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Zip Cloud / My PC Backup are Scammers!

At the prodding of a buddy of mine over the winter I signed up for an online backup service called Zip Cloud. It’s an online backup service which basically takes a copy of all your files and places them online. If your computer ever crashes you simply download all your files onto a new computer. Pretty novel concept, eh? I’ve been using online backup with Dropbox for quite a few years now.

There are lots of services out there that specialize in online backup. I personally use Dropbox, which isn’t truly an online backup service in the traditional sense but serves my purposes well. I pay $10/mo for 50GB of space and unlimited computers.

Zip Cloud offers “unlimited backup” space for $4.95/mo which sounds great until you actually sign up. The red flag was they tried to squeeze you into yearly billing. So $4.95/mo becomes $60 if you’re not careful, more on this later.

First off, you can pay quite a bit extra per month for “unlimited upload speed”. This is probably the most scammy upsell. The speed of your backup is determined by the the upload speed of your internet connection. For the most part, upload speed  is abysmal in the US. You would essentially be paying extra to remove an artificial limit placed on your account by Zip Cloud and still be waiting days for your backup to complete. My guess is support would blame your internet connection after taking the extra money.

Instantaneous backups? Yup, that’s a monthly upsell too. Every reputable service offers instantaneous backups of your files even with the introductory or free plans. What use is a backup that’s days old? Every additional computer to be backed up or sync’ed also incurred another monthly fee.

ZipCloud / My PC Backup is nickel and diming their customers. Generally, I’m okay with the upsells or “freemium” business model. However, scamming people with nonsense upsells is not okay. The ‘unlimited upload speed’ package is what turned me off right away. It’s a pity that you don’t see all this nickel and diming before you sign up.

Once I seen what was going on  I went to cancel and here are screen caps of the cancellation process.

Remember that yearly billing squeeze I mentioned earlier? Look the first option of cancellation:

Monthly Billing / Zip Cloud Cancellation

 

 

 

 

 

Continuing on with an offer of 20% off:

Zip Cloud Cancellation 20% Discount

 

 

 

 

 

No, okay how about 50% off?

Zip Cloud Cancellation / 50% off

 

 

 

 

You really want to leave? Well okay but would you stay with us to the end of your billing period so we can keep your money?

Zip Cloud Cancellation / Can we keep your money

 

 

 

 

 

Zip Cloud seems  pretty desperate, don’t they? Stick with reputable services like Dropbox, Mozy, and Carbonite. Skip scammers like Zip Clound / My Backup PC.

27 replies on “Zip Cloud / My PC Backup are Scammers!”

Hi there, I was reading your review and I actually thought you where talking about Justcloud, it seems they are all the same. Actually their websites look exactly the same. I felt totally missed leaded with their offer and after paying an 2 year subscription I found out that I had to pay extra for additional computers and for sharing. Also I was insistently offered an upgrade to increase backup speed. I am sick of this companies that work deceiving people.

ZipCloud and JustCloud are the same company and are indeed scammers. Since you posted this post, they made the cancellation process even more difficult. I signed up for one month of their service, just to test it, and it was not supposed to be recurring a subscription. Before my one-month subscription ended, I decided not to use this service any more and to cancel my account. The only way to do so is now to send an email to a specific email address.

ZipCloud and JustCloud are the same company and are indeed scammers. Since you posted this article, they made the cancellation process even more difficult. I signed up for one month of their service, just to test it, and it was not supposed to be recurring a subscription. Before my one-month subscription ended, I decided not to use their services anymore and to cancel my account. I found out that the only way to do so is now to send an email to a specific email address. So, I sent my cancellation email, and I have now received two emails asking if I really want to cancel. Each time I have replied that yes, I really want to cancel, but they just won’t do it… The best part? I just realized that they charged another 1-month payment on my bank account, which I didn’t authorize, and they did so 6 days before my 1-month subscription was supposed to end. Do not sign up with ZipCloud or JustCloud; you will regret it.

I agree with all other posters – ZipCloud appear to be fraudsters. Their “30 Day Money Back Guarantee” is a fake. You will never see your refund. If you are UK resident, there is no legal entity in the country against which you can take legal action to recover your money. Do not even think about using ZipCloud services – it all ends in tears.

Ha.

I have paid a monthly subscription, then realized their service sucks, then tried to cancel my account. Result? Infinite chain of back-and-forth emails between me and their “support”.

My advice: do not use them.

Sad enough, The reason for me to try their service was a recommendation I found on some website, close to the top of Google search results.

With their business practices I wouldn’t doubt if you read a self-written recommendation. It’s also worth nothing that they pay very high affiliate commission so less than honest affiliate marketers will write favorable reviews just to get you to click through and buy a subscription through their link.

I want to follow up on this outfit…do any of these people report and get their maney back? If so, who did they contact and did they get any help to gat it back?

Lori

I am a ZipCloud subscriber, and so far so good. I do not share the feelings expressed here. Optional upsells are just that: optional. I took none, and all my devices are backing up happily. I have not had the opportunity to restore from a data loss event yet, and hopefully I am not going to any time soon. Everything (else) seems to work ok. I am still going to keep DropBox obviously, but AFAICS, I am keep ZipCloud too.

I sure hope that you wont have to restore from ZipCloud – I have lost literally hundreds of picture files – that seemed to be backed up but when I try to restore I get 0 bytes. And what did I get from Zip Cloud? A ‘sorry for the inconvenience’

Well I am just going to tell my story in order to help others with their decision. First of all I was using rapidshare and RapidDrive as a cloud backup service and recently they changed their unlimited plan to a 250Gb plan. So I started looking around for alternatives. After searching and reading and because of the high scores that I was seeing for ZipCloud I thought to give them a try. The advertise unlimited space (which is not entirely true). So the first disappointment came when I started an account and then saw that I had to pay for “supercharging” my account to be able to upload more than 1GB file size or to have unlimited space. At the moment I have already paid for a six month period 41 Euro. You see I was pretty sure that I have found the alternative that I was looking for. I was wrong. In another user review in another site I read that he was using JustCloud (the same company) and he couldn’t restore an edited document. So I made the experiment myself and guess what. They failed. I downloaded a doc file with some text. Then made some text changes and sync again. The new updated file seemed to be uploaded OK. BUT when I was trying to restore I was able to restore only the initial backup and not the next versions. In addition whenever I was running an application ESET Nod32 firewall detected communication between the app (which was hooked apparently to some ZipCloud dll) with some mypcbackup server (same company different name again). After using their service for not more than a week I asked a refund and a cancellation. After about 3-4 mails and another week time today 5th April 2013 I managed to cancel my account and get back 26.6 Euro. They are keeping 14.95 as early termination fees. So at the end. I have lost about two weeks of my time and 15 euro. At the moment I am testing another company called CrashPlan and it seems to be doing much better. So from my point of view….stay away from ZipCloud, JustCloud MyPCBackup and any other affiliate company.

Hey all..

Just a quick post:

if you enter on Mybackupc and Justcloud, and close the windows, both the sites try to connect with an agent and do you a pop-up offer of a 14 day free trial dial…

another thing is that on Google Play, Both – Justcloud and Zipcloud has the SAME interface and pictures and examples, etc… what the odds? unless they hire the same company to develop the app, but in a very competitive business like this growing and giants like Google and Microsft playing the game, i dont think so…

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jdibackup.android.justcloud
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jdibackup.android.zipcloud#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDIxMiwiY29tLmpkaWJhY2t1cC5hbmRyb2lkLnppcGNsb3VkIl0.

Regards from brazil

Hi guys, confirmed, the following are the same companies and all CR@P

– JustCloud
– MyPCBackup
– ZipCloud
– BackupGenie

Sharing my story as well to keep you away from ZipCloud:

ZipCloud.Com is a website like Carbonite which advertises that they will back up your computer, to their “cloud”, in case of computer failure. They offer unlimited data backup for a reasonable price, so I gave it a shot.

First thing is, they’re not as polished as Carbonite, which is fine, they’re cheaper. But the first sign of trouble is the up-sell. Everything is extra. Want two computers? Extra. Want to back up your external? Extra. Want to automatically back up movie files? Extra. Want to back up files larger than 1GB? Extra. Want to back up more than once a day? Extra. Want to backup at a reasonable speed? Extra. If you decline these extras, they will continually go down in price to entice you to pick them up. I didn’t mind the extra price and picked up a few extras (multiple computers, video, etc) to make the process more easy.
I was happy with ZipCloud for a few months, the service worked automatically, I didn’t worry about it. After a few months, I decided to pay for a year because you saved some money paying ahead of time like that.

Now the trouble starts.
Soon after making that decision and continuing to use ZipCloud as usual, which for me is 2 MacBook computers, one of which is 200GB and the other is 150GB, updating daily automatically using their software, sometimes from my home and sometimes from campus where I am a college student, I received the following email from zipcloud:

“Hi Jason,

Our account monitoring system has flagged your account as being used out the boundaries of a normal user.

Unfortunately this means we will no longer be able to have you on our personal user platform.

You have 30 days from today to move your files away otherwise they will be permanently deleted and your account cancelled.

The only other option we can offer you is to switch to one of our business accounts which will be more suitable for your data storage needs.

The account you are currently on is designed for personal use only, We understand that there might be a small increase in plan cost but you will find a business account suits your backup needs better, all business accounts come with:

* Ability to create sub-accounts
* Ability to allocate backup space to users/devices
* FREE Network drive backup
* FREE external drive backup
* UNLIMITED sharing capabilities

Click Here to Upgrade to a Business Plan Now!
http://url.zipcloud.com/a00e8a4a

We also advise customers moving to a business option to delete unwanted files/folder to keep costs to a minimum as all business plans pay for space per GB.

As per our Terms and Conditions, we have the sole discretion to ask you to move plan type and there is nothing we can now do to prevent the above actions taking place.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS: 14. Termination and Fair Use Policy
(http://www.zipcloud.com/terms – Sections 4, 14, 15 & 23)

PLEASE TAKE IMMEDIATE ACTION AS YOUR ACCOUNT WILL CLOSE ON 28th September 2013.

30 DAYS FROM NOW.

Regards,
Zip Cloud

This email was sent from Zip Cloud, Unit 6, Fulcrum 2, Solent Way, Whiteley, PO15 7FN
Unsubscribe: http://www.zipcloud.com/unsubscribe

Now, Zipcloud does not have a live chat feature, nor does it have a telephone support system which I had not previously noticed. I figured there must be some mistake. As I mentioned, I use two personal computers. They are both Macintosh. One has a hard drive capacity of 150GB and the other has a hard drive capacity of 200GB. I had ZipCloud set up to backup everything. I figured in the case of a system failure, I would better be safe than sorry. And besides, ZipCloud offers “unlimited” data. So, thinking there must be some mistake, I sent an email to Zipcloud through their help system (which I am unable to obtain apparently) basically asking them what had happened to trigger the issue, and alternatively, how to cancel my account, because I was not paying double for a business account.

I received this initial response, right away:

“Hi,

Thank you for contacting Zip Cloud Support

95% of all tickets we receive are replied to within 2 hours.

**Please do not submit multiple tickets! Submitting multiple will delay the response of your ticket, as it will put your previous email back to the bottom of the queue**

If you think of anything which you would like to add to your email to support please reply to this email, and it will update your current message.

Please ensure you check all inbox folders for our reply including your SPAM folder. You can also keep a track of your tickets on the control panel http://my.zipcloud.com/account/tickets

Kind regards,

ZipCloud Support Team
http://www.zipcloud.com
_________________________________________________

View our Help Centre and FAQs: http://www.zipcloud.com/faq

Simply add Priority Support for a 1 hour response time, just 9.95/yr. http://www.zipcloud.com/upgrade

Have you seen our new iPhone, iPad and Andriod mobile apps? Now access all your files on the move!

I thought of a possible reason for the issue and sent this follow-up:

“I just realized that perhaps the other difference that may have triggered the mechanism is that I just recently started back up at school for the fall, so the updates may be happening while I’m at school, which of course is through their IP address, through their network. But I am not an employee of the school. I am a student and this account is used purely for personal reasons. If you are forcing me to open a business account, please let me know how to cancel my account and receive a refund for my annual payment.
Thanks.

I did not hear back for three days, when I received the following boilerplate response:

“Hi,

Thanks for your email.

Your account has been flagged this means we will no longer be able to have you on our personal user platform

We have to follow our Terms and Conditions, there is nothing we can now do to prevent the actions taking place.

We understand that there might be a small increase in plan cost but you will find a business account suits your backup needs better.

We do have the sole discretion to ask you to move plan type. Additionally we allow any user 30 days to recover all stored data from our first contact.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS: 14. Termination and Fair Use Policy (Sections 14 http://www.zipcloud.com/terms)

If you would like to discuss cancelling please email billing@zipcloud.com
If you would like to discuss upgrading to business please email business@zipcloud.com
If you would like help on deleting devices or data please email support@zipcloud.com

To reiterate, there is NOTHING we can now do to prevent the actions taking place.

Regards,


George Scott
Product & Development team
Zip Cloud
http://www.zipcloud.com

(I actually received the message twice, assumedly once from my initial email and once from the follow-up, both from the same “person”.)

I responded with this message and have yet to receive anything else from Zipcloud:

“My account has been flagged as a business account (with no explanation as to why). I am a personal user who uses the service for two personal computers only. I am a student and sometimes the update may occur on my school’s campus, which uses their own IP address (of course). I find it humorous that you maintain that “there is nothing we can now.” I literally laughed. As if your company is run by a mass of computers and robots with no human interaction. Your company has used one of the biggest bait-and-switch campaigns I have ever personally been subjected to. I am not making a legal argument, but simply pointing out that as a home personal user who has paid for “unlimited” space, paid extra for two computers, I find it mind-boggling that my two personal computers (one of 200 GB and another of 150 GB) which I update daily using your software would exceed what your company considers “personal use”. If you were able to tell me HOW I triggered such a mechanism, perhaps we could better understand if some kind of technical malfunction (on either end) or a misunderstanding when I updated while on my college campus. But of course, you won’t, you did not even respond to my basic questions in my first email, instead simply sending me a form email which laughably informs me that your hands are tied. No one is questioning your right to kick customers off your servers, I do question the wisdom of it, and I wonder as to why you would kick off a personal user who uploads 2 computers on a daily basis, but I do not question your right.

I have been singing the praises of your company since last spring when I signed up, because of the inexpense and ease with which I updated, but no longer will I be able to recommend your services.

All that being said, if your company is truly attempting to move a college student with two computers off your network because I triggered some kind of secret and arbitrary mechanism to a business account, so be it. Please send me information on how I can deactivate my account. And, as I asked in my previous email, which was summarily ignored, as I paid for an entire year in advance, I assume I am entitled to a pro-rated refund of some kind. Please let me know how to get that. I will be off your service and on to a more professional service such as Carbonite right away (who, as far as I know, don’t make it a practice to kick college students off of their service).”

ZipCloud apparently has some arbitrary and secret mechanism that will change a personal user to a business user which they do not advertise nor disclose to users. I am not a business, I do not own a business. Heck, I don’t even have a job! (Like I mentioned, I am a college student.)

ZipCloud refuses to answer my questions, I am not sure I will receive a refund for my annual subscription and they still have not told me what I did to turn to a “business” user.

Save your money, and a headache. Zipcloud does not care about personal users, they are quick to drop them, and cancel their account without any explanation. They do not stand by their advertised offers and quickly point to their fine print in their terms of agreement to shout “See! We’re allowed to do this!”.

Zipcloud won’t be around for long. I personally switched to Carbonite, which instead of cancelling college student accounts, actually gave me a student discount, lol. ZipCloud is a company with questionable business practices and ethics, not to mention a foolish business plan. If you want to put your precious data in the hands of a company who will delete it without any explanation, by all means sign up for ZipCloud, otherwise go elsewhere.

Stay away from Zipcloud! I wish I’ve read this website earlier, would have safe me tons of headaches and wasted hours.

If you are in any doubt as to MyPCbackup’s legitimacy – check out their facebook page. You can not view any comments and every post is ‘liked’ by exactly the same people. Oh, and they have 20 somthing thousand fans!

at the end, scam yes !

they are just there for you money.
first 300Mo backup took more than one month to complet (!)

after the first month, newest backups stopped showing under “my backups”.

in octobre, my recent backup available was from july (?!)

some backed files had different names (!)

I have screen captures that show this and all emails if someone needs to see for themselves.

after more than 3 weeks of email exchange, all they could suggest was “6 months free” if I stayed, because they “are having new servers in the near future”. jokers (if it wasn’t for the money).

they were unable to provide the service I payed for, and now they refuse to refund me, on the bases that refunds, according to terms and conditions are 30days only.

so at the and, I can say if one doesn’t keep their part of the bargain and keep the money, is a thief.
don’t trust these people, search furthermore the web and you will confirm this with many others opinions.

I was wanting to know if anyone on here knows how to remove their software from a mac. Normal method of dragging into the garbage isn’t working. I’m not usually a mac user and this is the only software app that I’ve not been able to delete. It’s annoying because every time I start up my computer the zip cloud sign up small page opens first, two of them. Ant help? Thanks.

I have been trying to cancel my account at MyPCBackup. I am on my third attempt at the moment and have just received this email from them:

Thank you for contacting MyPC Backup.

We are sorry for any confusion or inconvenience caused.

As per checking the account, you have been responded to in a separate ticket which is Ticket #1207055 from our Cancellation Department. We are waiting for your response before we fully cancel your subscription but you did not reply that is the reason why your account is still active. We need your confirmation first because all the files will be deleted in our system upon cancellation.

We understand your reason why you wish to cancel you account, it’s just that we believe that it would be best for your to keep it active rather than having it cancelled. It’s more practical to have an online cloud storage because there are many inevitable events that can make you lose your files so it’s best to always have a backup.

We will be more than happy to add 6 months free subscription to your account and we can disable auto charge on your account so that your Backup and services will not automatically renew.

Kindly confirm with us how you want to proceed so we can act accordingly.

Please let us know if you need further assistance, we are more than happy to assist you. We are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

For faster resolution of your issue you may wish to call us on the following numbers:

US/CA: 1-888-851-0954
UK: 0844 445 7025
AU: 61-1800-039-220

Kind Regards,


Christine Ricarze
Customer Services Representative

——————————————————————————

Here is my reply:

THIRD TIME OF ASKING. CANCEL THE ACCOUNT!!!!!!

I will simply repeat my previous request:

This is the third request to cancel my account. Please cancel NOW and do not take any more money from my account! I don’t want any offers. CANCEL THIS ACCOUNT! Furthermore I would like all monies taken since my FIRST REQUEST returned to my account!

I will be contacting BBC Watchdog to bring this business to their attention and stop other people from giving you bank details.

Please inform me when you have cancelled my account.

Geoff xxxxxxxx

I will be forwarding all email correspondence to BBC Watchdog.

———————————————————————————————————-

I will post any replies here.

You will notice some contact phone numbers on MyPCBackup email. I don’t know the response you get when ringing these as I have not done so but here are the numbers if they are any use to you.

US/CA: 1-888-851-0954
UK: 0844 445 7025
AU: 61-1800-039-220

I would be interested to hear of anybody having similar experiences.

Hi Geoff,

In my experience the path of least resistance is just to cancel the credit card which MyPC Backup was billing. I’ve had to do this with a couple of companies. AOL back in the day as they made it nearly impossible to cancel. I just cancelled the credit card connected to the service and they cancelled my service real quick. My local newspaper also made it nearly impossible to cancel. I cancelled the CC it was billing and my subscription magically cancelled. Funny how that works isn’t it? 🙂

Most credit card companies if you call and say you lost your card will cancel the old number and reissue you a card pronto.

Just my .02,

Dan

Worst product/service of any kind. After signing up, I receive constant warnings like “Account Expired” and “Out of Backup Space” – Upgrade Now”. My constant complaints about this scam receives a response from support, but it still occurs.

When I needed to restore my files to a new computer after my old one failed, the restore process failed to work. Support did nothing to fix the problem. Many of my files (about 20%) are also missing. After 4 weeks of no satisfaction with my failed restore, I’ve cancelled my account.

SUPER SHADY! I navigated to Dropbox from a new computer and when I clicked sign in, a new tab opened to Zipcloud. How did they do that? I had never heard of them before this and will never sign up for a company that uses these techniques to get me to use their services.

Has anyone reported these people to the Better Business Bureau? Thankfully I did my research before using them but it seems like everyone one here has valid documentation to report these folks and keep them from luring in unsuspecting victim. Also besides a scam, sounds like a breeding ground from potential digital identity theft. Someone, please go after these people.

Hey there, I made the mistake of signing up for a year (5,95) After payment procedure the website stated the total bill was 143 euros for a 2 year plan (which accually should have been 118 euros, if 4,95 per month) I emailed them (no answer yet of course) but I want to try and cancel through my account as well. Could someone tell me how this works? The screens you show in your article: can’t find it anywhere, can’t enter a cancellation process. Also, should I be aware of any spyware on my computer since I installed the backup manager?

In mid January, when I asked ZipCloud to cancel my account, due to loss of service, due to technical problems that their tech support was UNABLE to resolve, and due to them LOSING 2- years-worth of my files — they went ahead and charged my credit card IMMEDIATELY, ON THE SAME DAY I CANCELLED, instead of waiting till my February renewal date.

When my CC bank contacted them they said no refund would be issued since “he cancelled in less than the 30 days mentioned in the contract.” Then, when I talked to their agent, they AGREED TO CANCEL MY ACCOUNT AND ISSUE A REFUND. When no refund was showing in my CC account, I called them again. This time they claimed the refund will be issued in 90 days.

When 90 days passed I called again. They claimed the money should be refunded soon. OK, you guessed it, no refund.

Couple weeks later I called again. This time they simply said NO REFUND. Why? because I filed a dispute with my CC bank before contacting them. Meanwhile, since they promised a refund, my CC bank closed the dispute file, and can’t open it again, which ZipCloud must have planned it well ahead.

So no product, no refund, Ciao, baby.

Stay away!

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