For me the three most obvious benefits to be had from ceasing all social media (bar LinkedIn) activity are improved mental well-being, increase in productivity and not spending money on useless tat.

I can vouch for the first 2 and my online purchases have seen a significant decline over the last 6 months.

I still get caught up in the occasional online purchase. Usually eBay these days

At some point over the last 6 months I have made a couple of fairly innocuous online purchases and have fallen victim to pretty serious scams.

October 7th, my TV crashed whilst I was watching a movie.

In search of some sort of remedial solution online, I came across a website called JustAnswers who “connect users with verified professionals (medicine, law, veterinary, mechanics) for quick, reliable answers to specific questions” (Their words)

I input my query and for £1.95 I was informed that my TV had a hardware issue and my next course of action was to call the manufacturers customer service number.

All fair enough except on the following Saturday night, I happened to notice an alert for £39.99  subscription leaving my personal account for JustAnswers.

Good fortune on my part and I returned to the JustAnswers website to contact Customer Service.

An impossible task as the only questions the AI Bot was willing to answer related to fixing a TV or simple DIY tasks.

“Can I speak to someone in Customer Service” was unrecognised and with nowhere else to seek help on the website, I began to feel a little bit scammed.

I found a customer portal eventually and managed to cancel a subscription that I hadn’t taken out, and tried to get my money back but to no avail.

I went onto Linkedin and searched for JustAnswers and came across a LinkedIn page and eventually someone in Customer Success.

I explained my situation as succinctly as possible to a  lady called Wendy who dealt with my request and refunded my money.

All good.

Somewhat I naively advised that there were some fundamental flaws with the UX on the website and that their subscription portal wasn’t working, highlighting an obvious issue for those people who might have signed up for the JustAnswers service but might not have spotted the money being taken out as I had.

I asked her was she going to be able to put this information to good use via the tech department and she said no.

I was curious as to why she wasn’t at all interested in fixing the problem.

I scanned the LinkedIn page and that of their holding company, Pearl.com – both companies are CEO’d by a guy called Andy Kurtzig.

Further exploration of the LinkedIn page revealed a post from another customer who had said, and I paraphrase…”why are you taking out $150 from my sons account…it should only have been $1.95…I didn’t sign up for any subscription…”

I went back to my contact at JustAnswers, shared my concerns which had now escalated from bad UX to fraud.

My post:
Hi Wendy,

Thanks for coming back – i have to say that as a customer the experience was terrible. I have identified some opportunities for your tech team to improve the experience and also highlighted additional customers who will have had a similar experience to mine.

The importance of trust in sales, irrespective of modality, sector, product or service has never been under more scrutiny.

If I’m honest, I don’t feel that the company has taken my observations seriously.

Your site auto-booked me into a membership without any permissions whatsoever – i was lucky to have intercepted the issue. There maybe countless others who are not so lucky and you say that nothing has been changed on the subscriptions page or the Contact page?

My initial thoughts when it happened were that I was being scammed fraudulently or that your site had been hacked – and I’m surprised you cannot see the severity of it all.

Paul

I revisited the page the next day only to discover that the customer post had been deleted.

My next message to Wendy:

“I’ve just noticed that posts on the JustAnswer LinkedIn page have been deleted – the ones where another customer had made complaints similar to mine? Incredible! I think I would like to escalate this – internally and externally.”

Wendy’s reply was telling:

“Hi Paul,

Thank you for laying this out so clearly. I understand why the auto-subscription, the lack of visible contact options, and the later removal of similar LinkedIn posts have raised serious concerns about trust and transparency.

I’m sorry this experience has left you feeling that your observations were not taken seriously. We take your feedback very seriously and I will escalate your concerns to the proper teams.

Please let me know if you need further assistance from me.”

An interesting reply from the “customer success” champion with more than a hint of “I am being held captive against my will. Please help.”

Some agentic research into JustAnswers and Kurtzig backed up my theory that Wendy was indeed being held hostage by the bad guys.

In the USA, FTC has sued JustAnswer and Kurtzig personally in January 2026, saying the company hooked people with a nominal $1 or $5 fee and then slid them into a recurring subscription without making that clear, alleging that the online question-and-answer platform deceived consumers into costly recurring subscriptions by advertising a nominal $1 or $5 fee to access its services.

The FTC’s investigation found that JustAnswers’ chatbot assistant, “Pearl,” told consumers during signup they could “join JustAnswer for $5 (fully-refundable),” while the FTC alleges the company failed to present the actual monthly subscription terms clearly and conspicuously as required under ROSCA (the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act) and Section 5 of the FTC Act.

Despite receiving significant consumer complaints and conducting internal website testing that revealed widespread confusion about pricing, JustAnswer and Kurtzig chose to make the purchase flow more deceptive rather than clearer.

Kurtzig was named personally with the FTC alleging he directly participated in the challenged acts and practices with actual knowledge that they were misleading, including declining proposed website content changes and rolling back clearer versions of the disclosures – which explains Wendey’s reticence….

A quick trip to TrustPilot shows 10,000s of 1* reviews each outlining the similar fate for customers trying to get their TV fixed.

Can you imagine how many people are engaging with this fraudulent platform but not seeing the additional payments leaving their accounts?

At least I got my money back.

Lucky me.

Or so I thought.

There’s a thing called

Repeat victimisation.

A criminology concept describing how someone who has already been a victim of a particular type of offence has a higher-than-average chance of being victimised again, often by a similar method or within a similar timeframe.

It’s well documented for fraud specifically — once someone’s details or payment habits have been exposed through one scam, they’re more likely to be targeted by another, and people who respond to one low-cost “trial” offer are statistically more likely to engage with a similar one, since the tactics and audiences overlap.

The experience with douche-bag Kurtzig had made me more curious of any outgoings across my personal and business accounts and it was checking through my PayPal Account that I came across a sequence of payments made to a company called Nordicalab which began earlier in the year with a £1.95 payment followed by a series of 5 x £35.95 payments over 4 months.

My Just Answers wasn’t the first part of the repeat victimisation scam but the second.

Immediately I reached out via PayPal to the company through the email paypal@nordicalab.com to ask them a few questions about the subscription that I didn’t take out.

Within the day, ‘John’ at Nordicalab came back to reassure me that I had not made a transaction on any of the 6 days highlighted in my original email.

I was relieved and thought it was a hop, skip and a jump to a full refund via PayPal, because, well, it was PayPal I was dealing with.

Not so.
Unlike Wendy at Just Answers, PayPal have a ring of steel around their Customer Service entity and the only way through is via an AI assistant and then into their call centre where you are greeted by a clatter of Ex-International School graduates who speak a certain type of English at a ferocious speed and zero appreciation for the art of active listening.

A bit racist, Paul?

Or is it a genuine criticism of a customer service team that speak way too fast, do not listen and occasionally fall back into their mother tongue such is their speed in delivering  a script that was clearly written by ChatGPT 1.0.

I have requested the full transcript of all of the chat and messaging I had to endure over a 3 week period.

More of that later.

They are  good for nothing except grinding you down into submission.

Long story, short – I tried to have the cases disputed only for the machines to come back and side with the vendor.

“What, even though the vendor has given me specific dates to say that nothing was sent out to me?”

And then back into the killer loop – AI bot, ‘human’ chat, then the voice of ambivalence, then nothing.

AI bot, ‘human’ chat, then the voice of ambivalence, then nothing.

AI bot, ‘human’ chat, then the voice of ambivalence, then nothing.

Back in the day, I worked in a sales team trying to grow business in a tech start-up.

Our strategy didn’t have a name in 2013 but today it is called account-based marketing.

it goes like this: decide on the target company, get an email, send an email, make a phone call, repeat.

One of the guys that worked for me, Sean, had a plan.

He wanted to target Archie Norman, Chairman of ITV but didn’t have an email address, so using his initiative he went to work on all of the possible versions of an email address for Archie Norman.
anorman@itv.com
Archie_norman@itv.com
norman.archie@itv,com

You get the picture.

Well, Archie got the email, passed it onto his Head of Technology and we got the deal.

I wondered if this tactic would work to help me get in touch with someone at PayPal.

Getting decision makers names wasn’t easy – for a company of their size there was a distinct absence of C-suite on LinkedIn.

I got maybe 5 names and went to work on the 10+ variations of the email address and sent them out.

They bounced back – all of them. The surname.fullname@paypal.com,  the initial_surname@Paypal.com

All of them.

It takes a very special type of company to put a ring of steel around their decision makers and executive team.

A very special type of finance company.

That gives zero access to decision makers.

I went back to Linkedin and messaged their Head of Customer Success – Maeve Dorman – she messaged me back to say that she had retired from PayPal, though still proud to boast the role and the company on her LinkedIn status, fair play to her.

More searching got me in touch with David Jones, Head of Consumer UK.

Dave and I have been messaging back and forward – seems like a decent fella who has done nothing to deserve this as a query.

It isn’t his problem to deal with but he is very reluctant to give me a name and an email that I might be able to get some help with this.

So back to Nordicalab – who are they and is there any chance that they might have a track record similar to that of JustAnswer?

From what I gather they are a small outfit with an opaque ownership structure – on PayPal statements it trades as a company called Haur B.V. and almost impossible to verify a legitimate corporate presence behind it.

Outside of that, no Linkedin Profile, no C-suite, no Dave’s and no Wendys.

Similar track record all the same…

There are clues as to Nordicalab’s practices everywhere – TrustPilot, Reddit… customers get charged €1.95 for a download  that never actually arrives, and the €39.95 gets collected by one of the following – Testlibrary.com, Nordicalab.com, 16personalities.com, Haur B.V.

Pay £1.95 for a report and end up locked into a £39.95 charge every four weeks, with no mention of it until you get notified by the finance entity.

Similar MO to JustAnswers.

It’s the attitude of PayPal that disappoints most in this story.

On multiple occasions they have sided with the vendor in the dispute only to accept a re-challenge from me once I show them information that I had shown them on numerous occasions before.

This last week I have emailed NordicaLab several times and they have come back to me with information that further endorses my position but it has been impossible to get this information through to anyone at PayPal.

On 2 separate occasions I have received an email from PayPal saying that ‘this doesn’t fall within their US jurisdiction…” and when I tell them that I am emailing from the UK, I am back in the loop again.

In the last 10 days, NordicaLab has refunded my 2 of the payments – they haven’t told me why, nor has PayPal – but PayPal refuses to engage in any meaningful dialogue with me.

With a little help from Claude, I have been able to deconstruct their correspondence into poor customer service emails that fail to address core issues at every single turn.

I found an email address on Reddit executiveoffices@PayPal.com – (it appears there’s a whole cluster of people struggling to get through to the Head of Customer Success)

I sent an email to that address asking them the question, paraphrased to…”now that I am making you aware of the fraudulent behaviour of Nordicalabs, what do you intend to do to protect your customers from future fraud?

I sent it to the chatbots and to Dave, Head of Customer UK.

Nothing.

I haven’t bought anything on social media for 6 months but I know that I was scammed on numerous occasions – from local to international businesses.

And if you think PayPal and Nordicalab are hard to deal with you should try getting the attention of Meta – Instagram specifically.

As the customer, you do not exist.

I would say each of these platforms – and financiers – should come with the message “buyer beware”

It is either a question of sheer volume of customer queries – the volume of people being scammed is so unwieldly…or….the volume is so great that both vendors and financiers are making such a great living from it, why would they change anything?

Part 2 coming up