Natalie M.

AVOID AT ALL COSTS AND REPORT TO POLICE! To everyone who was scammed I recommend contacting the police about this dodgy establishment! They would do anything just to get ANY money from you! I was promised 5 FREE photos and a whole makeover experience for free for promotional reasons as they said. They only ask for a REFUNDABLE 25£ deposit to secure the booking and ask for your card details while you're speaking to them on the phone! I was smart enough to at least turn it down and say I would pay them via online banking using their information instead. Because if you want to cancel or change the date for your appointment they would charge you 50£ saying you didn't give them enough notice, so you'll never win here. The hair and makeup session was mediocre just as their photos in the end and I'm saying this as a person who worked with different photographers and had my photos taken before. Not even a 5 star studio in London would ever charge you more than 300£ for your photos with make up session and retouching. And these scammers manage to fool people to pay over 500£ for their trashy packages for pictures taken in a rush and without retouching! They take over ******* pictures a month so they don't care about you as a customer, all they care about is how to fish out more money out of your pocket. In the end of my session they took me to a viewing room to show me the results of my "fabulous makeover". Most of the photos were a complete crap, with some trashy AI generated background like a desert or flowers :D Maybe my grandma would find it cute but it was a very poor taste. They made me feel like a complete idiot in the end saying some rubbish that I misunderstood them about free photos and that I had to be familiar with their price list which was a total surprise for me because I was not intending to buy anything. They guilt trapped me and made me feel I was given an opportunity of a lifetime and treated like a celebrity so now I owe them my life for that. They wanted to charge me 450£ for 7 pictures and that included printed copies! That's why the price is so high as they explained. I said I didn't need printed copies so they swapped for digital but still it was over 200£ - the money I didn't have and didn't intend to spend on a stupid photoshoot I was offered for FREE! So I said I was not ready to pay that much because I didn't have that money. And then the funny part, the guy in charge said "Well how much do you have?". I said " around 80£ maybe". And then he said " the company would be happy to get at least something better than nothing" and he pressured me to sign a contract to give them my card details to install a direct debit for 80£ for 3 months. That "contract" is not even worth the paper it was written on. I felt very vulnerable at that moment and couldn't call anyone to ask for help or advice and I felt guilty for using their services and not paying in the end, so I signed it and was charged immediately. When I left the building I realised I was scammed and manipulated and it made me so angry, so I contacted my bank and managed to get a refund explaining it was a scam and then I blocked my card and ordered a new one. A month later they started sending me emails threatening to proceed with a legal action if I don't pay in 14 days. I ignored it but they spammed my email and my phone number sending messages every day demanding money from me and threatening to report me to the county court, so I wrote back to them and said "well go on then and good luck". And I did get a letter from the county court in the end but I had all the proof that this is a fraudulent claim and I don't owe them anything. So to everyone who had a similar experience I do recommend not paying anything and go straight to the police. And I'm sure they write fake positive reviews just to cover all the bad ones because they can't delete it. These scammers must take responsibility for their actions.