398janettet
I'm reaching out to address a concern that may affect many folks who frequent Brads Dads Land (BDL). Recently, you may have noticed unexpected charges appearing on your credit card statements about a month after a visit to BDL. This message aims to raise awareness and encourage transparency about these possible costs, and to assist patrons to be prepared when they engage with BDL services.||||As regular patrons of BDL who have consistently paid for our RVsite fees a year in advance over the past several seasons, and have recently booked our pre-paid trips for 2026, we find ourselves frustrated by what we perceive as either significant mismanagement or an unfortunate scheme of petty extortion. This has been a disappointing experience for us, and we believe it's crucial to address these concerns for the benefit of all loyal customers. Our expressed concerns here may be a campers only defence to cope with unexpected incorrect/bogus alleged charges from BDL of which the camper may have no prior knowledge.||||Today 17 July 2025, after we had left BDL at 7.25 am, we received an email while travelling home at 8.26 am from “Gabby” alleging we had an outstanding balance but our credit card had expired and BDL did not have our new credit card number. We responded by saying "We do not have any outstanding balance”; specifically we had paid everything on arrival from a $200 credit we had on file from the previous month and we bought nothing from the shop during our stay. ||||Since that first email at 8.25 am today from BDL, we received several other emails, all unsigned, over the next two hours from a BDL address. The first alleged we owed money from 15 June 2025, the second next alleged we owed it from 15 July 2025. Then we received a computersized invoice by email alleging we owed money from June 2024. Finally about 11.30 am we got an website based invoice showing the amount we allegedly owed. However to our astonishment, the amount had more than DOUBLED, that occuring in a space of about three hours. This latest version of our alleged purchases had two dates with two amounts being July 15, 2025 and July 17 2025, the latter being today, the day we had left. There were no tabs attached to this alleged outstanding balance, no video of us leaving with items, no agreement that we could or would run a tab, no proof at all that we had purchased items from the store. BDL did not appear to contemplate for one moment that perhaps they had made a mistake in the charges, although they did apologize for the clerical error on dates! ||And then at 11.51 am. an email from BDL stated "we are just trying to settle a purchase you made but did not pay for ... which is described as theft under the law”.||||Whoa! Theft? We are respectable 75 and 83 year olds respectively. We are immune suppressed and unable to travel to exotic places anymore or be close to others physically … we are just doing our RV thing quietly . And here is BDL not just accusing of us of theft, but actually stating it. ||Their email at around 11.50 am went on to say that “BDL management” were aware of the correspondence. We wondered out loud at that point if maybe “BDL Management” were incompetent or swindlers too? None-the-less here we had BDL sitting as judge and jury with no credible evidence whatsoever to prove we had “stolen”anything but determined to charge us even at the risk of libel as they clearly stated they had shared this information. ||||To us, this is all bizarre if not dangerous. BDL in their incredible false rightouness went on to say that as we were coming back in August and September, the new amount (that had magically doubled) of alleged theft of items would be charged to us in August. ||||The definition of extortion is demanding money illegally by using various means one being threats of exposing criminal wrongdoing as a form of coercion. ||||So driving home, we could not help but think about a Dad or Mom taking their kids to BDL in good faith. We imagine them suddenly getting a charge for specified or unspecified items as we had. How are they ever going to sort it out? Do they ask the kids if they bought 15 ice creams each? And then trying to get bogus charges reversed by their credit card supplier on the word of their children? Credit card reversals are a longwinded affairs and in these circumstances with apparently such hard nosed individuals, I think one would give up. Innocent folks would likely just shake their head and try to forget the extra unexpected expense they did not account for in their vacation budget and can possibly ill- afford. The kids perhaps would wrongly take the blame. It hurts us to think about this. Really hurts. ||||In our view, this is potentially a very slippery slope that BDL is running these days and certainly not the kind of treatment we, as faithful supporters expected. Buyer or in this case, “non-buyer” beware.||||We have six more bookings over the next 18 months with BDL. To cancel would cost us several hundred dollars. Instead, we are hoping that BDL will restaff or at the very least investigate, retrain and closely supervise their existing employees. We’d like to believe that our vacations at BDL in the future would not be ruined by such apparently transparent incompetence or possibly illegal business practices. ||||We are sending a copy of this account to the RCMP
