Catholic Financial Services Update
Update: Back on May 9th Catholic Financial Services acknowledged receipt of our completed forms and said that our withdrawal request was being resubmitted. Today (May 24th) we received all of our paperwork back from the post office unopened with an “unclaimed” note attached. This means that a) CFS lied about getting our mailed paperwork and b) They haven’t checked their P.O. Box for about three weeks.
—
Following up on our dealings with Catholic Financial Services (Catholic Online) here and here, shows that things haven’t changed a bit with the company. A month after we started asking for a reason why we weren’t getting our money we received a note that a $2 transaction had been revoked by the sender and that was holding up our transaction of several thousand dollars. When I said that we would be happy to have the transaction decreased by that amount so we could get the rest of the money, we were told that we had never filled out all the paperwork for our account.
I filled out the paperwork and overnighted it to them as well as faxed it. Then I waited. No response. I sent them a couple of notes and was told that our transaction was being put back in process. That was on May 9th. It is now 22 days later and follow up requests for a date when we will receive our money have been ignored. I filled out their official dispute resolution form last Sunday and received an automated reply that I would here back within 48 hours. It has now been three days.
The only other correspondence I have received from them is a threat to legal action against our company for posting about our experience dealing with them.
If you currently advertise with Catholic Online I strongly suggest stopping. If you were thinking about it, think again. This company is bad news.
July 21st, 2007 at 1:19 am
Hi -
I just read your blog about COL & CFS, and I thought that you might be interested in knowing that John Mitchell, Deputy District Attorney for Kern County in Bakersfield, CA, served a subpoena on Michael Galloway on 7/19/07 - Mr Galloway has 30 days to respond.
If you haven’t yet filed a complaint, you can do so now on the Kern DA website - fill in the form and then fax to the number at the top of the form: http://www.co.kern.ca.us/da/fraudservices.asp
Below is a way to find out some information about the case against Galloway and his proprietorship:
Go to: http://www.kern.courts.ca.gov/civil-index/case-detail.asp
Then use pull down menus to select S-1500 and CV and then enter 261211
I am aware of at least 4 other non-profits and a couple of dioceses that are not able to get their funds from CFS, including one that USED to be listed as a reference on their website.
Another interesting point: check out their user agreement by just going to their site and then SIGN IN and check the user agreement again: the website version has section 2.9 but the user agreement you get when you sign in does not have a 2.9. I’m sure that there are more discrepancies if one were to go looking for them.