Easylife charges elderly customers for unwanted 'rewards clubs'

Which? is advising the public to exercise extreme caution when dealing with catalogue retailer Easylife.

Consumers have been appealing to Which? for help after finding Easylife charging for expensive ‘rewards clubs’ they believe they didn't sign up for. 

The earliest of these complaints stretch back to at least 2018 and Easylife hasn't been able to shake accusations that it adds unwanted subscriptions to customers' accounts since. 

At least 12 people have been in touch with us this year already, after finding recurring payments they – or their family members – say they didn’t authorise. 

Easylife does refund disputed charges, but Which? thinks it is unacceptable to expect customers to monitor statements and cancel services they don’t believe they asked for in the first place. Many complaints we have heard about relate to elderly customers who don't use the internet.

Here, we explore how Easylife operates and explain how to report companies that take payments or share your data without consent.

Pushy sales tactics

Which? has contacted Easylife multiple times over the years about accusations of pushy sales tactics and unauthorised payments. 

Ann-Marie discovered her elderly mother had been charged £70 for a ‘rewards club’ she didn’t recall consenting to join in 2021, for example. 

We spoke to Easylife again in 2022, when it was fined a total of £1.5m by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for predatory marketing calls, sharing a selection of fresh complaints about nuisance sales calls and taking money for memberships people don't want.

Despite being on the data regulator’s radar, the complaints keep coming.

‘Easylife charged my elderly father £1,000’

Catherine Skinner, 50, got in touch with Which? in February after discovering her father, Grahame, had paid Easylife £1,030 over five years.

Though he had purchased what she described as ‘very poor quality goods’ from the catalogue before, trawling through his bank statements unveiled a further 25 payments he didn’t recognise. 

‘He was in a nursing home at the time, totally outraged that they had removed money. He has always been bad at checking his bank statements hence this going on for so long.

‘There seems little pattern to the regularity of payments taken or sums involved, other than increasing in frequency over the last year. Surely this cannot be right? Sadly I suspect this company is just the right side of legal practice, but it is totally immoral. It is clearly targeting elderly folk, looking at the number of middle-aged children on the internet who have made the same discovery I have.

'I did get a full refund back from Easylife. I sent them a letter, followed by a number of phone calls in which they tried to fob me off. On the fourth resend of the same letter, the money reappeared in my father’s account a month before he died. He was very upset that he had missed this.’

• Easylife said Grahame agreed to memberships of three clubs during telesales calls (the Perx magazine in October 2018, the Motor Club in August 2021 and the Rewards Club in November 2021). He was refunded in full in March 2024, around six weeks after the initial request which Easylife described as ‘relatively promptly’. Catherine told us she takes their claims ‘with a pinch of salt’ because her father was positive he had not agreed to join any of these clubs.

‘Easylife took £240 for clubs I didn’t want’

We also spoke to Wendy, 76, who only realised she had been signed up for an Easylife membership when a box of books arrived out of the blue in March. 

She had ordered a pillow from the Easylife catalogue over the phone in January, but nothing else. She called customer services to get to the bottom of it and was assured the membership had been cancelled.

‘Two weeks after that, I got another box of books and had to call again. They did put the money back in my account but later on another £69 was taken, supposedly for its reward scheme. I didn’t want to go through it again – they wear you down.’

After suffering with ill health, she couldn’t face calling up again to get the rest of the money back, so she was still out of pocket when her daughter came to Which? for help.

In total, Easylife took three payments for the ‘Book Club’ (of £32.99 a piece) in the space of two months and two payments for ‘My Top Reward’ (of £69.50 and £69.49). Mirroring many other complaints we’ve seen, these charges appear to have been applied at random, as the Book Club should cost £32.99 per quarter and My Top Reward has a single annual fee.

• Easylife told us it believes Wendy did subscribe to My Top Rewards and The Book Club, during a sales call though it agreed to refund the remaining funds on a ‘no admission of any wrongdoing basis’. When we asked for proof, it told us incoming sales calls are not recorded (only outgoing calls), though there are plans to introduce this in the ‘near future’. It blamed ‘a system error’ for overcharging Wendy for the Book Club and said ‘it is not entirely clear why’ she was charged twice for My Top Reward, though the telesales company has 'changed its practices' to prevent this going forward. 

Who does Easylife share data with?

Easylife confirmed to Which? that it shares customer data with sister company The Rewards Club Limited, which operates various discount schemes and ‘clubs’. 

Its privacy policy is more explicit, stating that Easylife Holdings (the parent company) also shares customer data with ‘other businesses so that they can market and sell their products and services to their customers’. 

It goes on to list some of the brands under the Easylife umbrella: Book Club, Easylife, Evergreen, Gardening Club, Good Ideas, Maison Maison, Motor Club, Perx, Positive Health, Puzzle Book, Rewards Club and Super Card (now known as My Top Rewards).

• Read more: how to stop a company processing your personal data

Is Easylife an ethical business? 

Easylife said it has been trading for nearly 24 years, serving over seven million customers and operating an ‘an ethical business’ that is compliant with all relevant rules and regulations.

It pointed to its positive rating on review site Trustpilot, of 4.2 out of five based on 81,410 reviews, saying it ‘speaks for itself’, though we noted this is for Easylife only. Reviews are much worse for brands like Positive Health (1.3 at the time of writing) and the Rewards Club (a score of 1.2).

When we asked why so many customers say they’ve been signed up for clubs they didn’t want, it said the actual number of complaints equates to less than 1% of its membership base and overall sales volume. 

Easylife says it frequently turns out that customers simply forget they did in fact agree to become a member of the relevant affiliate program.

‘As far as we are aware, there has not been even a single instance of one of the staff at the call centre incorrectly recording a customer signing up to a membership of a club when they have in fact not done so.’

Whilst it is possible that some of these customers did genuinely ‘forget’ that they agreed to them, for others this seems unlikely not least because several said they were paying for services they couldn’t use (such as a Motor Club subscription when they don’t own a car).