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Disconnecting
At the moment, Earthlink is running scads of TV ads showing the hapless nerd beseiged by guys in business suits who pull the plug on his computer, shower him with junk mail and peper him with tennis balls. At Earthlink, the ad says, they don't tolerate any of those service interruptions or spamming or pop-ups. So I thought it would be easy to cancel its service, which I actually acquired back when my account said Mindspring. But Earthlink's ferocious defense apparently only applies to paying customers, not to departing ones. Most ISPs, unlike more regulated phone companies, don't send monthly bills; they simply bill membership to a credit card. Thus, it's not simple even to find a phone number to call when you want out, and you sure won't find any little cancellation box on the home page.
When I got through at 8:50 a.m., I heard the usual chirpy recorded message urging me onto the site's website, where, the voice assured me, all my questions could be answered. There was, however, no prompt or icon or command on the customer service or tech support page for cancelling membership.
Back to the phones. I got to the menu, which didn't give an option for cancellation, but did give one for sales and service. That had to be the one, right? Wrong. After waiting on hold for 20 minutes, Diane told me there was a special customer service department for cancellations. She switched me to it. Fifteen minutes of bad music. I had that familiar, sinking feeling one gets upon entering the land of customer support, tech style. You can get in anytime, but you can't always get out.
Then a tech support rep came on. Can't imagine why you were switched to this department, he said. But I've been on the phone for half an hour, I said, taking the slightly more pleading voice one uses in the second stage of Phone Menu Hell -- the point before you really lose it, while you still hope some decent soul will ignore company policy and treat you right.
"Tell you what," said Steve the tech, his voice getting a tad chillier. "Why don't I stay on with you while we switch you over?" Great, I said. He vanished and wasn't heard from again. In the world of customer service, lies are the currency, and broken hearts abound.
Twenty-five more minutes, and a customer service rep from the first department popped on. A veteran of too many of these conversations to recount, I asked to speak to a supervisor immediately. One (allegedly) came on. Oh, he said, I was in the wrong department. So I did that thing where you recount your sorry travails in Tech Support Hell while they sometimes pretend to care.
"I've been on the phone for an hour," I said, the fuse having been lit. "It only took me five minutes to sign up. Why not make it possible to cancel electronically?"
Can't do that, he said, for security reasons. We have to verify your identify.
"But you let people sign up online, verifying or not verifying?"
"That's different," he said. It sure is. Cash flows in rather than out. After a few minutes (maybe three) on hold, I was told I needed a special devision of sales that cancelled subscribers. The supervisor switched me over. I expected to end up back in regular customer service, but didn't.
At 10:04 a.m., Cindy came on to ask for my name and PW. I didn't have the latter, as I hadn't used the service for a long time, and the PW had vanished into Password Hell, the bottom of a desk drawer stuffed with the detritus of old accounts, ID codes and issue and support reference numbers from countless tech issues and tech support pleas and brawls.
Cindy said Earthlink had no record of my ever having been a customer -- no name, address or credit card on file. I relayed to Cindy how impressed I was that they hadn't skipped a single month of billing me for the service, even though they didn't seem to know I existed. Yet I did have my credit card bill and assured her I was looking at a monthly charge of $9.95. Eventually it occurred to me that the account might be in my wife's name along with mine. The computer seemed willing to compromise on this point. Cindy said my service would be terminated. Was there anything else she could help me with?
Throughout this ridiculous waste of time, a voice kept popping up saying all calls might be monitored to ensure good service. I hope so. I also hope the people monitoring it have a lot of time and stored memory and a high tolerance for generic pop. I wonder if these people ever think about the irony: they spend all this money claiming to want to make life easier for people, yet they make what should be the simplest things nearly impossible.
The AOL call, initiated at 10:25 a.m. was shorter but weirder. This behemoth spends even more money touting how easy and customer-friendly the service is. That is, after all, the ads say, why they're Number One. But there's no keyword on AOL -- which has a keyword for everything -- for cancelling membership. If you root around in customer support for a while and keep typing in "cancel service" at every prompt -- I'm talking two or three browser moves and about five minutes, just enough to discourage the rushed, confused or distractable -- you eventually reach a page that offers an 888 number for cancellation of membership.
Getting the number of course, doesn't mean getting a human to answer the phone, which required another 20 or more minutes. The world's easiest-to-use and most wholesome online service doesn't fuss much about departing customers, either. At this point, I seriously considered saving the cancellation of AOL for another day. Maybe cancelling two ISPs is just too cumbersome for one workday. But then, there was Hemos and the invoices.
A gruff Brian answered the phone. "Can I help you?" he said, sounding as though his feelings were already hurt and he was spoiling for a fight. I assumed I had to be misreading his tone. I said I wanted to cancel.
"Why?" he asked. "We need to list a reason." Wondering why that was any of his business and eager to finally get off the phone, I mumbled something about having switched to cable. "You can piggyback AOL on cable," Brian interrupted. "That's not really a good reason."
Did I need a really good reason, I wondered? Had I missed something in the fine print when I signed up? What if something personal had happened, like a broken-off love affair? Or maybe I was broke, or been driven mad by pop-up ads and spam?
"Is there any complaint about the service?," he asked abruptly. I hadn't heard this brusque tone from customer service people, usually trained to hold onto a syrupy, we-are-here-to-please-you voice that probably causes them (and you) to later go home and torture their pets.
No, I said, I was happy with the service. I had finally switched to cable and wanted to cancel, that's all. What was the point of dumping on AOL, which I hadn't even been on for months? That would just generate a sugary phone call in a couple of days, pleading for re-consideration.
"You're sending out mixed signals here," Brian insisted, none too warmly. "This isn't really a good reason for cancelling. We can talk about adjusting the pricing, because there are different plans, if that's a problem, and since we can piggyback on cable and you have no complaints, I'm afraid I just don't understand. What am I supposed to write down on the form? You're not making any sense."
Contrary to the atmosphere on Slashdot, I don't particularly enjoy arguing, but Brian flipped my trigger. What would a 70-year-old user say under those circumstances, or a kid, or somebody who didn't speak English very well? Or somebody who just didn't want Brian jeering at him in a voice that vacillated between rude and intimidating?
It was outrageous and I finally lost it. "Look, Brian, I don't have to give you an unmixed signal, a good reason or any reason. I want you to cancel the service right now. Got it?"
"Your service is terminated," he said sharply at 10:50 a.m. AOL hung up on me! Things can't be all that rosy at the world's largest communications company. Brian was feeling -- therefore transmitting -- too much heat. But I was finally disconnected.
The morning did bring sharply into focus that this disconnection business is a horror, along with the way tech businesses often treat their customers, even as they spend fortunes taking out expensive ads claiming otherwise. Nobody should have to spend that much time cancelling two ISP's. It's so discouraging and so unpleasant that hundreds of thousands of people undoubtedly find it easier to pay relatively small monthly fees to avoid it. Which is almost certainly the idea.
So at the least I propose that ISPs be required to send monthly bills, listing numbers to call or websites to visit so that users can cancel on the phone or online. that means, of course, that ISP sites must offer electronic cancellation (if you can get on with a PW and ID, why can't you get off with them?) -- a button to push to cancel membership. It obviously ought to be as easy to cancel as to subscribe. Finally, AOL, of all places, and other sites should not dare be insulting, intimidating or browbeating to customers who want or need to disconnect. (Something Earthlink didn't try, I should point out -- though it took an outrageously long time there and the site didn't make the process simple in any way.)
In a world where it ought to be a universal right to get connected instantly, you ought to be able to get disconnected without calling a lawyer, a hit man or the FTC.
Never ever go to the "place" in automated call routing hell for canceling your account. Go to the "place" for past dure bills. I've never had to wait on hold there, and they can cancel your account for you. My business requires that I open and close many ISP accounts and that's always worked.
You know, the first thing I would do after this is call my credit card company and tell them that you've canceled these accounts and that there should be 1 final payment to them and no more after that.
You complained about having them on auto-bill, but that actually makes it easier to protect yourself.
Sometimes it's easier to just refuse the charge on your Credit Card.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
I never use any auto-monthly pay option for any services, be it electric bill, ISP bill, cable bill, phone bill, etc.
It might be convinient, but I rather write the check every month than to deal with these kind of BS that might follow.
geek page at KY speaks
I mean, what does it take to get the attention of some folks?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
For those of you that want to attempt to cancel your AOL account like Jon Katz, the number is listed on this page.
Interestingly, Earthlink also has the phone numbers to cancel just about any popular Internet service (except for themselves of course) here.
A few months ago when my mom switched from netzero (she was paying fot the 'platinum' service) to a real ISP, we found out that you can do anything your account you want to from the netzero website, except canceling your account, so she called, and was forced to answer some survey questions before they would cancel her account. Nowhere near as bad as this though.
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
The quality of tech customer service has been steadily declining over the past five-six years. For certain sectors, ISPs and telcos, the quality is simply atrocious. There are multiple reasons at work here:
1) New technologies (i.e. DSL for the RBOCs, cable internet for CATV carriers) have hastily cobbled together support structures that do a poor job of responding to customer needs. Education of the support techs seems to be as poor as education of the customers, leaving a huge gap in the working knowledge required to troubleshoot and rectify problems.
2) Corporate cost cutting. When Ameritech outsourced their IP support to Convergys (a spin-off of CBIS) a couple of years ago, the marked rise in on-hold times along with the decline in quality of the staff (working knowledge of telephony infrastructure) caused our corporation to switch to another IP provide.
3) Scripting. Support staff railroad you into a narrow set of options and if your particular problem doesn't fit into the right slot, you are relegated to a black hole of call-backs by higher level of support that adds days if not weeks to the resolution of your problem.
These issues have gotten so bad in the past couple of years that it is amazing that we have high-speed IP access at the consumer level at all in the U.S.
Or, you could just call your credit card company and say you will refuse to pay any future bills from those companies.
... from the credit card companies. Ever tried cancelling a credit card? It absolutely blows my mind how close customer reps will come to calling you flat out stupid for wanting to go with a card.
They made me feel like I'd be deported to some backwaters of Zaire if I even dared to survive in the concrete jungle with only one credit card. Fucking jerks, I shouldn't have to work my ass off and argue my ass off to manage my business relationships.
"Old man yells at systemd"
"I want to cancel my service. You made it hell for me to try to cancel, so I'm making it hell for you to try to get your money. Don't bill me again.
Wait, could you hold for just a sec?."
At this point either put your phone on hold and leave it like that for a few hours, or set it next to the radio, tuned to your local obnoxious contry station. Or just hang up without telling them. I should note that I haven't tried this, but I'd love a chance ;).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Managed to cancel AOL ok, but she did let them talk her into a couple of months of free service, to see if maybe she wanted to keep it around. That's not such a bad thing though. She isn't real worried about them continuing to charge her credit card either, as they have a card that is going to expire...
Maybe it was tough to find something 'important' to talk about this week. Should anybody really be surprised that a company that is in the business of making money isn't nice to people that no longer wants to give them money? Hell, why not give an american a chance at apathy, they'll probably take it!
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
They disconnect me practically every month, until I go pay the bill. It occurs to me, that if I simply stopped paying the bills, they would gradually get the hint I was gone.
Of course, you gave them your credit card number, which makes billing easy for you (and for them) but that puts all the effort on you to get it disconnected. If you pay cash or check, and you simply stop making payments, you'll be disconnected faster with no intervention on your part at all.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
"John Katz? THE John Katz? Sure I can cancel your service, please hold for one minute"
*click*
Bwahahahahaha!
A friend of mine got AOL FREE for over 3 months, she started with the one month starter CD then every month she phoned to terminate the account.. Every time they would offer her another month free to try it.. This went on for many months, not costing her a dime except time to make the calles.. She finnaly went to a real ISP..
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
I had that wonderful experience with Compuserve way back when. My ID didn't work, but the billing was still on my credit card.
I'm still in therapy for my experiences trying to sort that mess out. :-)
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Actually cancelling various services may be hard, but never underestimate the power of threatening to cancel the service in order to get what you want.
I use AT&T for my cable and internet service. I stopped watching TV as much recently, so I wanted to downgrade my cable service from Extended Basic to Standard Basic. I called the ever helpful (sarcasm) tech support, and the woman told me that they would have to charge a $15 "service fee" to downgrade the service as I requested. She explained that they had to send a technician out to turn off part of my service, and that I had to pay for that. Obviously, this sounded ridiculous, so I asked "If I just cancelled the service entirely, would there still be a fee?"
The next words out of her mouth were "Let me just waive that service fee for you..."
:)
It's actually pretty easy to get AOL to cancel your account. All you have to do is to go into one of their chat rooms and start typing profanity. Works even better if it's a kid's room and you start propositioning them. Your account will last about 5 minutes.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
The easiest thing in the world is just to send them your cancellation in registered mail so you can prove that they received it.
Then contact your bank to stop payments to whatever entity is siphoning from your account.
End of problem, if they don't comply they are on the wrong end of the criminal law.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
AOL removed online cancelation because it was, well, easy. This was brought up during the lawsuits aginst them over the busy signals a few years ago. Currently you have to call to cancel, and the person you'll speak to receives a paid bonus if they convince you not to cancel. They usually offer another free month or point out that you could just call back on the exact day your bill cycles. That's why Katz got hung up on, the person was upset at loosing pay.
I spent a few minutes on the phone, but it was obvious they weren't going to let me terminate service without hours of pain, so I hung up.
Then I sent a notarized and dated letter to each, telling them I had no further need of their services and that I would tender no further payment after the current month. I enclosed a check for the current month's service.
Then I called my bank and told them to refuse all requests for payment from both services.
Unsuprisingly, *both* services tried to bill me again (Compuserve several times). But, since they'd both cashed my checks, they couldn't say they hadn't received my letters.
Worked like a charm, and all told I spent less than two hours on the deal. Of course, both services let me sign up in less than ten minutes, but that's the reality of Corporate Amerika these days.
My friend Red says the secret to happiness is lowered expectations. In this case he's probably right. At least it doesn't matter if I'm "white" or not, they screw everybody equally!
I've heard similar stories to this one, where it takes an obscene amount of time to get a human to say "okay, we'll terminate your service", but the bills (or charges, in most cases) keep coming! In perhaps one or two cases, these being rather rare, the persons eventually had their banks change their credit card numbers to rid themselves of the monthly charge.
Keep a close eye on your next two bank statements. Make sure they actually stopped taking money beofre you believe youeself safe.
Not sure about Earthlink or AOL but I have never had trouble closing an account. Tips 1. Hit 0 on the first menu.. there is almost never a Cancel service option in the voice menu and 0 usually sends you to a human right away. 2. Go to the billing departemnt.. They are the ones usualy in controll of closing your account. 3. Can't get them to stop billing you.. call your credit card company and have them stop accepting the charges.. The ISP will come looking for thier money and at that point you will have someone to talk too.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
I had to call Earthlink no less than 7 times to cancel DSL service for an apartment I was moving out of. The first 5 times I called their systems were down and they couldn't cancel my account.
After finally getting my account cancelled, my debit card was mysteriously charged ~$150. Their explanation was that it was an early cancelation penalty due to my one year contract. I asked how long ago I signed-up and they replied 20 months! It took another 3 weeks to get my money refunded.
My advice is to escalate the call immediately at the first sign of any resistance, and to record the dates, times, and names from every conversation you have.
This is truly the worst customer service experience I have ever had.
One more thing - ring up the CC people get them to refuse any further charge - just in case!
When I cancelled my Earthlink DSL, they turned it off promptly, and still continued to allow me to use the dial up service without ever charging me. Now that's good customer service.
Personally, if I had to wait more than fifteen minutes on the phone, I'd fire a letter to Corporate headquarters, notifying them of my intent to cancel, sending it via registered mail, and have it authenticated by a notary public. If they bill me a second time, I'll do the same, and I'd ask the credit card company to mark the charges as fraudulent. Third time, I'd take them to court -- just for the sheer joy of it. After all, you've got three signed, dated, and authenticated letters, stretching over three months, showing good faith on your part, plus reciepts indicating proof-of-delivery. They'd likely settle out-of-court for a reasonable sum, and enough of these lawsuits might prompt the idiots to actually set up a reasonable cancellation method.
I used to work for EarthLink, so I can attest to the number of very frustrated customers who could never talk to the magical cancellation man...
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
This worked for me as well. I got surprisingly little sh*t from them. When asked why, I just said 'Cable', and the next thing I saw was "we're sorry to lose your business; thank you for using Earthlink".
the chat-window support option is the way to go.
You should check your credit card bill in a month to see if they actually stopped charging you. I had a similar experience with Compuserve and when it was all said and done they continued to bill me for two months.
The thing about these services is that they piss off one person at a time. It's like committing suicide slowly. I know of at least three different people who will never use these services because they were screwed over by them. Those three tell a couple of hundred each, and those couple of hundred also tell a bunch of people.
At first this kind of publicity doesn't hurt you but as the number of pissed off ex-customers grow it can have a real affect on the bottom line. Hence AOL probably doesn't get a lot of repeat customers.
Beware the wood elf!!!
Headline suggestion: Horrible Customer Service Call Centers Complete World Takeover and Finally Invade Computer Industry
WTF?
How is this different from any other large bureaucratic corporation's customer service and why do we care about this personalized story that only has to do with Katz? (This is only relevant to ME if a large percentage of people have that problem and Katz... you didn't provide proof of that.)
That said, my story beats his anyway!
**So begins the real reason for this post. To bitch about my own experiences!**
My favorite is when Verizon Avenue (a wholly owned subsidiary of Verizon that does DSL for Apt. buildings) broke my phone line.
Ver Ave: "We don't fix phone line. Call Verizon"
Me: But you BROKE IT and you ARE Verizon. You call.
VA: Call Verizon
Verizon: "We fix phones, but if we didn't break it, you pay."
Me: "Sounds fine, since you broke it"
Verizon: "Oh no, we weren't there we couldn't break it"
Me: "Well I'm not paying.
Verizon: Well, call your DSL service. Make them fix it or pay
Me: (calls john katz. please bitch about ISP customer service on slashdot so i can bitch and be on topic
Katz: No Prob!
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Is is just me, or is this the best Jon Katz story ever? I know that's not saying much, but this is the first one in 6 months that I have actually read beyond the preview text.
... Making sure that the billing actually stops. Keep checking your credit card bills. And if (when) they DO charge you again, going through your credit card company is a painful, but effective, way of fixing the problem.
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
I had to disconnect our family dialup in the UK several years ago (from Compuserver I think). The ISP's lines were quite painless for the most part but the ultimate result was that we had to mail/fax a written letter to them explaining we wanted to cancel. The upshot of this is that one could copy the same letter to our bank thus terminating the payments they would be getting, in the event that cancellation wasn't working on Compuserve's side
I applied for Earthlink DSL, got denied, and then started to get my credit card charged 49.95/month for it. Each month for 4 months I called and had the charge removed (each call being at least 60 minutes..thank god for speakerphone) until finally one nice lady decided that it might be a good idea to change my credit card # and exp date so that it couldn't charge my card anymore. Wrong answer. Sure enough, the next month the charge appeared and so I called my credit card company and had them contact earthlink...and finally after 6 months no more earthlink charges. That's spectacular considering I didn't even have Earthlink service in the first place.
Agreed. I have TWICE encountered similar problems in the past with ISP's. In my case, the problems were with billing continuing after I had told them to cancel the service. Each time, contacting the credit card company got the issue resolved quickly and almost painlessly.
Once you contact the credit card company and tell them the charge is unauthorized, the monkey is on the VENDOR's back.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
What did you expect Katz, in this post-Columbine, post-9/11 world?
Asking Google: how do I cancel my Earthlink account" gives me this page with specific instructions: http://help.mindspring.com/modules/00800/00823.htm
Lay off the weed, ok? Makes thinking clearer.
Credit card companies are used to dealing with business who make it hard to cancel recurring charges. They know what to do, and in this case they are your allies. Good Luck!
1. How do the attitudes of the people AOL and Earthlink employees reflect the insecurities of the general populace caused by a post 9-11 world?
2. Is the use of internet services for ISPs a symptom of globalization and furthurmore the lack of internet cancellations an attempt to make it even more difficult for people temporarily outside of the country to cancel their accounts?
3. Is this a symptom of the disorganization and uncertainty caused by the economic instabillity of AOL/TW and Earthlink fighting to survive in an economy in the midst of a recession?
Either way this is definatly one of the best JonKatz articles I've seen. When he sticks to the topic at hand and doesn't try to blow it out of proportion or make any stunning (and often incorrect) revelations he can be a decent writer.
I stole this Sig
This article didn't have any sort of hyperbolic buzzword-dropping extrapolation!
I have to say that by sticking to the primary source account and resisting the urge to excessively editorialize, you made something I found worthwhile to read.
Thank you, and I agree that this aspect of tech support should be put under the spotlight. Telecom companies are the very worst abusers in my opinion. Not only do they make it difficult to disconnect, but then they try to ruin all of your future dinner hours trying to "get you back".
With a fist full of T1s at work the thought of dial up a home had lost it's attraction, but my girl friend needed dial-up for work so she signed us up for Qwest. It was only $13 so no big deal. Their tech support turned out to be good and fast for Win platforms. Well, MSN made them a deal they couldn't refuse. QWest said move to MSN or go dark. In a moment of weekness I hit the button to transfer to MSN. After a month of tech support hell and their unwillingness to support win95/Netscape I pulled the plug. Because they were billing my phone account it took 3 weeks of daily phone calls and a director level person at QWest to terminate my account. I did learn one very usefull technique to use on stonewalling service reps: guilt. Just ask them, "how does working for a company that behaves this way make you feel?" The other is to keep them on hold. When they ask for information tell them you're looking for it and then pop back to the phone every 5 minutes and sweetly say, "I'm still looking." One day I kept MSN on the phone for over an hour that way. I finally found Eskimo.com They are cheep and support linux, but their pop provides seem to go out of business every other month. So their dial up numbers keep changing.
You can do it online as well. By using their Customer Service chat. Seemed fairly easy, and only took me about 10 minutes total.
Random Musings
The best part of this for Business is that they get happy, clueless employees that don't mind sub-US minimum wage and can handle extremely rude, self-righteous (and more than likely correct) American callers with a smile on their faces. So next time you want to curse out a company via their customer service learn some nasty words in Hindi to get your point across. Maybe the Indian programmer that took away my last job a few years ago could help us out with a few creative Hindi dirty words.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
- Notify them in writing. If you write (a letter, not an e-mail) to the billing address and say you want to cancel the service, then they (and you) have written, legal proof of your request to cancel. So you have the law on your side when it comes to step #2.
- Call your credit card company. Tell them that
you have written the company asking to stop billing you, and instruct your bank to block any future charges from them.
I'm not claiming that this is the easiest thing to do or that it makes for good customer service on the part of ISPs. Many ISPs won't make you jump through these hoops (as a tech with my former employer, we could all cancel accounts, all we had to do was click "Cancel" -- and we didn't ask for a reason). But there is no way they can refute your intent to cancel if you've requested it in writing.Spam a million accounts from your AOL/xenulink account. Problem solved!
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
I've found that pretending you don't have a touch tone phone and holding to "speak to a customer service advisor" is the fastest way of getting through to a human being. It also works with utilities companies. :)
Martin Piper
Owner - ReplicaNet and RNLobby
"you sure won't find any little cancellation box on the home page."
"I heard the usual chirpy recorded message urging me onto the site's website, where, the voice assured me, all my questions could be answered."
Go to support.earthlink.net Log in. Without even scrolling down, look on the left side of your screen, under "Customer Service," right next to the bit that tells you their call center wait times (which you obviously didn't check before calling). What do you see?
The fourth hyperlink down:
How to cancel your Earthlink account.
And, yes, their on-line chat tech support works, and the wait time on that is a heck of a lot shorter than their call-in lines.
"For quality assurance purposes"
.mp3 of the conversations you had with these guys.
I really would love to be able to download an
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
In other words, Earthlink and AOL both claimed his service was cancelled -- but will they keep billing his credit card anyway? Of course! That's part of the whole cancellation hell; even when you think you've won, the battle has only just begun.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
My uncle got his new computer, and dropped in the "Free AOL Trial" CD. As per usual, it wanted a credit card number before you could use your "free" trial. So, he entered the details of his card that was going to run out soonest, which happened to be in just over a months time. 3 weeks later, he'd decided AOL wasn't for him, and picked a new ISP. After 5 minutes trying to cancel and deciding it was too hard, he did nothing. AOL customer support then spent the next month trying to coerce his new credit card number out of him. Eventually, 2 weeks after the card had expired, they took his hints that he wanted to cancel, and terminated the account
I subscribed to the BT Anytime service over the summer, so I could use the net as much as I do at college without running up huge bills. After checking the minimum sign-up time and cancelation methods well, I signed up with my credit card. Come the end of the summer, I phoned up to cancel. With a copy of the contract in front of me, I asked if they could cancel the account, or if I should send them a letter, and copy it to my credit card company and ask that no more billing went through. Took 3 minutes to cancel the account :)
My dad changed from one local ISP to another to get ADSL. Apart for getting stung a bit for transfering his domain to the new ISP, it was very pleasant
This post will enter the public domain 70 years after my death, unless Disney buys another extension.
This might work for ELNK and AOL, but a rising number of ISPs are inserting "clean-up fees" for customers who violate their Acceptable Use Policies.
They *might* turn around and bill you a few bucks per spam (which could add up rather quickly) and STILL not "cancel" your account, but simply suspend your ability to log in during their "investigation."
Specialization is for insects. - R.A.H.
After they had lost several emails, I decided to cancel Verio. After reading the fine print about having to cancel in writing, I sent them a cancellation letter. They still charged my card for another two months. When I called they said they never received the letter. So I sent another letter and CC'ed my credit card company. This time it worked. They tried to bill me for one more month, but gave up after a while.
My family used to use AOL despite vocal protests from me and my brother because it was free. Every month or so, we'd reregister for a new account under a different credit card using one of their free CDs, and the changing usernames weren't a problem because Hotmail hadn't been bought by M$ yet, so it was still morally okay to have an account there.
/. story pointed out a few weeks ago) occasionally billing them for the products anyway - and they really couldn't care less about whether people pay for their service or not.
After a while, my parents tried to move to another ISP, probably because they were sick of hearing our whining. My father's call to AOL went something like this:
Dad: "I'd like to cancel my account."
AOL: "Why?"
Dad: "We want to use another service."
AOL: "What if we give you another month for free?"
Dad: "Okay."
So we were stuck with AOL for another month. At the end of that month, he tried cancelling again only to end up having the same conversation. And this happened yet again another month later. We finally moved to another ISP because, left with no other alternatives, I asked my parents to switch to something better as a "birthday present."
Maybe Jon Katz didn't speak to the same representatives at AOL, or maybe they've changed this policy. I find that hard to believe, though, when all you have to do for 1000 free hours is pick up a CD at 7-11 or wait for one to arrive in the mail. AOL gets their money from aggressive advertising - requiring people to see an ad and click "No Thanks" every time they sign on, for instance, and (as a
So fuck erathlink I hope they rot in the darkest tech-hell
if you want "No More Hiroshimas" then I say "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
My understanding is that canceling your account with an ISP doesn't make money leave their organization. It just means that your money stops going in.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
From friends who used to work for AOL (all is forgiven!) I know that there's a department called "Stop-safe". These people have the target of stopping 50% of callers from cancelling their subscription. Quite a thankless task, I'm sure.
Things can't be so good at Slashdot if they're having to nickel-and-dime over $9.95 of expenses!
-- the most controversial site on the Web
While he acts the part of a normal user who forgets everything including password or that his wife etc might be the card holder, does seem to be somewhat naive. Since he knows that they don't want him to opt out and will make it difficult, why doesn't he prepare for this? Have all the information neccesary and ask immediately to get through to the accounting department. Better yet, why doesn't he just send a registered snail mail asking to be removed from the service? That way, after that date he can legally block all payments to them.
. Tips 1. Hit 0 on the first menu
Pretend you are on a rotary phone, don't press any buttons. You'll be forwarded to a recptionist, and they'll forward you directly to the department you ask for. You still get to wait on hold, but it's less jumps.
10. TERMINATION.
You may terminate your account at any time and for any reason by providing notice of intent to terminate to EarthLink by:
- registered or certified mail, return receipt requested addressed to EarthLink Inc., 1375 Peachtree St. Level A, Atlanta, GA 30309; or
- telephone calls directed to Accounts-Customer Service at (800) 719-4660, option #2.
Email termination of your basic Internet access account will not be accepted. To terminate DSL service, you must call (888) 829-8466. To terminate Web Hosting and/or Business Services, you must call (800) 237-0148. Your termination will only be complete upon your receipt of a cancellation confirmation number from EarthLink. Charges to your account will stop accruing the day EarthLink provides you with a cancellation confirmation number. Based on your billing cycle, charges accrued prior to your termination may apply after you receive a cancellation confirmation. Email cancellation requests will not be accepted. If your account included space on EarthLink's servers, anything stored on this space will be deleted upon termination.Without prior notice, EarthLink may terminate this Agreement, your password, your account, or your use of the Services, for any reason, including, without limitation, if EarthLink, in its sole discretion, believes you have violated this Agreement, our Acceptable Use Policy, or any of the applicable user policies, or if you fail to pay any charges when due. EarthLink may provide termination notice to you by: email addressed to your email account or by US Mail or courier service to the address you provided for the Services. All notices to you shall be deemed effective on the first (1st) calendar day following the date of electronic mailing or on the fourth (4th) calendar day following the date of first-class mailing or deposit with a commercial courier service.
Sections 3, 4, 6, and 11 of this Agreement shall survive termination of this Agreement.
That's really not a problem, although your own CC may not be forthcoming in providing this information unless it's clearly criminal from the beginning. (E.g., the way I "signed up" for some porn sites, for the first time in my life, while literally on a ship at sea without internet access.)
The first letter to your CC is a dispute saying that the account has been cancelled. The second, when they rebill you, is a criminal complaint of fradulent activity. This gives the bank a lot more authority to stop the charges.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
3. Can't get them to stop billing you.. call your credit card company and have them stop accepting the charges..
Oh, if only it were that easy. Allow me to relate a horrow story of a friend of mine that he had with MSN. After a few months of service, he decided to cancel and move on to someone else's service.
He went to their webpage, which actually had a cancellation procedure (whatever happened to those days? I smell a conspiracy!). However, after he entered his info and tried to cancel the service (by clicking the button on the webpage), the browser just hung, until the page timed out. He tried several times, but he could never get a cancellation confirmation page to load.
So, he called customer service and tried to cancel through them. They were happy to take his information, waste his time, and then inform him that they were experiencing computer problems, and they could not cancel his service at that time.
So, he called a few days later, and same story. He just kind of let it go, because it was just $20 a month, no big deal, right? So he calls customer service a couple months later, and their computers have since been up and running, but are now broken again. Yeah, a likely story...
So my friend calls Discover, and tells him that he wants to stop accepting charges from MSN. Discover informs him that these charges are recurring and must be cancelled with MSN, Discover cannot decline them.
In the end, my friend was forced to pay off his Discover card and then cancel it. Welcome to Hell, my friends, weclome to Hell...
Just before the AT&T/@Home fiasco where service was lost by a large number of people, I called my cablemodem company and asked them if there would be any disruption of service. I was told there would be absolutely no problems. A few hours later we lost service for the entire weekend. That's the worse possible time for my wife as she was an editor for an online magazine and the deadline is late Sunday. Because they had flat out lied to me I decided to switch to DSL.
My attempt to cancel with AT&T resulted in me being placed in the on-hold hell they are so famous for. Rather than spend an hour on hold, I hung up and wrote a formal letter canceling my service and told them to contact me to make arrangements for the return of the cablemodem. We kept receiving a bill, and I kept writing "service canceled on {date}" on the bill and attaching a copy of the letter. Eventually, they called me because of an overdue bill. When I said I had cancelled in writing they said you can't do it that way and I had to pay. I said, yes I can cancel in writing and that I would not pay. She tried to insist otherwise, but I stood firm. I got the info to return the cablemodem and haven't been bothered since (other than the occassional junk mail advertising their cablemodem service "now available" in my area).
-- Will program for bandwidth
A: None of your business. I'm not doing your marketing research for you; commission a study if you want that.
Q: What am I supposed to write down on the form?
A: Anything you want. I'm not receiving the form. My next call will be to my credit card company to tell them not to authorize auto-billing from you anymore. At that point, I won't care what's on the form.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Here's how it went using the earthlink support chat thing. Enjoy. Earthlink: Please wait for a site operator to respond. While you are waiting, please feel free to begin typing your issue in the box below. Try to be as descriptive as possible. Once an operator responds, click SEND to transmit what you have typed. Earthlink: All operators are currently assisting other customers. Thank you for your patience. An operator will be with you shortly. [this thing repeated 9 times, then...] 'JoselynR': Thank you for contacting Earthlink LiveChat. How may I help you today? me@earthlink.net: I'd like to try for like the 10th time to cancel my DSL account, and in fact, every account with earthlink. I haven't lived at that address since December, the pac bell line was cancelled, but yet my earthlink dsl account remains active (or so it seems). The credit card used for billing that account has been cancelled so you haven't been able to bill me (thank god). But you might as well cancel my account and stop sending me e-mails about it. Thanks! me@earthlink.net: hopefully your database is not "down" again... JoselynR: what is the last4 numbers of the visa JoselynR: card me@earthlink.net: I have no idea. The card was cancelled long ago. JoselynR: what is the password (since they are cancelling me I don't mind giving this to them...) me@earthlink.net: (xxxxxxxx). luckily i remembered! JoselynR: ok did you want dial up or cancel out the whole acct me@earthlink.net: the whole account please JoselynR: ok one moment JoselynR: Ok, I have set the account to close at the end of this billing cycle for you. Was there anything else I could help with today? c4nc3l JoselynR: the acct will close on 05-25-02 me@earthlink.net: Thanks Joselyn! You are the first person who actually could do it! Thanks! BTW, here's a story about another person's problems trying to close their account: it will be read by many people today. http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/ 14/0138249&mode=thread&tid=95
JoselynR: You're welcome and thank you for using EarthLink LiveChat. Should you need further assistance, please feel free to contact us again.
me@earthlink.net: thanks. you (personally) get an A+
JoselynR: hhehhe
JoselynR: thank you
JoselynR: :0)
=============
and thus my relationship with Earthlink has ended...
Now Rogers had *never* answered their phone for me in less than 30 minutes, and this time was no different. What made it excrutiatingly awful was that the on-hold music was some old-time country and western yodelling music (I kid you not).
When a human finally picked up the other end, the first question he asked was why I wanted to cancel my service. Did I give him an earful!
After that he went on auto-pilot. Confirming my name, address, account number, etc. He was so much on auto-pilot, that he ended the phone call with
"Thank you for choosing Rogers!"
I laughed and hung up.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
I dropped AOL service a long time ago (when 28.2Kb modems were state of the art) and had no trouble at all. I did get a slew of letters from Steve Case wondering why I'd cancelled the service but no surly Customer Service person berating my reason for leaving. :-)
Someone should be explaining to Brian what the job market is like nowadays. Might just clear up that attitude problem he's got.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
John Katz knows what a stamp is? or where the nearest postoffice is?
I just thought of a VERY fast way to get your Earthlink or AOL account cancelled. Send out spam as fast as you can. They have automated scripts to can accounts that send out a certain rate of e-mails.
My roommate signed up for AOL for one day because his usual ISP was down and the man needs his online poker.
He knew they were going to ask him why he was leaving and spent his 30 minutes of hold time thinking of a good response. His conversation went something like this:
AOL guy: Why are you cancelling your AOL service?
Roommate: Did you see the movie Memento?
AOL: Yes
R: I have that same memory problem and I woke up this morning with a note pinned to my shirt that said "Cancel AOL".
AOL: Were you having any problems with your service?
R: I really can't remember. But I should probably do what the note says.
AOL: OK. Your account has been canceled.
You don't owe them any explanation. You're a customer and you don't want to pay them anymore.
That should be enough.
-B
My dad had all kinds of problems with Earthlink when they bought JPS. Double billing, spontaneously discontinued service, you name it. He finally brow-beat them into giving him "for free" the 6 months of service he had already prepaid for under JPS (at double his previous rate, of course). Before the whole thing was over they tried to bill him for it 3 times. Fortunately he keeps every scrap of paper he ever recieves from any company he does business with, immaculately organized, for at least 5 years (sometimes more, when I bought his old truck from him a few years ago he handed me it's file, which had reciepts for oil changes from 1986). He's also run construction crews for 15 years, so he knows a thing or two about being intimidating. The combination is unbeatable in such situations, although I have to give Earthlink props for holding out longer than any company I had previously witnessed him deal with.
Anyway, after the "free" six months was up, Erthlink told him that , not only did he owe them for the last 6 months (which was "free", remember), but that he was obligated to pay for another 6 months, and that he had to give them his credit card number so they could bill him automatically. My dad, having an inherent distrust of corporations, would never have gone for automatic billing anyway, but after all the effort Earthlink had put into trying to screw him, he told them where they could stick their automatic billing and cancelled his account. It took another 3 months for him to get them to stop billing him for service on his canceled account!
The lesson here for you, Katz, is keep a close eye on your credit card bills and make sure they aren't still charging you for your disconnected service. You may even want to take some proactive steps with your credit card company.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Katz forgot a good rule of thumb: if you have *any* flack about cancelling a service, demand a physical address and name for a followup letter and the customer server's rep's name, ID, whatever.
Then write a letter reiterating your cancellation, pointedly noting any information that the customer service rep refused to provide. Then send two copies - one in regular mail with receipt, the second registered with return receipt. You need two because many companies refuse to accept registered mail. If they do, you have the returned letter and the receipt for the unregistered letter with the same contents.
When your CC shows another charge - and many companies that make it that hard to cancel tend to be sloppy about stopping the charges, you *immediately* dispute the charge with copies of the proof that they were notified in writing.
If they do it again, you have the evidence to immediately escalate to a criminal "fradulent activity" complaint. That gives your bank the right to refuse charges, and does tend to get LEA's attention.
The final case is companies that refuse to provide even a mailing address. It's true, a few morons "accidently" hit the telephone hook and think that will make the problem go away. In that case you immediately call your own bank, report the problem properly notifying the company that you're cancelling the service, and ask them to note this in their records. Follow up with a physical letter. Then if you continue to get billed, your bank can present that letter with the notification of a disputed charge and the other company should have more 'splaining to do.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
A few years ago, I signed up for AOL for a few months so I could chat with a then-SO who was half the country away. When the relationship ended, I called the customer service number and, when asked for a reason, told the guy that I had "joined so I could chat with someone who is now an ex-girlfriend."
It took him 10 seconds to cancel my membership.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
(Andy)"Ever tried to quit AOL? They just won't let you. It's like the Roach Motel, they check in, but they don't check out. I'm wasting away the final years of my life on hold."
(Jerry) "So who invented hold anyway?!? That's one person who's going to hell. It's a battle of wills, just like the staring game we played when we were kids. After an hour and a half on hold I'm thinking, just a few more minutes, I know he's about ready to cave, there's no way I'm giving up now!"
(Dave) "The call center, I swear I am not making this up, is actually manned by CIA 'Pain Specialists' who are studying the average time a person will stay on hold before giving up. This is going directly into their Pain Threshold Database for future use in IRS audits."
Except Katz takes himself seriously. Oh, and he's not funny.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
http://www.aol.com/nethelp/findinghelponaol.htm
Whats better, earthlink even will help you cancel your AOL account, among others
http://www.earthlink.net/home/benefits/switchin
Now, as far as the 60 minutes on the phone, that does suck. I would advise people to send a letter in writing to their big ISP of choice, and keep a copy. When the charges show up on your credit card, just do a chargeback, and show your letter as proof. Let them call you.
Interestingly enough, doing a site search on earthlink (google search "cancel site:www.earthlink.com") yielded the above site on how to cancel OTHER services, but no information on how to cancel their OWN service. Must be some kind of an oversight. Yeah, that's it, an oversight. And I'm Paul Bunyan, (booming voice) founder of the internet.
www.avacal.com -- the home page of pete shaw
When my wife tried to cancel her cell phone (she had gone to another service), there line of excuses went:
"We can't"
"We can, but it your contract must run the rest of the year"
"Maybe there was no contract, but there's a $50 service charge"
"Maybe there is no service charge, but you'll have to clear it with the Loyalty department"
At this point my wife is mentions how the Loyalty department has tones of "1984". The service representative says he never saw the movie. *sigh*.
The Loyalty department:
"How about another month's contract just in case you really do need it"
"How about a month's free service" (!)
"How about three months' free service" (!!!)
"Why do you want to cancel?"
"Can you give a better reason?" (!)
Finally, they refused to cancel the service for three months. They'd just stop billing us and if we didn't use the service, it would expire...
Now after all that (which makes for great anecdotes at parties, even if it took a while), they did actually keep their word and we saw no more bills.
I used the account on and off as a backup and to talk with some family members here and there. My account was still comped and a bit of investigation showed that I still had access to the Rainman Plus (AOL's programming language at the time) areas. I kicked off another set of emails about the deal, not wanting to later be accused of something or have someone hijack my account.
Nothing came of it. Finally, 18 months after I'd left the gig I received an apologetic email that basically said "hey, we dont' have a record that you're working with an AOL partner, so we're going to cancel your account in a month unless you provide billing info".
Out of curiosity I paid for a month's access and discovered that hey, I STILL had access to the programming areas of AOL. Oops. I cancelled the account after arguing with Customer Disservice for a while. Despite several phone calls it took six weeks for them to actually cancel it and I never got refunded for the extra two months of charges. Not that I really had much to complain about - it was a comped account for two years.
Biggest thing that pisses me off about ISPs these days is slamming. I set up a branch office with [BrandX] DSL, which we'd get comped for because we do work for [BrandX]'s main business. Anyway, I signed up for it and the next thing I know we were SouthWestern Bell DSL customers. Cancelling service I never ordered would result in an outage of 4-6 weeks, I was told. [BrandX] DSL claimed helplessness about the situation and I had more pressing matters to attend to, so we stuck with SouthWestern Bell.
A short time later, I moved and got into an area provided by a Mom & Pop ISP offering DSL with a static IP. Next thing I know, I'm getting sign-up discs from BellSouth and calls from them about setting up my service. BellSouth was slamming me at home. I got it straightened out after 2 days, then got a couple of calls from BellSouth trying to get me to switch. They said rather than waiting 4 weeks for them to do my DSL install for the Mom & Pop, if I signed up with them they'd get it done in 4-5 days. I stuck with the Mom & Pop who run FreeBSD (yay), are more than happy to provide DNS service, don't mind me running my own web servers, and haven't blocked my ports or filtered my access. Huzzah!
There's a Dial America telemarketing center here that handles incoming AOL cancellation calls. From what I understand from an employee, they get bonuses for convincing customers to change their minds. My guess is, you could get free service just by calling to cancel every month, getting a free month each time.
"All right, how about this. I spend a lot of time writing for a counterculture oriented community based web portal that has a strong dissaproval of AOL and the mindless drones that tend to use their service. Also, AOL doesn't run on Linux, isn't open source, can't be legally hacked, and I can't run it on my heavily modified Sega Dreamcast! It is of no friggin' use to me whatsoever. I would rather dive headfirst into a bucket of cheerios soaking in 3 week old milk that has been sitting in my car growing rancid, and hold my head underwater until I passed out from nausea and/or oxygen deprivation than use this service one day further! Is that a good enough reason for you!"
"Hold on, now. How do you spell counterculture?"
www.avacal.com -- the home page of pete shaw
Mentioning Earthlink and Scam in the same sentence reminded me of the story of Reed Slatkin,(until very recently) Scientologist, who was one of the founders of Earthlink and how he has plead guilty to running one of the biggest Ponzi scams in US history.
Note: Ponzi scam = scam where money collected from later investors are used to pay "dividends" to earlier investors.
With great Scientology management from people like Reed, and Sky Dalton, it's no wonder their customer service is so good.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
"But there's no keyword on AOL -- which has a keyword for everything -- for cancelling membership. If you root around in customer support for a while and keep typing in "cancel service" at every prompt -- I'm talking two or three browser moves and about five minutes, just enough to discourage the rushed, confused or distractable -- you eventually reach a page that offers an 888 number for cancellation of membership."
Really?...I went to www.aol.com, and clicked on "search" at the top of the window. for a search query, I typed "cancel membership". The very first search result is a list of AOL's phone numbers, which clearly lists 1-888-265-8008 as the number for cancellation.
While there's really no excuse for bad customer service these days, it exists, and it's not going anywhere. If Katz actually expected to call a major company like AOL or Earthlink, and NOT get jerked around on the phone, the he's just too niave to be using the Internet.
If all else fails, just don't pay. dispute the charge on your credit card.
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
in brasil is ilegal to refuse currency. so if a service or product is advertised or on sale, the vendor is forced by the law to accept cash. paper bill or coins. the vendor can not impose the use of credit cards or things like that.
so everytime I sign to a service with recurring bills (like an ISP or magazine subsciption) I opt for a bill sent to my snail mail so I can pay in the bank.
this gives me the option of ignoring the bills, which'll force them to disconnect me. I did this several times before and it worked.
What ? Me, worry ?
>At 10:04 a.m., Cindy came on to ask for my name and PW
That's scandalous. They don't need a password to kill your account, they don't really even need it to verify your identity, and they're opening up a window for social engineering.
The only responsible policy is to say, repeatedly and openly, "Our personnel will never ask for your password/PIN/Permissive Action Link code", and to make it stick by training your people never to ask and by making sure they never need to.
I'd be surprised if someone hasn't called Jon Katz and said "Hi, I'm Kevin Mitnick in Earthlink's cancellation department. I can get you out of our billing system after the current cycle just as soon as we complete security verification. To prove that you're authorized to close the account, please give us the account name and password".
Hey at least you got one more long article out of your ISP's, so I guess you needed them still.
The beauty of AT&T Worldnet is that you can cancel online, without any interaction with a person.
I only know about cancellation because I signed up for a second account for a few weeks for a project and cancelled when finished.
I would not think of cancelling my primary Worldnet account. I've had the service for five years now, through multiple cable modems and time out of the country. (When I switch to their $11/month plan)
No surprise.
I'm reminded of when I was a 12 year old stamp collector and got caught up in "approval" buying.
They'd send you a bunch of stamps for $0.01 which would simultaneously get you subscribed to an approval buying service where you had to send things back quickly in order not to buy something.
It was hell to get out of. Granted, a lot of the success of the scheme relates to making it much easier for a customer to buy than for a customer to either notbuy or, worse, antibuy (get a refund.)
The hassles of getting an RMA for a web based order, dialing into a trickle of phone lines, manned 3 hours a day, charged calls that dump you into a voicemail system that either drops you into messages that no one answers, a busy signal, or a dialtone.
Since then, I've noticed that bureaucratic procedures and, yes, incompetence, can be selectively and artfully applied in all kinds of business situations to help profits.
Any business student can tell you that you want to hound your acccounts receivable into a short time scale, while letting your accounts payable drift unpaid as long as possible.
My all time favorite, of course, are health insurance approvals. The footdragging and hassles of dealing with managed health care have absolutely convinced me that bureaucracy and incompetence can be honed into a tool.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I tried using some of their free hours, and foolishly assumed they would warn me before starting to bill me. They never sent me any invoices so it was a few months before I noticed the £10/month going to AOL hidden in my statements. I phoned up and cancelled. My credit card continued to be billed. I did so again, and ditto. After I did this a few times, each time they totally ignored the fact they had told me it was cancelled, so after the final irate phone call I then called my bank and asked them to cancel my current card and send me a new one. Problem solved. Never heard from AOL again. Good riddance, though they screwed me out of about 6 months of charges for something I never used.
Phillip.
PS pssst JonKatz, try getting Verisign to do something simple...
Property for sale in Nice, France
I use an online service to pay bills. I connect, veryify the cert on the ssl site, enter my account and password, then check off the vendors I want to pay, plug in the amount. For the bills that are the same every month (Car, House, Insurance, and so on) I schedule a payment automatically. When/if I don't want to pay them, it's a simple click.
I would never allow any business to bill me automatically for services (aside from the bank I'm using, no way out of that!). It's in their interest to bill me no matter what. It's in my interest to pay my bills when the service meets my expectations.
Moral of this story: Never leave your wallet where someone else can reach in. It never works out in your interest.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Saw a billboard in Tucson a month back advertising for customer retention specialists for AOL. Claimed you could make better than $50,000 a year. That sort of claim usually means they're paying by commission - so whenever you get through to such a specialist and you aren't retained, it's straight out of the specialist's pocket. No wonder the guy thought you were being nasty to him.
___
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Katz gets trashed a lot for his more pedantic stuff, but this is a great article. Well done.
This happened to me too! I thought it was just a fluke. We tried to sign up for Earthlink DSL and were told that we weren't elligible due to location. So we signed up with Bellsouth instead. A few months later we start seeing charges for Earthlink DSL on our account. Took us 2 months to get it cleared up but we DID get them to refund every penny they charged us since I was able to prove that they had never even sent us a DSL modem or anything.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
I cancelled my Earthlink account after business hours in a whopping 4 minutes when I got my DSL, although I was sad to go because SBC/PacBell will never give me the same customer service as Earthlink. They even noticed I'd just been billed the day before for the following month and had it refunded.
As a consumer, business-person, whatever your reasons for wanting internet access, consider requests to verify your identity from your ISP before cancelling or making significant changes to your account a good thing- like when the sales clerk asks for ID when you wrote "SEE ID" on the strip on your credit card. People do actually try to cancel other people's internet service for revenge or a host of other reasons. Dial-up may be easy to restore, but if you went through the hell of DSL installation one time- well, when your circuit goes back into the phone company's "pool," you're screwed into it all over again.
I'm sure the customer records Mindspring turned over to Earthlink completely suck. Not to make excuses for the guy who might have been gruff with JonKatz, but in general, I suspect they are trying to make the best of a suspect collection of customer data from Mindspring- and imagine your annoyance if they cancelled your account instead of JonKatz's because the information they have on old Mindspring accounts is in mixed up.
I've been trying to cancel Cricket cell phone service for the last two weeks. I mapped out their entire voice menu system, all branches eventually lead to one of two options:
1. Pay a due bill
2. Sign up for new service
No option ever takes you to a real person, and if you stay on the line the voice menu just keeps cycling endlessly. I'm beginning to think the entire company resides on an answering machine in some guy's closet.
Walking into an official Cricket office and asking to have the service cancelled leads nowhere. They say they can't cancel the service from there, you have to call personally. Which leads back to the voice menu dance above. Their website consists of five pages or so (easy to print out and carry around at all times--very handy!), no service related options at all.
I think I will be with Cricket for ever and ever, amen.
before they got out of the ISP business, they started sending me bills for $20/mo. Now I never ordered their service, they just started billing me and had somehow attached the account to my AMEX card. So I changed my amex number, and started trying to get this account cancelled. every mont they'd cancel my account, and send me a bill the next month. this went on for 9 months. finally I discovered that it was my father's account I was being billed for, but he was also being billed and paying his service.
I was very close to hiring a lawyer to deal with them when they announced they were getting out of the ISP business. They sent me a notice that my account was going to be cancelled and I was overjoyed. Eventually they quit billing me, but I kind of miss it. Because, you see whenever they credited my account, the credit would end up om my AMEX card. they were giving me $22/month. I dont know why this happened either, but I just loked at it as payment for the hour on the phone I spent with them every month.
"We are not tolerant people. We prefer drastically effective solutions"
When my wife and I got married and she moved in she had an AOL account, which she hadn't used anymore, cause I had the house wired and put her on that. She called AOL and ran into the SAME thing, we can piggy back on your cable, you should leave, drink the koolaid. They make it such a big hassle that it isn't worth canceling, almost.
On a wierder note I got a letter from a collections department of Dial-America (some magazine subscription thing), they claimed I had made a commitment for 2 years of Time (a magazine I personally hate, prefer Newsweek) and I hadn't paid. So I called and it turned out that they had made some mistake or someone had done it from an address I didn't live at and a phone I didn't have. So they canceled it, but after that hassle they tried to sell me a magazine subscription. Like I am gonna buy anything from you guys after all that crap. Maybe the article is right, they are hitting up the timid and none native english speakers.
Once in, you're in for life.
I'll bet Dollars to Doughnuts that he gets at least one more bill from one or both of them. sort of a going away present.
AOL used to be notorious, and probably still is among people that still listen to AOL sob stories... anyhow, they used to be notorious for billing people's credit cards after they had decided to use their free 50 hours and then cancel. (it's up to 1000 now, or something like that. ridiculous...) To get your free 50 hours, of course, you have to give AOL your credit card number. when your 30 days are up, even if you've cancelled, they would too frequently charge your credit card.
and sometimes continue to do so for months, despite repeat cancellations. i've heard of this happening a lot. fun, huh?
now they're touting the fact that you don't need a credit card to get online any more. wow. i guess now you have to give them access to your checking account for automatic drafts.
*new can opened*
*worms everywhere*
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
With banks and credit card companies, press '0' five times seperated by about a half a second. This is what they tell mail order companies to do when they're calling to verify identity when charging to an account. Since the customer may be on hold while the check is happening, they put you through to a person immediatly.
- Go to their primary website and search for advertising or look for an "advertise with us" link.
- Call the toll free number, you will probably not have to wait any time at all.
- Play dumb, "Hello, yes, I was trying to disconnect my service...? The wrong number you say? I'm so sorry, could you please transfer me to the correct people....?"
It works every time.The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
In a world where it ought to be a universal right to get connected instantly
There's pontification for you. He even prefaces it with "in a world where...", a favorite Katzism.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
It took me about 5 calls and 3 days to cancel my earthlink acct. Personally, I find it amusing that their "tech" support was 24 hours a day, but their "customer" service was only like 9-5. Further, I found it interesting that two of the tech support people I spoke to couldn't give me the customer support ppl's number. I, too, had to call the general CS number, and be forwarded to their cancellation dept, which apparently had no public number (from what their CSR's would have you believe). I also found it infinitely frustrating that the only people that can cancel your account are the least accessible. I tried emailing all their depts, the online chat thing (which did NOT work for me), and finally, calling every number I could get my hands on.
;)
I don't remember getting any bull about trying to keep me as a customer, but then again, when I'm talking on the phone, I'm like one step removed from pathological liar ("Um, I'm going to Africa for 6 months. . . I'm getting an OC3 installed in my apartment building. . . due to the nature of my employment, I cannot divulge personal information over insecure lines. )
Now that my new apt has a T1 line, I actually *enjoy* telling broadband telemarketer's the truth.
CSR: You do understand that Verison DSL can give you speeds up to 50 times as fast as dial up access, along with great reliability and consolidated billing with your local phone access.
Me: I've got a T1 line in my apt.
CSR: Well, in many areas, DSL service is faster than a Cable modem.
Me: No, I've got a T1. You know how you guys are an ISP, and you provide internet access to other people via your larger network backbone.
CSR: Er, yes...
Me: Well, that's what I've got. I could be you guys and offer customers broadband access from me. You could NEVER offer me access as fast as what I've currently got. *evil cackle*
CSR: Ok, thanks for your time *sniff*
Even if you don't have a T1, even if your still on dialup. I suggest ppl take this route w/ telemarketers. It'll give you an amazing evil/warm fuzzy all over.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
When I lived in Arizona, I had a friend who worked for AOL. According to the TOS, if you cuss out a support rep 3 times, you're in violation of the TOS and will be terminated. Apparently the way some people cancel is by sending three e-mails to tech support, all full of profanities.
:)
I tried it, and sure enough, it works. Just don't expect to be able to use the same credit card to sign up for AOL again... But then again, why would you want to?
Once I got my own apartment after college, I piggybacked on my parent's AOL account for a while. Back then AOL had a long distance phone deal of 8 cents/minute, not bad for the time. So I signed up with a credit card. Use it for about a year, then got a better deal with someone else. Called AOL Phone service, asked to be disconnected, they said ok. Get billed again next month from new company AND AOL. Call up and ask to be canceled, they say ok again. Next month, the same thing. I call the credit card company and dispute the past 3 months, I do the paper work yada yada. They told me that "Yeah, AOL is really bad on this. We get a lot of calls about them." For 3 more months AOL keeps charging me, and I get the charges reversed through the cc company. Then, I got three more months of charges, but the cc company automatically reversed the charges. It was on my monthly bill! A month passes, and then I get a bill due notice from AOL I somehow still owe them $40 bucks. I call them, they give me some bs about processing fees and inter-LATA fees, so I told them to fuck themselves. Somehow next month my long distance and inter-LATA service was totally dropped. Hmmmm?
Bastards.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
I cancelled an account on a really shitty freelance services (read: website for you to lose business to foreign companies who undercut your price with undermined abilities) asp. It took me three months to figure out how to cancel; there was of course no option to do it online.
When I finally got the guy (via an email to an email from an online email form), I said that I'd already cancelled three months ago and they kept billing me. A lie? Certainly -- but since I hadn't ever used their service and they wouldn't let me leave, they were technically stealing from me. And my mother taught me that theft is worse than falsehood.
They did give me back my $75. Which is more than I can say for my bank (lets call them "El Banquo del Llaves"), which when I quit charge me $290 in overdraft fees because they never turned off my "online bill payment" system. I told the man who called to collect the cash that this was absurd...I had cancelled all the stuff before I cut up my bankbook, just to be sure. "Oh no," he said, "our records show you only cancelled the payees...not the payments. This was all explained in the user agreement you clicked 'yes' too and so you do have to pay the fees. Sucks to be you!" (this last sentance I added for embellishment, because I cannot properly describe his condescending "Read the EULA, idiot" tone. Wait, yes I can. Go to your Pat Burns sysadmin and ask him how to create a shortcut).
Right. Clicked yes. I read all about the legal difference between payees and payments and databases without referential integrity and then consciously made the decision to cancel one and not the other. Sheesh. It's a good thing I'm a highly paid tech worker making the market wage for my skillset(snicker).
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Telocity (Now DirectTV DSL) sends me an email telling me our carrier Ricochet is going out of business and they will no longer be able to provide service. In the email they gave a list of exactly what would happen (no more billing, broadband would stop early sept, free dialup access for 1 month, a package would arrive for the DSL modem in October, our account would be closed automagically). There was a phone number to call for questions. I called and confirmed the information in the email. This was mid August last year.
Two weeks later a bill a telocity charge appears on my credit card. I call em up, they credit the card and "fix" the problem. A month later, another charge appears. I call them up again, they tell me, oh a judge ordered Ricochet to stay open during bankrupcy proceedings so we didn't close your account. Aren't you happy? I explain that I switched ISPs two months ago after receiving their notice. They say, oh sorry, and fix the problem. I check my telocity email and verify they never sent me any notice contradicting the original cancellation notice.
They stop billing my credit card. But I'm curious to see how whacked out these people are so I keep checking my telocity email account to see when they actually terminate the account. It happens sometime in December. In January, they send the prepaid package for the dsl modem (they were supposed to do this in October). A week later a notice arrives saying if you don't send back the modem immediately we will charge your credit card $400. The total Account Closing process took about 6 months.
Either long-distance or SprintPCS, it can take over 6 months to cancel your service.
The long distance is the worst though -- we switched to Working Assets many moons ago (they give you free Ben and Jerry's coupons every month), and we still recieve a bill from Sprint monthly. It's usually for a nickel, or for 50 cents, or some paltry amount that they would most likely be losing money on collecting anyway, even if it weren't for the fact that we'll never pay them another cent.
Usually a brusque "I don't want to get into why I'm cancelling, just cancel me" will work. Sometimes you'll have to say it twice, but it's best to get it out of the way early on in the conversation.
The telemarketing company she worked for had been contracted by a credit card company ( Citibank I think but I'm not sure ) to take calls from people requesting that their credit protection insurance be cancelled. This is the insurance that will pay your monthly minimum balance for a period of time should you get fired or layed off, but not if you quit your job. The credit card companies charge a fee that is often more than the principle payed on your minimum monthly balance to your card so you do not see a big difference on your monthly bill, yet the balance increases even though you've been paying your minimum and not charging anything.
According to her most people who called had been shnookered into signing up by a fast talker when they signed up for the card and didn't even know they'd signed up for the insurance until they examined the bill closely-often years after being signed up.
The telemarkers that take the calls have minimum quotas ( make this or get fired or lose hours ) and incentives ( state lottery tickets and cheesy prizes ) to make 'saves'. A 'save' is a customer they've convinced or confused into keeping the insurance. Often this is done by saying to a customer that's been on the phone a long time and is tired some statements like that 'they would be happy to cancel the service if that is what you want' to get the customer saying yes and then 'We are glad to be of help in answering your questions and would be pleased to confirm that you have chosen to keep this service' the cusomer says 'yup' and then *CLICK* a few seconds later the customer sometimes realizes that they have to call the number again because they've been schnookered or they discover on their next bill that they are still signed up if they bother to look.
Being pissed off at a telemarketer and acting rudely is a good way to get them to say yes to everything you say yet keep you signed up. They can just claim that they hit the wrong key, and the job isn't worth much to them anyway. The telemarketing company doesn't have an interest in keeping this to a minimum as long as they have a scapegoat employee to 'discipline' if anything serious happens, and telemarketers know they can earn $6.50 - $7.00 / hr anywhere. About a third come in to work stoned and most are teenagers.
I'm sure AOL and Earthlink either contract this out or pay their own minions to do this. And since these kinds of tactics keep people signed up.
Eat at Joe's.
When I was in the military I found it easy to sign up for AOL's free hours to stay online during a relocation. Then when I got where I was going and found a suitable dial-up, I would cancel the account before the free time was up. Abusing the system? Maybe but that's not the point here. :) The point is that every single time AOL happily accepted my cancellation request and then proceeded to charge me a monthly fee anyway. And every single time I had to call them back twice before the charges actually stopped. Most popular, hell! They just simply charge everyone and count them as happy customers.
When asked why you are cancelling, don't tell them the truth, lie.
AOL REP: And why do you want to cancel your account?
ME: I've converted my religion and am no longer allowed to use computers.
AOL REP: That doesn't sound legitimate.
ME: Are you questioning my faith, because if you are, that would be discrimination. My church has lawyers to deal with this kind of thing.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
My parent's signed up for AOL dialup a few years back (when AOL sent out floppies instead of CDs).
The AOL sign up program dialed a 1-800 number that signed them up and set up a local dial-up number for them to use. Well they never were able to use AOL _once_. Every time that they called the local dial-up it was busy. After a week of this, they decided to cancel.
They called AOL customer service who told them that they had to cancel their service online. Customer service wouldn't budge when my parents told them that they couldn't get online to cancel. My parents called several times, and every time were told that they couldn't cancel by any means other than getting on-line.... And they were never able to get online.
Finally, after trying to cancel their service for three days I had to call for them and literally yell at the AOL person and threaten to place a fraud complaint with their credit card company, and that finally got them canceled.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
On August 7, 2001 I moved from my apartment to a new place and new service provider. During this time, my previous provider (CapuNet) had been closing off their residental service and sending its customer base to Earthlink. I had called in late July 2001 and received a cancellation number from CapuNet technical support that my line would be shut down on August 7, 2001 and billing would stop.
On September 13, 2001 I receved a credit card statement from WWW*EARTHLINK.NET posted to my card (that I never directly provided to Earthlink) for $62.27 from 8/29/01. Despite numerous calls every month to contest the charges and assurances from Earthlink billing department that my account had been disabled (every time!) these charges continued until December 11, 2001!
You can read the full story here: Earthlink Billing Practices.
Rob Carlson
It took me about 3 tries to cancel Earthlink. I went through the phone maze about like you described, although I managed to find customer service fairly directly and they were the right people to terminate the account. They did not argue with me and told me that the account was cancelled. The next month, I saw another charge on my bill. I called back and they had no record of my first attempt at cancellation. They entered my cancellation again. Next month, same story. It is finally really cancelled after the third phone call, in which they saw my account "noted" that I wanted to cancel, but it had not been entered into the billing system. I guess they won, since I am unwilling to call again and harangue to try to get some charges reversed on my credit card. I do want to say that I was generally happy with Earthlink which I used as a dial backup to my normally cable-modem-connected linux router for the house. Lets just say that the dotbomb downsizing strongly encouraged me to take severe economy measures like shutting off backup network access services and even shutting down my cluster when I was not actually using it ( $100 per month in electric power for a 4 node cluster ! )
Zoot
enough is too much
There is this little problem of a credit rating.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
In mid-1999 I changed job, from research science to an ISP. I got free, unlimited dial-up as part of my contract. Then in mid-February 2001 I was laid off. Some comments were made about falling revenues and low currencies...
Shortly after this I moved overseas for a while (12 months so far) for a taste of the world. While I got 12 months free access as part of redundancy, dial-up access isn't so much use if it's with a regional ISP (Australia+NZ) located on the other side of the planet (I'm in England).
But I do have contacts on the inside, and my bosses are very reluctant to lose customers. After talking via email to people in Human Resources I got switched to Marketing's weirdest account type, the "Anytime". Quite why we (programming department) let this one slip past is anyone's guess, but what they want, they get. If it's possible and legal.
Get this: nothing a month, nasty expensive connect time of NZ$2.95/hour (IIRC), but it comes with the free 5 email addresses and 10Mb web space. No cost, no need to change my email or web addresses (always a big hassle) and no downside . I mean - it's not like I want international call charges and and connect charges just for 56k - which almost certainly won't happen with some of the line quality and delay issues I've had on some voice calls.....
... and today's pet project has
I had a friend who joined AOL and called the next day to cancel his account. They put the screws to him and he got a lower monhtly rate.
I asked him "Why did you want to quit right after joining?" and he said "I didn't. I wanted to see if I could get a lower rate".
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Don't bother calling them. Just send them a registered letter 30 days before about the cancelation. And then cancel your credit card and get a new one.
I recommend a $500 credit card limit "sacrificial" card. It gets good amount of activity from electronic transactions (from tatteredcover, etc.) and about once every six months you loose it. It is amazing how the card just disappears... I mean my sacrifical card just spontaneously combusts in the drawer where I keep it... Oh well, with just a simple call I get a replacment; one with a new number. Then I call up the services I still have that monthly bill (NY Times, etc.) and tell them about the new card number. In this manner I've been lucky enough not to have my credit card used for purchases that I don't approve. I've been amazed at the calls I get within the next 30 days after canceling... A friend of mine has had his card for 3-4 years, he didn't want to "loose" it since he had memorized the number and didn't want to have to re-learn it; problem is, every vendor (and any cracker that has broken in to the vendors) knows the number too... luckly he has alot of time to sort out all of the invalid billings on his card. I don't have that kind of time, memorizing a new credit card number every few months is a bit easier... I think.
When I signed up for a Verizon phone at Radio Shack, I noticed a blank at the bottom of the form in the sentence describing the early termination fee. I can't stand to see a blank on a form ( especially such an important blank ) so I strongly suggested to the sales clerk that we fill in that blank with $5.00. I think five bucks is a reasonable amount to pay for them to turn of my service.
Sure enough, about 3 months before the end of the year's service obligation, my son lost the phone and we decided to cancel since it was costing him too much anyway (read he used it too freely) and the insurance on the phone had a significant deductable.
I took my copy of the original contract to the local Verizon store ( the telephone customer service people said they could not read the form over the phone, imagine that! ) and they verified that the $5.00 was in the spot where I said it was, and that it was the original MCR form, not me writing it in with a pen on my copy only. Verizon honored the contract and did in fact charge me only $5 to cancel although on my final bill this showed up as a combination of the normal termination fee plus a customer service credit cancelling all but $5.00 of the fee.
Zoot
enough is too much
Sounds good! You could make a little money and get a larger penis at the same time as cancelling your account!
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
don't have cable yet still on dialup but my local isp is quite friendly and all that jazz. never have any rpoblems with them and the office where I pay my bill in cash is only ten miles away. if you live in hampton roads, va and have tired of gargantuan ISPs that might I suggest Pinnacle. I'm just a satisfied customer.
-
...can be found via a basic google search. (It's not like there aren't any other companies who want your business, Jon.)
They are:
Regular Accounts (only)
1-800-890-6353
DSL
1-888-829-8499
Web Hosting & Business
1-888-237-0148
My "karma's" wedged at 50, so no I'm not whoring.
Two hours? HOURS? Try days or weeks. I had one ISP a few years ago send me to a collections agency when I cancelled my credit card in desperate response to nine months of unauthorized charges. (They lost my check and asked for a credit card number to hold and use in case the second check didn't arrive. They found the first check, cashed it, cashed the second check, then billed my credit card periodically for nine months...)
.au sites, causing me to become disoriented and vomit. Now my CueCat's all plugged up.
...and the number one reason you should disconnect my SDSL line:
My experience cancelling service with Speakeasy was much easier, but still not easy. I was particularly infuriated with the notion that I had to justify why I was cancelling, or they wouldn't stop billing me. (Notice the terminology: they consider it a "cancellation request" while I consider it a "cancellation order" -- just whose wallet is it?)
So for your amusement, I present the letter I sent to them (I don't have a place to host the original PDF):
----------begin----------
Speakeasy Networks
2222 Second Ave
Seattle, WA 98121
attn: Billing (xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) [hardcopy sent by registered mail]
8 February 2002
ref: Incident xxxxxx-xxxxxx, Incident xxxxxx-xxxxxx
Dear Speakeasy Minions:
After filing two cancellation orders and following up with three messages, you're evidently refusing to disconnect SDSL service to my house unless I provide you with some sort of explanation for canceling the service. The simple answer is "because I don't want it anymore." But apparently that's not good enough for you to act. So, here's...
The Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Disconnect My SDSL
10. Every time you reboot the Redback, locusts shoot out of the unused ports on my router and the activity lights bleed.
9. I think you're a front for Al-Queda opium e-distribution networks, and President Dubba says that breaking my addictifications is a patriotic act against the Axle of Evil.
8. I got busted by the Amish Gelassenheit Squad, and they smashed the server running www.bonnetandbuggiewhip.com I'd hidden inside the butter churn.
7. The firewall melted when I tested it with a torch. What kind of crappy firewall is that?
6. SDSL uses an expensive dedicated line; unnecessary expense = pork; pork = unclean.
5. I'm going to work for a secret government agency and won't be home for a while.
4. With access to all that pr0n, I got masturbatory abrasion injuries and carpal tunnel syndrome, so what's the use of a fast line when I can only type with two splinted fingers?
3. The big round Speakeasy logo swirls the other way when I visit
2. Using an 802.11 card, a Shannon Compensator, a homemade yagi, and a 60,000-watt amplifier, I'm getting Terabit service from a place on 2nd & Pine, right through your skulls.
1. I'm the customer, and I told you to.
Please note that an unwillingness or procedural inability to act on your part does not compel me to purchase or pay for unwanted service from you. I gave reasonable advance notice about wanting the line disconnected, and provided an additional cancellation notice (two, actually) through your support system on the day you requested I do so. At that time you did not notify me that you would want some sort of justification, verbal defense, heartfelt apology, explanatory Dear-John letter, or separation therapy sessions before you would act on my cancellation order. My notice of cancellation was sent before the paid-up period ended on 2002.02.02, so your delay in processing the cancellation only increases your non-recoverable costs from Covad. I'm done using the line, I'm done paying, and I'm done talking about it.
Just turn it off.
Sincerely,
Jon Espenschied
(if you wish to email me, please use my new address: xxxoffensivexxx@xxxdomainxxx.com)
----------end----------
Yah, that did the trick.
-Jon
firstname.lastname - acm.org
I think not...(*poof*)
Didn't work that way for me. You must have gotten someone with a brain.
5 69 &cid=3538888
http://features.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=32
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
You must have more money than I do (either that, or less sense ...)
I would have said something like this:
Sir, are you sure that with the post-9/11 era, the era of the globalistic information superhighway, you can afford to not be connected to the internet? It is a place of free-thinking, an exchange of ideas between the "haves" and the "have nots", where one minute you can be ordering books from your favorite author (such as yourself) and the next you can be instantaneously connected to and annoying thousands of netizens. I don't know about you, sir, but I think this is an incredible time we live in, the age of the internet. Are you sure you would like to cancel your service? I don't know, maybe I can do that, maybe I can't. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
As someone in tech support I can say that you lost the guy at that point, from this point on he did not want to help you. NEVER ask for a supervisor unless you have no other option. Plus the "supervisor" you talked to was just the guy in the next cube over.
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
Just wait 'till next month's credit card bills.
I bet you ten-to-one you're still getting billed by both.
And the month after, too...
You're not out of their nets, yet. [pun intended]
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
I hurt his feelings.
Ah, AOL! Sweet revenge?
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
My name is Edward and I work for earthlink customer service, I won't try and defend earthlink as for the transfering around to different departments (although if you can provide me with the names of the reps you spoke with I will be more then willing to 'look into this for you') but, as with any phone tree for ISP's, there are usually only 3 options to select.
1)Technical Support (handles technical issues *obviously*)
2) Customer Service (handles billing and account maintenance - cancelling would be account maintenance)
3) Sales (obviously handles the setup of new accounts)
Each of our 3 divisions has access to different databases (to streamline the 'customer experience' by letting reps focus on specifics).
As for the hold time - I have a LCD display that allows me to see how long someone has been on hold. For the past month now our hold time hasn't been over 10 minutes in customer service (if you call during peak hours *8am-5pm PST respectively). If you call after of before peak hours our hold time is next to nothing (if we even have a hold time at that) Our Tech support line hasn't had a hold time for at least 3 months now.
As for account verification - we accept the last 4 digits of your credit card, calling the account holder back at the phone number listed on the account, a secret word (which the user sets up at time of initial signup), or the last 2 characters of the password (after which the user would be required to setup a secret word).
I can't speak for AOL on these matters (for obvious reasons)
They have to have your credit card number to tell if you're close enough to the central office?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
The funny thing is - part of me was bothered by the thought of somebody else assuming my identity, even if I'd never handed it out as an email address or visited any forum where anyone would see it. AOL was just a relatively convenient way of getting on the 'net to do real work in hotel rooms. That feeling of disturbance lasted about two seconds before I laughed at myself for being an ass.
"So let me get this straight: what you're telling me is that I can't tell you that charges from Company XYZ are not to be accepted and that while I could report my card lost and get a new number issued, you might helpfully forward those recurring charges to my new number since I've done business with that merchant before. So I'll know when I call next month, how long does it take to cancel my card? Also, can I have your name and/or employee number again?"
fencepost
just a little off
...until they get bought up by a larger company which then sells out to an even larger company which then...
While you still have a "local" (i.e., you can go to their office and talk to the owner and top tech person) ISP, go talk to them about gettting the phone company to connect you and your ISP via DSL. After all, if you're in a small town you ought to be close to the central office. Support your local ISP while you still have one so that they don't have to sell out.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
>Once you contact the credit card company and
>tell them the charge is unauthorized, the monkey
>is on the VENDOR's back.
Yeah spammers love this. They sign up for an account, spam from it. We close it down and charge them a spam clean up fee. They dispute both the spam clean up fee and the initial charge for service. The ISP GET *F*CK*D*, 2 charge backs, and cleaning out from asshole spammer who wants to make your penis larger.
Aup doesn't work, Credit Card companies simply won't allow it saying that we don't have a signature. THE ONE TIME I had a signature (on both an AUP and credit reciept) The credit card company dicked around for 9 months, and the spammer had long since cancelled the card. ISP screwed again.
Moral of the story, want to cancel, call your credit card company, they are your friend. They sure as hell aren't the small business guys friend! Unless of course your business is SPAM.
cluge
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Yeah, I first got cable trough Highway1 which became MediaOne after it was aquired (by SBC I think). Now it has become AT&T Broadband of course. Soon it will likely change a third time if Comcast is successful.
Each time it seems that either customer service or the quality of service takes a hit. I remember having a cheap MediaOne pen that they had sent to me. If someone wanted to borrow a pen that is the one I would lend them with the caution that it doesn't always work. They would always retort "Yeah, just like the service".
I tried calling AOL about a free trial after reading Jon Katz' story at 800-509-7538. In talking to them I asked where would I call if I wanted to cancel. The offer said I could cancel durring the free period and not be charged at all. The woman gave me a number that I should call, 888-265-8008. The person at that number said I needed to call another number, 888-346-3704, which turned out to be Tech Support. Tech support said I had to talk to the Billing Dept at 888-265-8003. The Billing Dept in turn said I needed to call 888-265-8008. I told the Billing Dept that I had already been given that number to call and that I wouldn't be signing up for AOL. So my little test did indeed corroborate Jon's experience.
BTW - AOL does not support Linux, I specifically asked them. So if anyone wants to cancel and gets asked why, just tell them that you have moved to a Linux OS.
I called the number and waited an insane amount of time on hold. In fact, it took me several days of calling, waiting for an hour or so and then hanging up before I finally got through to someone. When I told them I wanted to cancel, they asked me for a reason, and I told them something along the lines of "I'm spending the next three years as a researcher in Antarctica," and they apparently believed me. They canceled my service without any hassle.
Of course, there was no reason this couldn't have been done automatically, online, but that's capitalism for you.
Try switching an (existing, personel) ATT cell phone to your corporate account (because the only way you'll get reimbursed is to be on the account). No problem, as the account holder, they'll gladly do it, making your corporation liable, not you, in the eyes of ATT for the bill.
...No rep, no switch.
Then, quit your job and call to get billing switched back to you. (After all, you want to keep your number - it isn't used as a corporate standard number, such as some sales reps have and they don't want the # walking becuase clients will use it and they assign it to a new rep)No problem - have your offical corporate rep call and authorize the switch. Point out you work for a hugh firm with offices everywhere - you have no "offical cell phone rep."; and their records show I opened the account and did the first switch. Yes, all that is OK, says ATT, but
My solution - get my old admin assistant to call and be the offical rep (heck, she is probably mor epowerful than our lead partner anyway)- instant switch. All is well, until ATT discovers they overbilled you and credited money to the old account. Call ATT, go through 3 supervisors until one finally realizes the credit can be applied to the existing account and the old account closed out. Can't refund it to credit card, even though they have all the details.
I still get a monthly bill for $0.00 on the corporate account.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Wow. I never had it that bad. The most I got to was 3 three calls. They usually got it on the 2nd.
:) I also have a rather extensive collection of Installation CDs. I figure if I keep them out of circulation, so much the better. Eventually I'll find a suitable method of disposal.
I hate AOL. With a vengeance.
Easy dude. All that hate isn't good for your blood pressure. I limit my hate to bad mouthing them to everyone who will listen.
Did you ever get your demo?
Just get a hold of one of the sleazoid bulk mailer apps and start spraying email in all direction. I can guarantee your service will be terminated in less than a day with no long phone calls...
:-)
;-)
I did something similar years ago after encountering a similar problem with an old ISP (now no longer in business, guess that just about sums it up). After being repeatedly put on hold then disconnected when attempting to cancel I thought I'd take matters into my own hands...
A few choice newsgroup articles spelling out my experience (massively crossposted to generate complaints), running a bot to post random text to their sales@ and abuse@ addresses for a few hours and the finale - plastering (possibly illegal) pornography all over my personal web space and I was soon disconnected
Obviously not the route to go down if you ever intend using an ISP again, but... well... I didn't
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
I'd been a customer of a local ISP for about five years. During that time, they were bought up by a larger regional ISP, which was then bought up by an even larger one.
:-) Apparently they don't get many calls, since almost everyone deals directly with their more local subsidiaries, even though everyone's billing goes directly to this entity. I got right through, no holding, unlike the hour or so I'd wasted on hold at the smaller subsidiaries. I told the woman who answered that I'd like to cancel my account; she asked my name and address and account name, and then said I was cancelled. She didn't even ask for my password, much less my credit card number for verification. I was floored--and relieved.
:-)
I'd been happy with my service. $9.95 a month, only very rare connection problems or time-outs. But hey--it was finally time for cable! Yum, more pr0n, faster.
So, I called the ISP at the local office I'd signed up at year ago. They wanted to know what my username and password were, and what my bank card number was--I'd had direct billing. So, I gave it all to them--but wait, the bank card number wasn't right. Just a moment, I said; there's a second card since it's a joint account, and I might have signed up with that other number. But no, that number didn't match either. Oops, I remembered--a couple months earlier my bank sent out replacement cards, with instructions to destroy the older ones. Hmmm. I'd signed up with a bank card number I no longer had.
So, they said they couldn't help me cancel "for security purposes" without the card number. But, I have the password? Nope, it doesn't matter because the password could have been shared with a third party. But wait, isn't that against your TOS? Umm, yes, but it doesn't matter I still can't cancel your account.
So, supervisor time. Same song and dance. No disconnection.
That's when I called the company which had bought the old local company, and went through a similar song and dance. No luck.
So, I called the bank, which said they couldn't stop payment on any debit card withdrawals unless I come in and sign some forms. I'd hate to waste more of my day...
So, I finally called the larger ISP which had bought the regional ISP which had bought the local ISP.
Of course, I had a friend who was not so lucky at getting his desired cancellation. He couldn't get it done, no matter what he said--I don't remember what he no longer had that they needed for verification. I do, however, remember how he finally got his desired account cancellation: he e-mailed the sysadmin listed on the ISP's site, and said something like "Your billing department refuses to cancel my account. Well, I'm e-mailing you from the address associated with my account, to tell you that if you don't cancel my service immediately, I will post my dialup username and password and POP server information to several websites and newsgroups frequented by spammers and hackers, so that they can use my account for whatever they want until you cancel it yourself for TOS violations. I apologize, but this is my last recourse. I'm giving my account details to spammers and hackers in two days, unless my account is cancelled by then."
Well, he got his account cancelled that way.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
I had an account I used to test their browser on some of the sites my company made. When I cancelled, they gave me the same pile of shit. They asked for a reason ... and after refusing to accept the first reason, I told Mary that SHE was the reason. That before the call, I wasn't sure, but now that I'd spoken with her, I was convinced. It was Mary's fault.
Hey Katz!
You think it's over?
Just wait till next month and check your credit card bills... I think you'll be in for a nice surprise. Just because they SAID they cancelled it, doesn't mean they did.... Your still only at level 1 of 17 as far as the cancellation escallation is concerned. You're going to have to complain to VISA, the SEC and the UN before this is over.
My wife connected us to AOL when we moved back to the US while I shopped for a local ISP since they had a free month. I found I couldn't connect to a POP3 mailbox with AOL.
Disconnecting was the same problem of having to find the right party who does the sore looser sales pitch begging you to stay.
I complained about the inability to receive my mail. They of course offered to migrate my mail. I expressed concern of the volume of users exposing the system to dictionary spam attacks. I wished to keep my existing account as it was not subject to spam. I asked when they would permit receiving POP3 mail from another ISP and send my mail through AOL with a proper return address. They did not support that, so I repeated please disonnect me, I have found a local ISP with good ping times that does support POP3 mail.
Find a valid technical reason to switch and the sales pitch dies. Use ping times, D/L speeds, poor first connect rates, anything!
The truth shall set you free!
I went onto their website, and went to "LiveChat". I remembered my username, but not my password - they got by with the last 4 digits of my credit card number, and 2 minutes later it was done.
I do not understand it. Send them a snail mail cancellation letter stating that you cancel the service, effective a.s.a.p.. As long as they do not deny getting that letter, this will have the desired effect (denying getting the letter wuld be criminal). Sending a copy via email usually speeds things up. If this fails once, send certified mail (possibly with a witness of for the letter content) and if this still fails cancel their bills. From this point on it will get expensive for them. So far I never had to do more then send the letter.
Should not take more than 10 Minutes in all.
I have never had problems with this procedure. But I am in Europe, things might be a little different here....
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
Naturally, I called the number, connected me to a sales agent: "Are you sure you really want to cancel?" She even offered to let me have another month free, and tried to haggle. I threatened to call my credit card company for a chargeback, at which point they agreed to (really) cancel it, and refund the additional bill.
Okay, I had Sympatico DSL using Nortel equipment. I was also paying for an ISP I _like_ for dial-up. Don't ask So, my ISP has recently add their own equipment in my CO, so I wanted to move my equipment/service. I signed a Letter of Authorization, and my ISP put in a provisioning request to Bell Canada to run a loop of wire in the CO to their cage.
What that was supposed to give me was POTS Dial Tone, plugged into Sympatico's Nortel Line Card, plugged into MyISP's Alcatel DSLAM, plugged into my pair that comes to my house. The Alcatel DSLAM was supposed to (and did) filter out the frequencies used by the Nortel, rendering that stuff dead.
The day the loop was provisioned, I lost Nortel sync, and my shiny new Alcatel modem got sync. Yeah! My sync rate went from 960kbps down to 1.7Mbit down, 128kbps up to 792kbps up. Yeah!
One week later, I lost sync. Long story short, the Bell tech that ran the loop for MyISP saw the Nortel gear, and escalated a discrepancy report to "upper techs". She was sent back to remove it, because it CAN'T work. Meanwhile, my shiny new static IP, and my high-speed service, and my domain, and my mail server and my web server and my... all went DOWN.
Bell refused to replace the loop to MyISP's cage, because it CAN'T work. So I called Sympatico. This was Feb1st. I was told that yes, I could cancel, but it wouldn't take effect, and I would continue to have service until the date of my monthly renewal; the 28th of the month. (!) Had I cancelled the day before, I would've been shut off within 48 hours.
I offered them extra money to please get their Nortel equipment de-provisioned off my line. I was told that no, I HAD to enjoy the rest of my month.
I escalated to tech support, with a fresh cancellation number. (These guys can put in trouble-tickets to Bell, why not de-provision tickets?) They can't.
I escalated to Bell Provisioning. Their computers didn't show my cancellation (well, duhh, they won't until the 28th!) They wouldn't deal with me because I didn't request the provisioning in the first place. Only Sympatico can request their equipment be pulled.
So who authorized the equipment I asked MyISP to attach be removed?!?
End of story: MyISP's owner knows the Bell tech who first provisioned the loop, and second pulled the loop. She agreed to go back out that afternoon and re-provision the loop, and make up some crazy paperwork later. While she was at that CO, she also pulled the Nortel equipment off my line, knowing that I'd cancelled Sympatico.
So, if you REALLY want things done, know people.
"Oh no... he found the
I think the reason he had trouble is because he said he was trying to cancel. He should have said he wanted to close or terminate his account.
:P
I can see how someone may think that he signed up and then decided to cancel his account immediately afterwards, without paying fees. If they could see his info in their computers, they should have seen that he was not in his first billing period and figured out what he really meant.
I guess in any case the are idiots/overworked.
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
Heck, I sometimes do this at work. For the 30 minutes I'm on the phone, I can get 29 minutes of real work done.
It's also fun when some service droid says "Please take me off speakerphone". I always say: "If I have to be on hold, you get the speakerphone. Too bad."
While I'm on the subject, here's a typical exchange between me and a voice menu system, to keep my sanity:
1) Dial number. "Welcome to FooCoo! Please listen careful--"
2) Press 0: "Thank you for calling! Enter your nine digi--"
3) Press 0: "You've reached the Customer Serv--"
4) Press 0: "That response was not undersood. Please try--"
5) Press 0: (o/~ Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head o/~)
6) Wait.
7) Human answers.
Most places take 3 or 4 zeros. Really huge bureaucracies might take 10 to 15.
Time spent: 4 seconds reciting your account number. Time saved: 13 minutes listening to five different ten-option voice menus.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
It took my father more than two months *after* AOL assured him they would cancel his service for them to stop billing him for it. He had to call back again and argue for more than an hour to be credited...which took them 90days to run through.
1. I would like to speak to your manager (use this if you've been on hold too long for something simple)
2. Something to the effect of: if you do not take care of this promply (i.e. right f'ing now!) I will dispute the charges with my bank/credit company.
3. I will never do business with you again and I will specifically recommend to all my friends, family, coworkers, and business clients not to use your service.
Oh yeah you better bet that's the kind of thing that gets those bastards' attention. They don't care about you, they don't care about anything except money. You are a paying customer, it's your damn money, and if need be you should throw that weight around.
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Shit, you guys went about it the AOL way. I chatted with an Earthlink guy online via their secure chat and it took 5 minutes for me. It was the night before the trial period ended. Couldn't have been more painless or easier.
It's called "retention" - getting the customer to keep patronizing your business. Not a big deal, regular business practice and understandable. But when the company HIDES its contact information, and BURIES the department ten levels deep in its phone system, in order to make it as hard as possible to cancel... that's messed up.
Derek
err this is Jon Katz sorry silly question.. Just call VISA, tell them you made a valiant effort to cancel your account but support is not co-operating, PLEASE NO LONGER ACCEPT CHARGES FROM EARTHLINK/AOL....Simple and done is 5 minutes, but then you'd not have anything to whine about you poster child for birth control.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
They first claimed we were. And they would send us our modem etc... Then we called back when we didn't recieve it and they said we weren't elligible. This was after they had already gotten all of our information.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
AOL was my "training wheels" for a while, and my wife (then a teacher) loved all the content related to her profession. But at length, we outgrew it and cancelled. I didn't have any trouble getting ahold of an account rep, and when asked "Why are you leaving?" I simply told them I wanted to use a straightforward ISP instead. He could'nt have been a nicer man; he offered to give me free months, and when I demurred, he told me AOL would hold our screen names in case we reconsidered.
Bear in mind that this was eighteen months ago, before AOLTW came under the severe financial pressure and market scrutiny it's "enjoyed" lately.
Incidentally, I switched to Earthlink, and I've had nothing but positive experiences dealing with customer and technical service there, too. There was one minor glitch where my billing got screwed up, and once we all figured out what was wrong, everything was cool. Everyone I've talked to has been a reasonable, attentive, polite adult.
Sorry to read about your frustrations, Jon.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
I just cancelled my Earthlink/Mindspring account. I called 800-719-4660 and went through 2 levels of voice menu, waited about 20 seconds, and got a live person. After providing my email address, code word, and verifying my address, I asked them to cancel my account. When asked why, I told them it was an issue with tech support (actually there were several such issues but I didn't go into detail). They told me the account was now closed and my credit card removed from it. The call went through smoothly, so we'll see if it actually works.
By comparison, tech support is a mess. The last time I called, the wait time was quoted to be 46 minutes but I was unwilling to wait on the phone that long (maybe I should have, as it was a toll-free line, but I had other things to do). I emailed tech support, and the response I got back over the course of about 4 exchanges suggested the person (different each time) either did not read what I said, or could not read English. That's not an uncommon problem that email tech support has for most companies. Even when talking to people by voice, I after have to go into explanations for them (some actually end up understanding it when I do that). Unfortunately with email support, there is no opportunity to gauge their level of (lack of) understanding, especially because the reply ends up being handled by a different person.
My Earthlink/Mindspring account was not my only account. I have almost a dozen dialup accounts. So it was no big loss (and in fact a savings of $21.95 a month) to drop one. It was my only nationwide dialup account, but I found another company that provides them, so I will probably next try out these guys. They are slightly lower cost, list Linux in their support, and even offer shell accounts. So maybe the move will be worthwhile if these guys are honest.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Either you write about 1000 bills a year, or you have a horrible memory and expect to pay ridiculous late fees. If you pay all your bills by check on time, you might pay about $25 more per year for the stamps and the cost of checks. And since electronic auto-payment usually gets deducted 2-4 weeks before the end of the grace period, you might actually make some of that $25 back in interest you earn by holding on to your money longer.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The propositioning children part.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10