So I joined the terminated masses this past week.
Sinemia canceled my account.
As a quick refresher: Sinemia customers with accounts in good standing nationwide have been arriving at the theater to get a ticket, getting an error message, and then going to their account page to find they have been accused of fraud and that their account is canceled. Here's a video showing it happen to a customer in real-time.
I was willing to give Sinemia the benefit of the doubt on this, as MoviePass also canceled some accounts for fraud and they never canceled me. Companies need to protect themselves from abuse, I get it. But I operated on good faith with Sinemia, obeying their rules to the letter, always checking in, keeping my account on one device, carefully following all the terms of service.
So with my cancellation, I can confidently and objectively declare: SINEMIA IS A SCAM.
As far as I know, only one person I know also signed up for Sinemia and I warned her to preemptively cancel her account and get a refund before Sinemia gets a chance to cancel her. I advise anyone reading this to do the same.
The conspiracy theory floated online appears accurate: if the amount of money Sinemia spends on your tickets approaches the amount you initially spent on your annual fee, they will cancel your account. This is especially obvious since Sinemia offers the canceled an "adjusted refund," which is your initial payment minus the amount they spent on your tickets. They're not even trying to hide what they're doing there.
So if you bought an annual account with Sinemia, you might as well have been spending that money at the theater, buying full-price tickets. And think about that: when you use a service that claims to provide three tickets a month for $10 ($3.33 each), will you be seeing movies you would pay full-price to see? Probably not. So that means a whole lot of unfortunate Sinemia customers got screwed into shelling out $13 each to see Replicas, Holmes and Watson, and/or A Madea Family Funeral. (No comment on whether I saw all three of these with Sinemia.)
I'm able to stay fairly level-headed and objective about this, since the account and physical card were given to me as a present. I asked for it, fully aware I might be diving into a deep well of cinemadness. So at worst, it's like I was given a gift card to the theater and I spent it to see a bunch of movies I wanted to see: good, bad, and mediocre. No regrets, really. Except maybe on Replicas.
But I also plan to do everything in my power to get my account reinstated and, failing that, to get a proper prorated refund for the nine months of service I'm not getting. At about $9 per month, they owe me $81. No way I'm settling for the sketch "adjusted refund," which will be approximately zero dollars. Do the math: I paid $113 for the annual account and card and I've seen nine movies for $11-$13 a ticket, so let's say $12 per. That means I got $108 worth of tickets. If I took Sinemia's "refund," that means I'd get $5.
Nope.
So if you get canceled like me and you want to fight the system, here is a guide for how to do so from a gentleman on reddit who managed to get his account reinstated.
I was able to get responses from @SinemiaSupport on Twitter, mainly to get screengrabs to demonstrate their unhelpful/robotic nature. You can do the same by doing what I did: Alas, I bitched on Twitter, replying to several of the @SinemiaSupport and @SinemiaApp tweets. This got my customer service DM answered PDQ.
I don't tweet, so it sucked to have the first thing I say in a long time be complaining about a service, but it's part of the process and they'll ignore you unless you do it.
You should leave mega-negative (but HONEST) reviews on TrustPilot and the Better Business Bureau, where you can also file a complaint. Both of these are good ways to get their attention, whether you want to get your account reinstated or you just want to fight back against a corrupt company.
Sinemia will robo-reply to your review (Some variation on this lie: "Hi, we are sorry to hear that. The system terminates the accounts in
case of a fraud detection automatically. If you would like to apply for
an adjusted refund, you may click on "Request usage history" on your
membership area at www.sinemia.com/member") so feel free to call them out on their robo-replying in your review.
I took the email message from the reddit gentleman's guide as a template and rewrote it with my information and personalized/modified it a bit before sending it to Sinemia. I recommend you do the same.
And you should definitely copy every Sinemia executive on your message. Their email addresses are available here. Go ahead and copy the Business Insider journalist who's covering Sinemia, too. He's at nmcalone@businessinsider.com.
You're supposed to keep fighting for a couple weeks, keep hitting them up on Twitter and such. I'm actively calling them out and commenting on all their Facebook ads and posts. But I'm probably not gonna keep this up for weeks, the way the guy who got reinstated did. If you want to, though, go right ahead. I'm giving Sinemia two business days to respond.
If they reinstate my wrongfully-canceled account, I'm happy. Cool to keep getting three movies a month for $10.
If they offer me a proper pro-rated refund for $81, I'm happy.
Tune in next time to find out if Sinemia makes me happy or unhappy!
(If they make me unhappy, I'll be filing for a chargeback with my credit card company. Sinemia thinks they're being clever because they're waiting 90 days before cancelling accounts. It's a lot harder to get a chargeback after 90 days. But here's the thing: this is a SERVICE, not a PRODUCT. And credit card companies are a lot more flexible about chargebacks for ongoing services. Especially when there's fraud involved. I've heard multiple accounts of people getting their money back from Sinemia through their credit card companies, sometimes even the full original amount. Time will tell how I do!)
-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename
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