this, we have small children to feed. It just seems so so wrong that these companies can or would work like this and it takes a lot of heartache to try and pursue them like they have done to so many of you.
My solicitor has been great and if any of the three companies are reading this, I'll be after you shortly!
mortified at 4th Aug 2008, 01:03PM

We advertised our company [www.homeplumbingandheating.co.uk] (link: http://www.homeplumbingandheating.co.uk) with Yell.com in August. We got a second line listing for the entire area of West and South West London. We took out a contract for "central heating services" This included searches on the Yell.com site for all key words in relation to gas and boilers. Whe nthe advert was taken out initially we had a brilliant response. We also had a one year contract as agreed on this basis. Yell.com then sold all our sub keywords to other competitors although we had a contract on these words. It also turns out that the coverage area is much smaller than what we were sold. Yell.com maintains they do not have to give us the key words we were sold back as our contract is only for the keyword "Central Heating services" and not boiler repair and gas engineers etc.

I have been thrown from customer services to sales and so on. I have made numerous phone calls. They have suggested I may be able to put in a compensation claim, but have not guaranteed I will recieve it. All I am asking for is that they put us back into hte position that we have contracted with them