California Wow XPerience in Thailand have always been a scummy, seedy company. Aggressive with their sales pitches, cold calling potential customers at ridiculously late hours, selling things they don’t deliver, and illegally still taking money from client’s credit cards for sometimes years after their contracts are supposedly over — so now that Bangkok Bank has filed a lawsuit against California Wow for a massive 71.9 million baht unpaid debt, it’s really not that surprising.
The Bangkok Bank lawsuit against California Wow in Bangkok currently seeks claims on a 15-million-baht overdraft, a 6.9-million-baht loan and a 50-million-baht promissory note, after the company has had major difficulty repaying its loans. It’s highly unlikely Bangkok Bank will get there money either, as California Wow is struggling to survive.
In fact, it’s probably not going to look much better for California Wow any time soon either as the company reported net losses for 2011 of 246.6 million baht, a bit better than the year before, but still pretty bad.
Again, though, not surprising as word has been getting around Bangkok about the company’s scummy practices and of the way it treats its customers, so many Thais, and a lot of foreigners, know to avoid California Wow like the plague. After all, when you already know several people who have filed complaints about California Wow stealing their money by repeatedly charging their credit cards, you’re not likely to sign up for a California Wow membership yourself, are you? Not unless you’re really dim.
So, will California Wow survive in Thailand? Highly doubtful, we’d say.