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100% Guarantee is not necessarily 100%
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I was trying to collect e-mail data for a small business start-up. I had much of the information, but I just needed e-mail addresses. Spokeo's free service has a highlighted link for occupation and I felt that if I had the business name I could do my own search for the company's standard e-mail format. When I searched the free service, the link was "clickable" and took me to their upgrade page. I figured I was worth the $14.85 to find the information they appeared to have.
I searched about 20 different names from my list and there was nothing listed under occupation for any of the people. This took 15 - 30 minutes (give or take). I felt it was misleading that they give you a clickable link on the free end tat takes you to the purchase the upgrade page, but once you do, there is no information for twenty individual searches.
I e-mailed immediately to cancele my subscription and assumed that the 100% guarantee meant that I would get 100% of my money back. They did respond promptly to my request to cancel, but only offered a refund for $10.00. I asked to explain why there was a 33% cancelation and their response was essentially that they don't guarantee accurate or complete information. I can respect that, but I received NO information and therefore was not 100% satisfied.
I accepted the $10.00 refund because it wasn't worth any more of my time to argue the point. But I did let them know that I would voice my displeasure on every review site that had their company listed.
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Business's response - by Spokeo, Incon 2/24/2012
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Dear Spokeo User,
I sincerely apologize for this inconvenience, and certainly wish to clarify this matter. The information displayed in the boxes on the preview page is to showcase the potential information we can provide on the specific individual being searched. Had the information regarding the individual's occupation been publicly available and linked, it would have displayed their profession.
Also, the 100% Guarantee we offer ensures that you, as the customer will receive additional results for only the first search that is performed.
On that note, please understand that our guarantee does not promise that accurate results will be provided for subsequent searches. Spokeo showcases the power of information aggregation, as the data is gathered from a multitude of different sources, such as social networks, public records, phone listings, marketing surveys and more. However, machine aggregation has its limits. Since there is no human involved, the data is not verified and might not be accurate. Moreover, many sources do not refresh their data often. For this reason, we cannot guarantee full or accurate information for every single name, phone number, email address or username you search for, as the results vary so much from person to person. We are only as good as our sources, and our engineers are working hard on new algorithms to improve our data accuracy. I do apologize again for the inconvenience.
Please feel free to contact us via our contact page, as we wish to resolve this issue for you. Again, I apologize for any inconvenience.
Sincerely,
Spokeo
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