Directa caught in telephone scam

TALLINN - Hundreds of customers in Estonia are angry at the business practices of the Estonian arm of Directa, the Finnish-owned online business portal that manages the Emateab business portal, reports news agency LETA, referring to Aripaev. Namely, customers who have been contacted by Direct Eesti’s telephone sales personnel with an offer have later received an invoice for registration of company data, although they have not agreed to the service.

One such customer is Natalja Freiberg, the owner and chairman of YTIC Ltd. that handles solid fuels, who says that after such a phone call the company received an invoice for 474 kroons (30.30 euros) for being registered as the portal’s customer, although she had no interest in the service.

Freiberg said that Directa’s telephone sales person had called her and presented her with the service. “We had quite a long talk. Since we have many Russian-speaking customers and they said that they don’t mediate Russian-language business information, I was not interested in the offer,” says Freiberg, who agreed to receive an offer by e-mail.
When she did not respond to the offer, she got the invoice which had to be paid in 14 days.
After Aripaev contacted Directa and told the company about the problem, Directa agreed to terminate the contract without a penalty fee.

Toomas Tarm, the CEO of Direct Eesti, told Aripaev that the company had 3,500 contractual customers in Estonia, of whom only five to ten percent dispute the contract. He said that since such oral contracts made by phone are a natural business practice in Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe, the company saw no need to change its approach in Estonia.

“It is not easy to be a pioneer in some field,” Tarm noted.
Urmas Ustav, an attorney at LEXTAL Law Firm, said after studying Directa’s terms and conditions that since Freiberg had not paid the first invoice, she had not agreed to the general terms and conditions of service. “Since she has not paid it, she had not agreed to the terms and can therefore ignore the invoice,” said Ustav.

Tarm questioned such an approach and says that Directa’s legal advisers say that it is perfectly legal to agree to contracts orally by telephone. According to Tarm, after the customer has received the invoice, he can terminate it within seven days. “However, if this deadline is not met, the portal manager will be claiming the contracting fee. This is normal business practice,” he said, adding that the customer must have agreed specifically to the contract and that all sales calls are saved for resolving disputes.

Directa Eesti’s parent company Directa and its five executives have been charged in Finland for large-scale fraud and distortion of market rules. Among others, the company is claimed to have misinformed customers about its invoicing principles and kept invoicing companies even when the latter have terminated the contract.
Jussi Lahde, press spokesperson for Directa, pointed out that agreements by telephone are a natural business practice in Finland, Sweden and elsewhere in Scandinavia.