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In Reply to: Re: glad to know that posted by excog on December 10, 2004 at 11:18:41:
I'm still trying to figure out if the birthday gift was just them being over-the-top nice, or if it was a spooky message (we know where you live).
I faced a few of the same challenges going after MinOtel that ex-members face with The Family. They are headquartered in Switzerland. I'm in the US. I don't have enough money to sue them, and even if I did it would cost way more than I would ever hope to recover.
At a point, I felt like I had been robbed and there was nothing I could do about it. I felt small. I felt stupid for being tricked, and I didn't want people to know that I could be that easily duped. I thought long and hard about just forgetting about it and chalking it up to experience.
Then, one morning I was laying in bed on a day I didn't have to go to work. It just bothered me that I was rolling over and playing dead. I had insurance to cover it, and the claim was pending. But, I thought about how unfair it was to the policy holders who would have to pay higher premiums due to my bad transaction.
I started to rack my brain to figure out a way to get MinOtel to pay me back. Then it dawned on me that I know how to put websites together. I got out of bed and spent $15.00 to register the domain name, and then just built a simple site around my documentation. It took about three hours.
Less than 24 hours later, the President of MinOtel emailed me to settle. Before that they wouldn't give me the time of day.
Of course, you can't compare a company like MinOtel with The Family, and I don't pretend that my experience was in the same league as what all of you experienced while in the cult. I'm just saying that some of the same feelings of being violated, swindled and disempowered were there.
Exposing The Family on the Internet does more damage to them than we can calculate. Anyone who is thinking about donating to them can simply type some keywords into Yahoo or Google and end up here and find out what they are all about. Who knows how many people have been turned off to The Family by what people here and on other websites have written?
