A review of BDC Canada (Business Development Centre Canada - Toronto, Ontario) which cheated me.
I paid for a Canada trademark registration from BDC in November of 2011, and got cheated.
I was sent a fee estimate saying these would be the expenses (I quote verbatim):
"For The Services Of Filing Trademark Application: $553.95
Mail Box Service: 284.02
Delivery: $25"
With taxes, ($79.69), it came to $942.66.
I live in India, and it is a lot of money.
10 months later, I got another email saying I'd have to pay another $281.37 for "renewal of my mailbox account".
I was stunned - that is Rs. 16,000 (Indian currency), a hell of a lot of money.
I went back to the site, to the fee estimate sent to me, everything, searching for any logical place where it was mentioned that this was an annual fee. There was none.
I wrote to BDC, and an Aaron Hornbrook there wrote what many would consider a contemptuous email to me.
His main point was just one. On the order form on their website (assuming it hasn't changed by the time you're reading it):
https://www.bdccanada.com/bdc_order/ind ... ckageId=54
it was written:
"In order to apply for a trademark in Canada, you must provide a valid address in Canada. If you do not have a valid address in Canada or if you wish to maintain your Privacy, you can use our Registered Address Service that includes mail receiving and forwarding.
[checkbox here] Registered Address for Trademark in Canada (Add $215.00)"
Apparently, if I had *checked* that checkbox, I'd have seen that this was an annual charge.
Now in the whole world, people know that the way to tell others to read for more information is offering a *hyperlink* - in this case, saying something like ("Annual - click for more details").
I did not think that checking that checkbox to get more information - I do not click on checkboxes in website assuming there will be more information there. I click on hyperlinks.
The point is, I did not even use that order form to order - I had just written to them for some clarifications, and they sent a fee estimate for my requirement.
BDC cleverly misled me in 3 ways:
1. Instead of the text:
"Registered Address for Trademark in Canada (Add $215.00)"
it could have put:
"Registered Address for Trademark in Canada (Add $215.00 - $180 recurs annually)" with "$180 recurs annually" being a hyperlink
2. It could have mentioned in the fee estimate sent to me by email that this is an annual recurring charge. It *should* have - that is the legal way. It did not.
3. It sent me the mailbox agreement, where it is mentioned in some convoluted way that this is a recurring fee (but even there the actual amounts are not mentioned), *40 days* after I paid the amount. If it had sent me the mailbox agreement along with the fee estimate - which is the ethical and legal thing to do, since agreements aren't sent *after* payments are made - I would have at least noticed something amiss, and enquired.
For me, the 3 points above are MOST IMPORTANT.
In my complaint to them, I brought out these 3 points.
Aaron Hornbrook did not address any of these 3 in his response. Instead, he hunted for data to justify what had already happened. So these were his fundamental stands:
1. I should have clicked on that checkbox for more details.
2. The mailbox agreement was available somewhere on their site, and I could have seen those details there. (I add: it does not appear anywhere in the process a normal user would follow to understand the price - it is as of now hidden somewhere in the footer along with many other links.)
Here is a line from his email, just so you understand what I mean by a "contemptuous" reply:
"Firstly, "Annual", or "Annum" is a synonym for "year". If you perhaps did not understand that the term of a 1-year rental was in fact 1 year, I do apologize."
If I knew there was a $281.37 annual fee, I might not even have gone in for BDC, since it changes the overall price completely (a trademark takes about 18 months on average).
You cannot send order forms and agreements *after* payments have been made - it ought to be before.
I have no option now but to pay them, since they can obviously cause problems for me since my trademark is in their hands, and it is a foreign country for me where I do not understand how things work.
From their contemptuous response, the refusal to address the 3 main issues I had, and the refusal to waive off this additional fee, I can only conclude that this happened wilfully.
The pages and processes at BDC canada might change after they discover that more and more people are reading reviews and complaining, which is good if fewer customers get cheated. But I have all screenshots and original .mht files as of the day I complained.
I got badly cheated by BDC Canada, and this review of Business Development Centre Canada is intended to let the world know and be cautious.