About a year ago, my brother was staying with us for a little while. He is in outside sales, and needed to be able to receive faxes at home. We only had one phone line (still do!), and I am on the Internet quite a lot so he would miss faxes. I heard about these services that would give you a number in your local area code that people could send faxes to, and the fax would be sent directly to your email.

I began looking at some of the ones available like jfax(now j2) and efax. Some of the services were just as expensive as a regular phone line, but I finally decided to sign up with e-fax. This was the first time I had purchased something online with my credit card, so I was leary of getting chipped.

I read the terms of service and the website thoroughly before officially signing up. Their service was 3.95 a month with a 10.00 setup fee. When I signed up, they immediately charged 18.95 to my credit card.

On the website, it said that my number would be active within 10 minutes. I signed up on Saturday morning, but it said nothing about it being a Monday-Friday setup. That night I gave my fax number out. People tried it but they it was not yet activated. I was confused because as I had said the number should have been active 10 minutes after I signed up.

I emailed efax, and got a generic response for reasdons faxes would not go through. I emailed again on Sunday morning. I got the same response. By Monday morning when the number was still not activated, I became upset. I tried calling efax long distance, and got a recorded message. I told my brother I would give the number until 3pm MST, to become active. If it wasn't I was calling my credit card and having the charge removed.

Well, the number was not active by 3pm. I called my credit card and told them what had happened. I emailed efax and cancelled the service. Low and behold the number was finally activated Tuesday morning after I cancelled the efax service.

What happened next between efax and I really took the cake. I received an email about my cancellation. They said they were keeping the 10.00 setup fee and 3.95 for the first month's worth of service. I laughed out loud. You've got to be kidding me. It took them 4 days to hook up a number that was only supposed to take ten minutes. I never used their service once, and in fact it caused my brother trouble with his clients.

I called my credit card again, and told them this last problem. Well to make a long story short, my credit card took off the whole 18.95 e-fax charged me. I would not recommend the e-fax service to anyone. They are definitely scary. With no way to get reputible customer service by phone or email, if problems do occur you could be wasting your money.



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