According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), it is illegal to claim what you are selling is “FREE”, and then later in the call indicate there are charges to a product or service with regard to what you are selling.
This phone call that one of our community members made in January of 2019, did a great a job in exposing this.
https://youtu.be/PR0oYIaCM4g
The actual call starts at: 1:19.
They indicate it's a free alert system: 1:40
In addition, they used a commonly deceptive tactic by saying that the customer was selected in a promotion, which is definately misleading because he merely called into a phone number that is a few digits away from another business phone number, that someone could easily mistaken by pressing the wrong digit.
My definition of being selected in a promotion would mean that you've filled out some kind of form or had dealings with my business before, and were entered into a list. I doubt the caller ever had any dealings with Life Protect 24/7 before, and don't even know who he is.
About 10:15 minutes into the video, he starts talking money.
To be clear on something, I have a family member who has one of these devices and are with another company and the way it works is, the actual device cost is built into the service fee automatically, which comes out to about $500 per year. So no matter which way you are slicing the bread, the company has to somehow pay for those devices, and the truth is: They don't. The customer does, when the company adds the device cost into the service fee.
For those who don't know, a monitoring fee is a service fee.
This sounds almost like one of those two year cell phone contracts, where the device cost is included but spread evenly across on a monthly basis. The only difference is, the life alert companies don't reduce any costs after some time, and typically this is because these devices get replaced more often than not for one reason or another and of course the replacements would also have to be paid for too.
I hope this information helps.