Consumer rights

by

Pure Med Spa/Brite Smile

Something weird has happened. Maybe it isn’t weird. Maybe it’s normal. I don’t know. In any case, it used to be if you searched the internet for Pure Med Spa, Brite Smile, et al, my blog would come up and people could see the number of people harmed by this company. There are hundreds of comments on my posts from people who have been robbed or injured by them. Now you search these terms and my blog doesn’t show. In fact, it brings up all the current locations where these thieves are still operating. Want a burned face? How about some severe skin damage on your legs? Better yet, how about having a lot of your money stolen? If you do, head on down to your local Pure Med Spa/Brite Smile,GRF Medspa et al. Free pain and stealing awaits you!

To see those previous posts that have virtually disappeared, here are the links:

You Be Sorry You Mess with Me, Pure Med Spa!

Let’s Eliminate Pure Med Spa

Good Riddance, Pure Med Spa!

Pure Med Spa Again

Pure Med Spa, Brite Smile, Crooks All

Order By Bankruptcy Court for Pure Med Spa

Pure Med Spa/Brite Smile is Now Pinnacle

I Hope We Get You, Pure Med Spa, Brite Smile, et al

Groupon Does Business with Pure Med Spa

by

Groupon Does Business with Pure Med Spa

After several commenters noted that Groupon in Dallas is giving out a Groupon on Pure Med Spa (aka Beauty Med Spa–same name, no difference), I sent them an email saying that they really ought to reconsider promoting a company that has done so much harm.  Here was Groupon’s response:

Hi Lara,

Thanks for your feedback and sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.
We do our best to feature businesses that see Groupon as an opportunity to gain loyal customers as well as advertise their services.

We stand by all of the businesses we feature and the deals we offer, but if you ever feel let down in any way when using your Groupon, we’ll be more than happy to work with you towards satisfaction! Also, thanks for the information! I will be passing this on to the right people.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Regards,

Sarah M.

support@groupon.com

I told them that I am not going to be let down, but others will be.  Who wants to be a loyal customer to a business that has stolen thousands of dollars from customers, burned people with lasers, caused one woman to require surgery because they damaged her legs, and on and on. They are being investigated by several state attorneys general and have been profiled on many television news programs for the harm they have caused.

It’s a shame that this is Groupon’s response considering the negative publicity associated with this company.  Groupon is promoting thieves and hucksters.  Send Groupon a letter letting them know if you have been harmed and what happened.  Maybe if enough people contact them, they will change their policy.

by

Pure Med Spa, Brite Smile, Crooks All

I finally started the article I have been planning to write for over a year.  Every two or three days another comment comes in on the company detailing further bad acts.  Over and over people tell stories of failed treatments, closed doors, lost money, and injuries.  I have been called by Jeff Nourse.  I have spoken to employees and customers.  An attorney general called me to ask what I knew about the company’s practices.  A local Portland television station profiled a victim of Pure Med Spa and called to get my input.  A financier in New York called because the CEO and CFO had contacted him to borrow money.  Basic research led him to this site and to me.  Along the way Pure Med changed to Brite Smile, and the stories continued.  More money lost.  More people harmed.

It is time to get the word out that this company is a public health hazard.  When another story popped into my inbox tonight, I stopped reading my book, pulled out the computer, and started working on the story.  The words are flowing.  I am going to write about this disaster of a company who steals its customers’ money, disfigures and scars their bodies, and runs rampant over its employees.  Then I am going to submit the story to every major woman’s magazine in this country.  Hopefully one of them will realize that this story is a big one, and that in order to protect consumers, the story needs to be told so that no one gives them another penny and nobody else gets hurt.

Some people have asked me Why aren’t these people in jail?  They are crooks!  They hurt me!  They stole my money! Why indeed.  Something needs to happen to stop them before someone else gets hurt.  If we can’t jail them, at least I can try and stop them with my words.

by

Let’s Eliminate Pure Med Spa

See my post on the Pure Med Spa bankruptcy here.

I am writing an article on Pure Med Spa.  For info, please click here.

Because I have received so many messages in response to this post, and since it seems not many of these commentators have read my later piece on the Pure Med Spa bankruptcy filing, I have included this paragraph to inform any readers of that filing.  Effectively, if you received your treatment or they stole money from you BEFORE they filed their bankruptcy case in 2009, this means you may NOT file a lawsuit against Pure Med Spa, except through the bankruptcy court, and there only for certain causes of action.  You may NOT contact the company in any way about the money they owe you.  You may NOT call the CEO and harass him.  In short, you may not do anything to them.  That is the point of the bankruptcy stay, to protect the company from creditors, and I absolutely support this, even when the filer is as abominable as Pure Med Spa.  The same laws that protect Pure Med Spa protect you if you ever had to file, and speaking from experience as a bankruptcy attorney, that relief means a lot to people who are being harassed night and day by creditors.  Don’t think this means you don’t have options, just follow the rules to ensure you don’t violate federal law.

Original Post Let’s Eliminate Pure Med Spa:

I admit it, I do make my title statement without actual and personal knowledge of how well they perform their spa services. I have only my customer-no-service experience with them stealing my money to go on (I am planning to sue here in a couple of weeks once I get the paperwork together). However, Pure Med Spa needs to be run out of town on a rail.

In spite of my lack of spa services, I can glean from the feedback I get here that Pure Med Spa has a lot of people really upset. See my previous post on them here. By far, I get more hits on my blog because of Pure Med Spa than any other. WordPress has a feature where we can see the searches people use to find us. Every single day, without fail, someone connects to my post on Pure Med Spa because they searched for it with some derogatory descriptor like Pure Med Spa complaints or Pure Med Spa sucks or Pure Med Spa steals money or Pure Med Spa ripoff. These are all actual searches and the list is by no means complete. I received a comment from a woman asking me to contact her about her horrible experience. I received others describing their horrible experiences.

Here is a quote:

I paid Pure Med Spa thousands of dollars, in return received cancelled appointments, broken equipment, refusal to honor the packages I purchased, and overbooking, in addition to extreme difficulty and delay in even getting an appointment due to overselling and short staffing…. hat really bothers me is the company’s indifference and arrogance. It seems to just be an effort to take money from clientele without accountablity to perform the services people pay for. Michelle

Here is another:

I’ll kick Pure Med Spa’s ass too. They are liers (sic). They sold me a treatment which they had known that the machine will burn my skin because of my skin type. But they still talked me into buying it. Then later, they told me the machine would burn my skin, and they are trying to give me some other more expensive treatment which I do not need at all. They have a stupid ‘no-refund’ policy, they would not give my money back, that is for sure. Lucy

Considering the number of people who are searching for Pure Med Spa because of problems with the place, I would suspect there may be enough people out there who could file a class action lawsuit against them. That said, even though I’m an attorney, I know very little about class actions, especially since the feds made them harder to file. I do think though, that someone ought to look into it. That place needs to have its ass kicked straight out of business.

by

You be Sorry You Mess with Me Pure Med Spa!

See my post on the Pure Med Spa bankruptcy here.

I am writing an article on Pure Med Spa.  For info, please click here.

Because I have received so many messages in response to this and my other Pure Med Spa post, and since it seems not many of these commentators have read my later piece on the Pure Med Spa bankruptcy filing, I have included this paragraph to inform any readers of that filing.  Effectively, if you received your treatment or they took your money BEFORE they filed for bankruptcy in 2009, this means you may NOT file a lawsuit against Pure Med Spa, except through the bankruptcy court, and there only for certain causes of action (which include fraud).  You may NOT contact the company in any way about the money they owe you.  You may NOT call the CEO and harass him.  In short, you may not do anything to them.  That is the point of the bankruptcy stay, to protect the company from creditors, and I absolutely support this, even when the filer is as abominable as Pure Med Spa.  The same laws that protect Pure Med Spa protect you if you ever had to file, and speaking from experience as a bankruptcy attorney, that relief means a lot to people who are being harassed night and day by creditors.  Don’t think this means you don’t have options, just follow the rules to ensure you don’t violate federal law.

Original Post You be Sorry You Mess with Me Pure Med Spa:

I kick your ass little med spa stupid place.

I have lots of lawyer girlfriends.  Because I am a lawyer, of course I have lots of lawyer friends.  It goes with the territory, you know?  What I find amusing is how often my lawyer girlfriends have to pull out the lawyer card as part of their ass-kicking when some stupid company fucks them over.  My lawyer boyfriends do not seem to have this problem, and I mean friends who are boys, not actual boyfriends.  I only have one boyfriend and he is not a lawyer, thank GOD…anyway, I digress.  I think sometimes us girls get hassled by companies who would not hassle boys just because they think us girls are pushovers.  Small problem.  We are not all pushovers, especially lawyer girls.  Lawyer girls in my experience have a little extra something that likes to kick asses, if you know what I mean.  Something of that ass-kicking mentality pushes us to do things like go to law school and become lawyers.  I am sure there are other professions like this as well, but as a group, my lawyer girlfriends are ass kickers.

ANYWAY.  So my friend Kathleen has had many instances where she has had to kick company ass.  It’s fun to listen to her because you can tell by her story that she is always right and the company is always wrong and I am not being facetious here, she really is.  Like the time the bank told her she could have her deposit in 7 business days so she deposited a rather large sum based on that assertion, then the receipt the bank gave her after the deposit said she could not have that money for like two or three weeks or something.  Um.  NO.   Bank wrong.  Kathleen kick ass.  Or another time, I don’t remember the details, but she was bidding at a furniture auction and bid on a piece of furniture and the auction people gave the furniture to someone else who bid earlier.  Kathleen kick ass again.  I think she lost on that one but the company was sorry they had crossed her and her husband looked sheepish.  The company was wrong, no doubt in my mind. Fuckers.  I would have kicked ass too.  Kind of like when the bank in Hawaii thought I was a terrorist and would not give me an account even with a very large sum of money, a valid driver’s license, a social security card, and a passport.  Very large ass kicking there. I ended up at another bank.  Upset Lara.  Oh, and then there was the time the air filter company tried to mess with my lawyer friend Sara.  Their ad said Free In Home Estimates.  So they came and did their estimate and it was too high so of course Sara used another company.  Then they tried to charge Sara.  Um.  No.  Sara pointed out the various laws their attempts to collect violated.  Needless to say, they didn’t get the money they did not deserve.  Jerks.

ANYWAY.  So the point of this rambling diatribe is that I gave this med spa fifty bucks to hold my appointment back in July.  They said We need a fifty dollar deposit to hold your appointment.  If you don’t show or cancel within 24 hours of the appointment, we keep the fifty bucks. Okay.  I can deal with that.  Well, I called to cancel the same day I made the appointment.

Oh, we don’t do refunds.  This isn’t a refund.  I didn’t get anything.  It is outside the 24 hour period, I want my money.  Well we won’t give it to you.  Okay then.  Have you heard of the Oregon Health Spa Act, ORS 646A.030?  It allows the right of rescission of any spa service within 72 hours of requesting or paying for service.  Um, let me get my manager. Yeah, you do that.  So the next several conversations were not pleasant.  I described all the things I would do to them, including writing about their spa on my blog (doing that now), calling the Oregon Attorney General’s office, and telling Clackamas Town Center, the mall where they are located.  During all this, I also promptly sent off the written notice requesting the rescission, as required by statute.  Finally the manager spoke to someone who would allow a refund.  She told me the money would be in my account by the end of the day.  Nope, not there.  I called again.  Within three days.  Nope, not there.  It is now three and a half months later and still, no refund.

So I’m going postal on their asses.  I filed my complaint with the Oregon AG.  I am going to call the mall where they are located.  And I’m writing about them here.  I did some research and discovered MANY forums lamenting the many problems with Pure Med Spa.  They are a terrible company.  They have huge problems giving refunds or returning deposits.  They also use technicians who are not properly licensed and forget to follow health regulations when performing spa services (this information comes from the forums, not my personal experience).  Too bad I did not know this when I walked by them in the mall.  They are counting on people not knowing this when they walk by in the mall.  This is part of why I’m going to tell the mall.  I don’t know if the mall will care, but there should be some public service message to let patrons know the company they might deal with is a giant crook who will steal their money and could possibly perform some atrocious health violation on them or something.

The problem with stupid companies assuming customers are stupid is that their assumptions are often WRONG.  Guess what? I know where to look for the statutes about stupid asses like you.  I am happy to let others know there are statutes out there to protect consumers from shitty companies.  Oregon and many other states have rights of rescission statutes in many areas (though not in car sales, as is often believed).  Anyway, in Oregon anyway, there are statutes to allow you to change your mind about gym contracts, time share contracts, things sold door to door, certain home sale contracts, and other consumer contracts.  Usually you just have to send them a letter.  It’s not difficult, people just don’t know this is their right.  It would be better if the statutes required these jackasses to post something prominently stating as much, but for now, at least the laws are there so if some crappy company like Pure Med Spa tries to rip you off, you can fight them if necessary.  Fees to sue them and damages for causing you the trouble are often included in the remedies, so all you are out is your time.  The next time a company gives you trouble, go look through your state’s consumer statutes, you might find you have certain rights.  It is so empowering when some ginormous company who couldn’t give a shit about you tries to steal from you and you kick them in the ass.