For months, several customers of the Hubside shops. store, specialized in multimedia equipment, alert on deceptive marketing practices and in particular incomplete information on contracts to which they have subscribed… sometimes without even realizing it. Marianne and Philippe, a couple from Yvelines, have each subscribed to 5 offers at Hubside.store… when they only thought of committing to a single contract. Result: they were debited more than 800 euros each. For Marianne, Philippe, Pauline and Clarisse, the story begins in the same way: they are accosted in the street or at the entrance to a shopping center with a coupon that catches their attention. “A high-free product” is promised to them if they go to a Hubside store. store, a brand that sells multimedia equipment and offers a series of services and subscriptions in the form of contracts and insurance.
In mid-August, Clarisse, a 19-year-old student from Lille, goes in the EuraLille shop to benefit from the “free battery” mentioned by a Hubside salesperson at the entrance to the mall. “I was very well received, at the limit it’s as if I had been taken out of the red carpet and all the stuff. There were cakes, sweets, ”recalls the young woman. “A manager took me to go around the store and show me the offers”. Pauline, who lives in Avignon and who also received this coupon, remembers sellers, “very close to us, very familiar, who try to find common points. “For Marianne, 26, and Philippe, her 48-year-old companion, the scenario is very similar: at the end of May, the couple went to the Plaisir shopping center, in the Yvelines, during their lunch break, before being apostrophized by a seller who distributes the famous coupon to them.
“He told us that it was a contract that included five services”
Marianne and Philippe are received in the store where a salesperson presents them with various offers for nearly an hour to which they can subscribe. Loyalty card, electronic object rental pass, telephone equipment insurance, assistance service for creating a website… By subscribing to the “Intensiv +” contract, the couple thinks they can benefit from this whole series of ‘advantages. “He spread all the brochures on the table for us, but he only opened one. He told us that it was a contract that included five services. He sold it to us like that, the thing. He didn’t sell us that, telling us that it was five contracts with five different prices,” explains Marianne. The couple ends up subscribing to what they think is a single contract, which would cost them 100 euros per month each, following the third month of subscription.
“But what surprised me was that we each received five text messages for electronic signatures… even though we had been told regarding a single contract. It seemed strange to me, but hey, it’s true that we were in a hurry. Marianne and Philippe sign and return from their lunch break. But at the end of July, when they return from their holidays, it’s a cold shower: the couple realizes that they have already been sampled several times by Hubside. store. The total amount of the debits amounts to more than 800 euros each.
In Lille, same unpleasant surprise for Clarisse. At the beginning of September, the student checks her bank accounts and finds that she is in the red: in a few days, she has been debited nearly 150 euros by Hubside. store. The young student does not understand: she nevertheless terminated on the telephone at the beginning of September the only Hubside contract to which she thought she had subscribed. But when she looks at her bank statements, she realizes that she has actually subscribed to three other contracts, which have been debited from her account. For their part, Marianne and Philippe also quickly understand that they have subscribed to several contracts. “I contacted customer support but never got an answer, I sent an email but never got an answer… And that’s when I said basta: we called our banks and we opposed. »
“A gap between the speech of the person on the phone and the reality”
At the end of July in Avignon, Pauline terminates three of the contracts to which she subscribed in store a month earlier, but decides to keep “the rental pass” following a telephone exchange with the dedicated customer service. “On the phone, the person told me regarding monthly direct debits, but without telling me that they were in fact bi-monthly direct debits”. In early August, while checking her bank accounts, Pauline noted five direct debits from Hubside: “there was still a gap between what the person on the phone said and the reality,” laments the young woman from 24 years. “And on top of that, I got a swab on top of the normal swabs, which shouldn’t have been there. »
Pauline has since made a request for reimbursement, which she is awaiting the transfer. Some customers, who denounce abusive debits, have called on lawyer Emma Leoty to take legal action. “Normally, the teleoperator or the commercial has a duty of information and exact information. There is a real work of information on the part of the merchant who must explain in an educational way to the consumer what he is committing to, ”explains the lawyer. The Hubside group was already the subject of an investigation in April by the General Directorate for Competition, Consumer Affairs and the Repression of Fraud, which noted “practices consisting in misleading consumers to believe cease their direct debits or terminate their subscriptions (…) that their termination requests were taken into account or even effective”.
Contacted, Hubside. store said that “the brand’s sales processes and customer service are strictly supervised and are subject to regular checks, in particular by external organisations. All sales are systematically made with the customer’s consent. Sales that do not respect the quality criteria and processes are prohibited and result in sanctions”.
