I was looking to take a language course over the summer at home. I went online and found the local universities that offered that language, and tried to find information about the courses to see if I could afford them. I couldn’t find the course fee online for a UC Berkeley course, so I made a CAL account, hoping I could find more class info that way. The teacher and price info still wasn’t listed, so I enrolled in the course, and checked my cart- and it said the course would be over 4000 dollars. I absolutely cannot pay that, so I immediately dropped the course from my account (this didn’t take more than ten minutes, total). Never did I take the class or attend the school or even visit the school, and there was no warning on the site anywhere saying I would be charged for simply searching online TO FIND OUT WHO TEACHES THE COURSE AND HOW MUCH IT COSTS. There is no way I cost the school enrollment either, since it all happened in less then ten minutes, the course was practically empty, and it was 3 months before the class would have started. Now I have been informed that since I did not pay a 175 dollar class drop fee, my name is being submitted to the California Franchise Tax Board, and money will be collected from my account. I think this is ridiculous- I don’t have 175 dollars to pay, and the whole reason I am not taking the course is that I don’t have money to afford it. If they take my money, they should have provided me with a service, or at the very least, indicated on the site that I will be charged money for clicking the enroll button without providing billing information.
What am I supposed to do? I wrote to the school and they said their records show I enrolled and dropped within ten minutes, but my name is still being submitted, and I owe 175 dollars. I am not, and have never been a UC Berkeley student, or studied at any University of California.
Respond to them in writing and indicate that you didn’t intend to enroll and that any purported enrollment was a mistake. They cannot charge you a drop fee for a mistake. You’ll probably need to send similar correspondence several times. Good luck.
Are you sure they can’t? I wrote them two emails already and got back responses saying school policy demands I pay 175 dollars, and that they have already submitted my name to the Tax board for collection. They said I can file a dispute only after paying the fee, and that I would have a chance of getting 100 of my 175 dollars back then, but it’s not guaranteed.
Simple contract law. I would argue you never intended to contract to take the course made clear by your cancellation within 10 min. They’ll “come after” you, but if you have a paper trail saying it was a mistake I doubt they will take it very far. Just make sure they don’t have access to any of your funds – i.e; bank withdrawals, etc.
This doesn’t ring true, either about the process or the numbers.
I just did a check and UC Berkeley extension does not offer online language courses, but does offer open enrollment courses at various locations on or near its campus. The course fees are printed directly under the “Add to Cart” button and were $525 for each class that I checked. The extension site also says that it charges a $35 fee to drop a course.
Also, I know of no system that would complete a course enrollment without payment – adding & dropping items from the cart would have no impact, it would only be after pressing “submit” and provision of payment information that an order would be processed.
So what the OP says just doesn’t make any sense financially. I’m wondering whether the OP has been the victim of an online scam of some sort.
To the OP: You claim you have received & sent emails. What is the address that shows up after the @ on these emails you have received? When did this all happen? If what you say is true it really sounds like somehow you ended up on a scam or phishing website, rather than enrollment for Berkeley.
UC Berkeley also offers summer intensive language courses which are open to non-Berkeley students, but you would have had to submit a separate application for that. Cancellation fee for those courses is $100 — but that’s not the same as a drop for nonpayment.
I’d add that the Franchise Tax Board does not “collect” money for unpaid bills to state universities-- what it can do is place a hold on tax refunds due. I also find it dubious that the university would be threatening to report to the FTB early on. This is called “interagency intercept” and UC guidelines indicate that it will not be used unless “collection cannot be made by the usual collections process”.
But it is fairly common for scammers to make threats like that.
So I think that either the OP is providing incomplete/inaccurate info or else the OP is simply the victim of a scam, and would probably be wise to take a much closer look at the email address that is the source of the email received.
I agree with Calmom - this is become a more common phishing tactic of scammers. I am not completely familiar with California, but with most state and federal agencies, you would be informed by letter, not be email (OP didn’t say how notification was made) or by phone. Such a letter would provide details on how to dispute the debt. Disputes do not require the debt to be paid first. If the debt is real, and has already been submitted to the tax board, you should be able to verify with them that there is a hold on your account.
It wasn’t an online course, it was the online signup for an in-person German course. I added it because Cal’s student portal still wouldn’t show the course price until it was in my cart, and as soon as I saw the course price, I removed it from my cart. I do have the screenshot showing that I dropped less than a minute after enrolling, and I now sent it to three Cal emails (from their website, not a third party) explaining the situation, but they all answered that the fee is school policy.
I added and dropped the courses back in May, and yes, it made no sense to me either that I would be charged for enrolling (or dropping) when they hadn’t asked for my payment info anywhere yet, and when I had no intention of actually taking the class, I just wanted to see what its cost was and who was teaching it (in the hopes that I could email the professor independently and ask to sit it unofficially).
http://summer.berkeley.edu/application/fees lists the summer session costs that you could have found out without enrolling in any courses. It also says that if you actually enroll in a course, you would be subject to a $100 cancellation fee to drop all courses.
This assumes that you are not interacting with a phisher instead of the real school.
^ ucb, earlier, on that page, when I clicked the tab for Application & Fees, it doesn’t show fees. Now, too. I found that page much like OP may have, by googling into summer German courses. ?
That doesn’t explain how she came up with a 4000 fee. Or how backing out of the cart didn’t void the whole transaction.
Yes, the info is listed here. I’m admittedly not the greatest with computers, or finding things on websites, though, and didn’t find that page. I was looking for the teacher name and course cost on the course description page, and since it wasn’t there, I hadn’t given credit info, hadn’t found this page, and hadn’t ever encountered a school that charges for adding and dropping a course (as opposed to course tuition), I had no idea I was walking into a fee trap. The emails I’m getting are not phishing emails, and are from the actual university, and yes I’ve contacted multiple administrators, but they claim there’s no way out of the fee.
If I just never pay (they don’t have my billing info, but have submitted my name to the California Tax board), will I actually ever get charged? I’m not filing taxes in California, since my income is well under 17,000 a year, and I don’t know if I will ever be filing taxes in California.
Did you provide the university with your social security number? Because the Franchise Tax Board couldn’t do anything without a tax id.
Why are they telling you that you owe $175 when the website clearly says that the course cancellation fee is $100? Did they provide a link to a webpage with their policy that you can share?
At the top of that page is a button for Berkeley students to add the class-- but you say you aren’t a currently enrolled student.
So to select that class, you would have had to click “Apply for summer courses” under “All other students” – that takes me to a page that says that the registration deadline has passed, so I can’t know what you saw when you were browsing the site. But I am guessing that you probably filled out an online form that asked for a lot of information about you and somewhere along the line you clicked “submit”.
I also think that you must have gone a step beyond “add to cart” when you browsed the course you were looking for – perhaps after selecting the course, you clicked a “submit” or “enroll” button.
I realize it might be hard to remember what you did several months ago, but perhaps you might check your emails from around that time to see whether you received any emails confirming your enrollment or referencing the cancellation fee.