LegalZoom

When I chose legalzoom.com to handle filing my fictitious business name (dba) with Riverside County, California on November 1, 2022, I expected the filing to have taken place by the time my Los Angeles County dba filing expired on 12/27/22. My paperwork that was to be filed was not sent to Riverside County until 12/28/22. There was a delay on this due to the holidays and the fact that I wasnt notified in the form of emails of questions their Back office had along the way. The only email I got was when the documents were ready for me to print out, sign in triplicate and send back to legalzoom.com so they could send those to the county for recording. From the 1st of November thru the end of 2022, I called them for status updates on 4 different occasions, November 14, 25, 27 and December 10. I called to check status and was told it was going to be a 5 to 6 week delay to get my documents recorded in Riverside County. This was no fault of Legal Zoom,so I was told, and took their word. On or about January 27, 2023, I began getting solicitations in the mail from various local companies wanting me to use one of them to do what I paid up front for legalzoom.com to do. All new filings for fictitious business names must be advertised in a local publication for 4 weeks in a row following recording. And again the $240 I paid legalzoom.com included the four weeks of paid advertising. I called on February 3rd because I had received a call earlier that morning from somebody representing to be someone that is in the back office of legalzoom.com. He sent a text message to me so that I could go to a link that he provided which turned out to be a form which supposedly was to go to the Secretary of State's office in California to prove that my company was in good standing with the State. He had me open the file which took me to a form which had legal zooms logo on it. He explained that we had to fill this form out correctly the first time because it was a problem if you filled it out in error and then try to get it changed. It had my name address phone number email address and finally my federal tax ID. I worked with him to get those pieces of information entered on the form. At that point I still did not understand why I was having to fill this form out and why I was going to have to pay more money. The cost for this was going to be an extra $145. I hit the ceiling at that point and stayed there ranting and raving about why I had to fill this out and why wasn't I told and etc. etc. At that point I asked to speak with somebody in customer service at LegalZoom And he supposedly transferred me but it turned out to be possibly the same person or somebody with the same accent. I went round and round with him until I finally hung up. They never got my credit card nnumber. I then called the toll free number to legalzoom.com they didn't have any record of anybody from their back office trying to call me. I also did some research on the form that I was asked to fill out by the impersonator and that form is only used for corporations or LLCs to prove that they don't owe anything to the state in the form of taxes Etc. A sole proprietorship like I am filing is not required to fill out anything like this unless I was selling my company. During my call to the real Legalzoom, the representative kept saying that the time frame from when I started this process to the current date had been way too long and it shouldn't be that way. So she told me that she was going to take ownership of my case and communicate with me from this point until completion. She also told me to expect a call from somebody that had more Authority. I impressed on her that the impersonator had my personal info as well as my federal tax id.at legalzoom regarding the impersonator as well as the process taking so long. I never heard from her or anyone in management regarding anything on my case. The next day, I got a call from someone who sounded like the same person with the same accent purporting to be with the California Secretary of State's office. I said right then at that point, before I hang up on you I want to hear what you have to say. He proceeded to rattle on about this that and the other until I hung up on him. I did report this incident to the Secretary of State's office and the fact that this impersonator had my federal tax ID now. I did finally receive a copy of the dba recording about a month after the recording date of January 26 but there was no mention of the 4 weeks of publication in a local news source. I called several more times to check on the affidavit regarding the publishing that must be started in 45 days of the recording. I got conflicting info each time I called until finally I spoke to a representative who told me she was going to contact their publishing department to get the status. This was early April. I heard nothing in a weeks time and called back. I was told that the affidavit would not be available until end of May. That made me so distraught and I did nothing for over a week. I called Legalzoom again to ask a simple question Why was it going to be another month for this to all be done? She kept looking further into the notes in my file and found that publication info was filed on March 14 and recorded on April 6. The time this info was shared with me was April 24. She could not pull up the document but gave me a recording number. That number turned out to be the filing number from January 26. The publication affidavit recording should have a different recording number because it is now 3 months later. I am now giving up onn legalzoom and have made an appointment to go to the recorders office and see what they can tell me. It is ashamed that I have to do this leg work. I should have just done this myself in a much shorter time frame. Legalzoom has cost me thousands of dollars in sales because the service I paid for is not done and their system shows my purchase to be complete. Am I going to be forced to get a lawyer to rattle legalzooms cage? Six months and counting is highly abnormal for an individual filing as a sole proprietor!!