Utah Couple Fined $3,500 by Online Merchant KlearGear Retains Lawyer, Turns Tables
By SUSANNA KIM | Good Morning America – 6 hours ago- Good Morning America - Utah Couple Fined $3,500 by Online Merchant KlearGear Retains Lawyer, Turns Tables (ABC News)
After an online merchant fined a Utah couple $3,500 for writing a negative review and caused a financial nightmare for more than a year, a public service lawyer has agreed to take the case and fight back with demands for $75,000 in compensation.
When Jen Palmer of Salt Lake City didn't receive a Christmas gift that her husband ordered for her online, she wrote a negative review of KlearGear.com and moved on with her life. But the company fined the Palmers $3,500, citing bizarre fine print on its website.
"No one would have expected this from doing perfectly normal, everyday and perfectly legal things,"Scott Michelman, staff attorney with Public Citizen who is representing the Palmers, told ABCNews.com.
KlearGear.com didn't deliver Palmer's online order of a desk ornament that was less than $20, so it cancelled the transaction in Dec. 2008. Jen Palmer, now 40, wrote a negative review on private business review site RipoffReport.com, saying KlearGear.com had "horrible customer service practices."
"It's been five years," Palmer, an executive assistant, told ABCNews.com. "Once we put the review up we pretty much forgot about it. It was no different than writing a review, good or bad, about any company. We just figured we'll share our story and hopefully it warns anybody else."
Then last summer, her husband, John, a senior network engineer, received an email from KlearGear.com demanding $3,500 pursuant to a non-disparagement clause that it claimed was in its "Terms of Use" on its website.
"We were blown away," Jen Palmer said, recalling that her husband asked her who KlearGear.com was when he received the email. "We were floored. We couldn't believe that somebody would even attempt to do this. The threat of doing it was scary enough, but the extent to which they did it blew my mind."
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