Deal with Shaw Academy at your peril!! You will regret it.

On 22 Oct 2020 I had R499.99 unauthorised debit go off my bank account. Eventually on 27 Oct, Hector replies to my emails. I must add that any negative comment, post or review you leave on channels such as their Facebook page, LinkedIn and so on are deleted. An except from Hector's reply : "I have personally reviewed your account and found that you had enrolled in the Quarterly Subscription on by entering the payment details and upgrading the subscription by agreeing to our terms and conditions. The Premium membership allows the customer to access all our services without any limitation for the entire billing period.

You may cancel your subscription but the membership will remain active until the end of the billing period and all the course contents have been already made available to add to your account and access all.

In terms of processing a refund, unfortunately, this is not something we can do as the membership benefits were made available to you as per the terms and conditions you agreed while upgrading and the revenue has been recognized as per our revenue recognition policies.

What I am going to do is to provide you with a Lifetime Membership totally free of charge as I want to and am going to turn this into a positive right now. I am going to ensure you benefit as much as the many millions of highly satisfied Shaw Academy students right now. I have gone and done this on your account now and you have Lifetime Membership access totally free of charge meaning you can complete the course you initially joined for and any others you wish."

My response: "If you went through the correspondence properly you will see that I absolutely did not sign up for the quarterly subscription! I made it VERY clear that I did not want to continue with Shaw Academy after I completed the Digital Marketing course. I just needed a little extra time to complete said course but I did not want to continue beyond that.

One of your agents, Megan did not take the time to understand my query/request properly and cancelled my subscription prematurely which would have resulted in me being unable to complete the course. I managed to escalate my query and another agent - Sebastian took it upon himself to "extend your free trial by 3 months". See attached correspondence. I subsequently completed the Digital Marketing course.

I therefore do not accept your reply and solution to my complaint. And quite frankly the arrogance that comes across in your email is appalling. I demand the reversal of the unauthorised R499-99 debit immediately. I reported it as a ********** transaction to my bank this afternoon and they are currently investigating. As for the "millions of highly satisfied Shaw Academy students", judging by the number of complaints on the Internet, there are just as many - if not more - highly dissatisfied people who have been ****** of their money.

I don't care about free lifetime membership of Shaw Academy. I want my money back and I never want anything to do with Shaw Academy ever again and I am making it my mission to tell as many people as I can about my bad experience.

I look forward to your positive response with regards the refund."

Hector then sends an auto reply, 23rd Oct (and this is what I now get sent to every follow up mail): "Your request is being reviewed by our next level dedicated Refund Processing Team. One of our support staff will be in touch with you to address your issue within approximately 48 hours, however we will do our best to come back sooner. In order for us to assist you promptly, we would request you to answer our call. It will be very helpful if you can share your preferred day and time to speak to you. Our business hours of operation is: 7:30 AM - 16:30 PM (GMT) We would also kindly request that if you have raised the issue by email/ticket/or any other form that you do not open a second ticket. Rest assured we will action your request. To add additional comments, just reply to this email with your preferred day and time to speak to you. Thanks for getting in touch." So, what do I do now? Make it my personal mission and crusade to let as many people know on social media that people need to stay as far away from this company as they can!!!!!