GLOBAL VISAS
Fraudulent Charges and lack of service

My husband and I live in London and arrived here in 2010 on a Tier 2 work visa - due to a change in jobs we realized we would need to transition to a Tier 1 visa quickly as the window for this particular visas was closing in April.

We contacted Global Visas on February 3rd and talked to a very enthusiastic sales agent (Ritesh) who listened to our situation and told us we were great candidates and they could assure us that the application process would run smoothly and correctly. They requested the entire sum of money up front (1, 400 GBP) before allowing us to speak to our case manager. We were able to end up putting down a 250 GBP deposit with a 30 day payment plan on the understanding that we wanted to speak to an actual case manager about our case before committing ourselves.

I was called back by a very impatient and rushed individual by the name of Marcin who spent about 3 to 5 minutes reading me off a laundry list of documents that I needed to get to them. As this list is available on the UK Immigration website I was already fully aware that these were needed. Any attempt on my part to ask a question or clarify our situation was met with 'yes yes yes, that's fine' which led me to believe he was not taking in a single thing we were saying and was just doing what he needed to do so he could 'check a box'.

My husband and I already had most of the documents on hand and had the rest expressed mailed at our expense from the states and uploaded to their system over the weekend. Monday arrived - nothing. We had already emailed several clarifying questions over the weekend and now we began to call and leave messages on Marcin's line to no avail. It wasn't until Thursday, several days and calls later, that we were able to track our case manager down on the phone - not because he returned our call but because we managed to get the original sales agent (Ritesh) on the line and had him get up and go track down the case manager in the office and made him pick up the line. Turns out the case manager had been on leave the entire week and was leaving again the next day on Friday. Right. And the pesky job of looking at our case or documents? Apparently very annoying for him. And surprise - the information Global Visas requested us to obtain from the states - was wrong. They had us request the wrong time period. We had to go back and repeat the process all over again. Thanks to excellent service providers in the US we were actually able to get these documents by Friday. However, we were told that it would not be possible to submit our application the following week with no reason provided. As our case manager was still on leave we can only assume that he chose not to complete our application or review our documents. At this point we realized we were better off submitting the application ourselves then dealing with a company that scheduled our extremely time sensitive documents around their annual leave and couldn't be bothered to return emails/phone calls or review our documentation in a timely manner. We understand that everyone needs a vacation once in a while - but please assign us someone who actually plans showing up to work and following through with what they have promised to do. It was made clear by us that our case was very time sensitive and needed to be handled in a timely manner. Clearly this was lost on Global Visas.

We informed them of our disappointment in their lack of service and response (both on the phone and via email) We were careful to clearly spell out that we were terminating the relationship and that our bank had been instructed not to allow any further charges as none were authorized. We arrived at their offices to take back our original documents and we were told they were sorry for how things were handled and asked for a 2nd chance. We told them that at this point we simply didn't have the time and would be filling out our own application and submitting it ourselves that day. At this point we believed the issue to be over.

Global Visas sent us an email the following morning (by operations manager - Adrian Baxter) claiming we owed them the remaining balance for all the 'work' they had done and went ahead without any authorization from us and debited our account for that amount. This is currently being disputed at several levels.

I would strongly advise any other consumer against every working with them - the amount of money, time and personal anguish caused was terrible. There was no service given in return and the attitude of the company has alternated between disinterested (once they thought they had our money) to aggressive when they realized that we would be terminating our relationship with them.

Company: GLOBAL VISAS
Country: United Kingdom
Region: United Kingdom

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