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AOL Tries New Tactic to Keep Customers
Jhon writes "AOL customer Vincent Ferrari tried to cancel his account, but a phone rep wouldn't let him do it. What he got when he tried to cancel his account was a lot of frustration. Now that's customer support!"
Just for his trouble they probably signed him up again for 6 free months!
Link to mp3 recording. Putfile's proper site for this requires a proprietary download just to run the file, so have this link instead. They'll probably move it though to make us look at their annoying page.
Here's link to Vincent's blog. He's been dugg and farked and all the other usuals by now (which is why the file is now on putfile), so be gentle with the poor bastard's bandwidth. He's just come out of a very rough breakup, after all!
Also, this isn't a new tactic at all. That spin isn't in the linked article or anywhere else, so I guess 'Jhon' is to blame.
Opinions on this practice aren't as one-way as you might expect. It's kind of surprising to see a site called 'consumerist.com' reply to
withPricks.I remember hearing a similar complaint about AOL years ago, where people who had gotten the "1000 free hours for a month" thing signed up, and tried to cancel. This time, they were told they were cancelled, but weren't... and started getting charged automatically.
It got him fired when publicity came out. AOL has had a long history of this. I ran into this years and years ago when trying to cancel a free 100 hours account before broadband. The victim is probably Vincent who was just doing what his supervisor told him to do. But, atlas, that's what you get to be when the bottom falls out; the scapegoat at the bottom.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
When I used to subscribe to AOL 1.0 they made you call to cancel. There was never a way to do it online. The waiting time was very long on the phone. I listened to a lot of bad elevator music then.
The Custom Mary
Couldn't he just stop paying the bill? Wouldn't that cancel the account? Or is there something that I'm not aware of?
for months. But I keep getting sucked in to inane threads like this one.
It's like crack I tell ya!
The fact that companies are able to get away with this sort of thing is ridiculous. Seriously, it ought to be illegal.
I actually heard somewhere that if you call, identify yourself and your account, say, ``Cancel the account'' and hang up, they can't do anything about it and must cancel it. I do not know myself. Does anyone else?
A similar thing has actually happened with my friend, albeit with Comcast and with signing up as opposed to cancelling. He called to ask about prices and the exact product. After the lady told it to him, he asked her to wait a few minutes and asked a family member about purchasing. The family member told him that he was busy and to call Comcast back later. After my friend told this to the lady, her response was ``Well... what if I gave you another five minutes, will you be done then?'' He responded that he will not. Her answer was ``But I don't understand! It's so easy! I'm giving you five minutes...'' At this point, my friend completely lost it, and screamed ``I don't bloody care whether or not you understand it! I will call back later!'' and hung up.
it seems that "customer service" reps are trained now to intentionally make a caller angry in order to give them justification to cut off the caller for "verbal abuse". it's happened to me more than once.
Here's the same story from the 20th Century
a r b o r l a w -- legal blog for entrepreneurs and small business
AOhell got its name somehow, right? these tales go all the way back to Quantum Online running on the non-windows DOS graphical OS.
and they're all true.
It took me 10 minutes to get them to finally realize that with DSL, five years ago, I didn't want them any more. and I was lucky to be immediately dropped, perhaps because I used Quantum Online back in the v1.1 era.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
AOL is an internet for people who dont know any better. With all the fancy advertising on TV with the people compeating in Professional sports and what not, that kind of stuff looks flashy to this idiot society.
Personally what I would like to do is take these commercials for instance the guy running the track....Yeah let AOL make you high speed with everyone else, but lets make this more realistic....Lets put this oversize hurdles in the guys way and call it SPAM or Spyware.
Or the kid doing the swim race, I would love to see him go at it then this huge shark come up out of the water and take him out in one gulp...I'd lable him Virus.
This is just a more realistic AOL.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
i recommend you watch the video (with it's audio) that is included on the page... wow that CSR was a complete and total douchebag. recording calls to businesses might be good practice.. is that legal?
Comcast has usedthat for years.
Hell I used to be an employee and when I cancelled my service (Comcast is horribly overpriced compared to DSL+Dish, and yes kids DSL is better than Cable at least when VoIP is involved) It took 2 weeks to get it cancelled and the endless calls to offer me a "better deal" if I keep my service and upgrade to the uber digital HD PVR package, etc..
I finally had to go to a local office stand in line and refuse to leave until they gave me a final bill and a written service cancellation recipt.
The phone people get a kickback spiff for every customer they keep from leaving and will do anything to get that kickback.
AOL simply is using the same tactic.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Hang up.
Call your credit card company.
Tell the credit card company to no longer accept charges from AOL because they refuse to cancel your account.
If you really want to play it safe then write a letter to your credit card company after the call that reiterates the request and the reason for it.
which is why they strongly badger you for one of those numbers.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Here's the digg article with links to mp3s.
They record us all the time ("This call is being monitored for quality assurance purposes...") so it's only fair that we be able to record them as well. Of course I know that security guards don't agree with the principle that since they're videotaping us, we ought to be able to videotape them as well.
Hasn't someone invented a way to harness the sun's energy, using a massive array of old AOL CDs they've collected over the years, using them to create an ultimate Laser Of Doom that could just be pointed at AOL's headquarters?
He was a scapegoat. AOL is responsible. They put unreasonable pressure on the employee to keep customers on the phone. They don't tell them 'how', they just tell them to make sure they do it.
This is the same way big companies get their retail outlet managers to stiff workers out of overtime/benefits. By giving them unreasonable goals and incentives that are only achived by doing things that a corporation doesn't want to own up to doing themselves. So, they pass they buck, the blame, but not the profit.
I would urge this employee to take action. I for one am witness to AOL doing this very thing. Remember, those calls are monitored. They can't pretend not to condone this activity. I am sure that there are ex AOL employees that were rewarded for doing the same thing.
John Doe - "Hello I'm Mr. Green i want to cancel my account.
Customer Service Rep - "Done. Good bye Mr. Green"
Rock and Roll
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The link to the video in TFA is incorrect as of 21:50 EST. The video (audio with running transcript) is available on their site : here.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Either the retention specialist/customer service agent/phone troll was lying about the usage (huge surprise) or the account was hijacked. I have nothing against a company clarifying why you want to cancel -- they may make you a special offer or fix what is causing the issue -- but this is beyond ridiculous and bordering on criminal.
The problem is I am sure this has been standard operating procedure at AOL every single day for the last decade. Everyone that has experienced this level of customer "service" needs to complain to the FTC and hopefully they will investigate. If memory serves, wasn't AOL already investigated for this by the FTC in years past?
we could get the AOL operators to do tech support. We exchange people that want to talk with the people that try to get you off the line in 18 seconds or less. patent pending
Stay tuned for new sig...
...call these people?
It is their job to prevent you from leaving at all costs. I dont remember the stats (I worked in the tech department) but I believe they wanted no more than 3 or 4 cancellations an hour. If you have more than 6 its time for you to clean out your desk and work elsewhere.
Or as they like to put it "Your keybadge wont work" as a polite way of saying your fired.
Its a very bad place to work and the bean counters call teh shots and make senior decisions on how its run everytime. I am surely not surprised it lost 30 million customers. They are very short sighted indeed and dont give a crap about anyone including their own customers. Just how they look to senior management at AOL corporate.
Also the call center I worked did some borderline illegal practices and they always change the name of the subsidaries they do some call center work because they keep getting sued for firing people for unjust causes. But I consider this outright fraud.
So if you know anyone who uses AOL and wants to quit, here is how to do it? Call the credit company and tell them not to pay AOL anymore. Problem solved and you get to save someone's job.
http://saveie6.com/
My mom had a similar problem with disconnecting our earthlink only i took her 20 mins to get through to the person
. . .but someday you'll realize that guy was just trying to help Vincent.
./ed
He obviously needed someone to step in and grab him by the collar and say, "Vincent! This is a bad move, man! AOL is here for you! Don't you get it??"
But Vincent wouldn't listen and now look at him.
Not only is he AOL-less, but now he's been
Did a trial to see if AOL@school had somehow magically become useful.
Pretty much verbatim on their end - they try every tactic to get you off point and convince you to stay.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Try to uninstall the "free trial" of McAfee on any new Dell PC.
You can't - it conveniently gives you an error message. I've confirmed this on a variety of Dell PCs.
This isn't an accident. Sure, you can reboot in safe mode and uninstall it but they know that the average user isn't a geek (trust me, it takes an average user weeks/months to follow simple step-by-step instructions to uninstall Dell's McAfee and install Avast). So they prey on them.
It is about time that someone sued the pants off of them. Where are the ambulance chasers of the tech world?
More
The poor guy at AOL was probably going through the phone script he is forced to use. If he deviates from it, some customer service middle manager is there to put the smack down on him, as all the calls are probably recorded and reviewed periodically.
What someone should do is start a blog and start recording all their customer service transactions. After listening to this call, it didn't seem out of the ordinary - it seemed pretty good for what I've experienced with Cingular.
You're pretty much down to scraping the bottom of the barrel, aren't you?
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
... of the Bastard Operator From Hell series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_Operator_From _Hell/
I moved from my apartment to my new house. I wanted to transfer my account to my new address. The rep on the phone looked up the address and couldn't find it. I asked for a cancellation and the dude on the phone went circles with veryfying the SOC, Last name, First name addreses. And supposedly he was suggesting I keep paying Adelphia the cable & internet bill for the apartment I no longer lived in. Finally, I started repeating that "I wanted to cancel my account" everytime he paused.
Eliot Spitzer has been down http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/24/23 5233">this road once already...
Things must be going down, down, down, the tubes.
Don't get me started on trying to get away from the AOL behemoth. You can get to a fraud hotline at your credit card company of choice in mere minutes. "Hiya, this is Patio11: does it count as fraud if I'm getting billed without my consent? Because I've had this recurring charge from AOL for *state length of time greater than zero* after I called them to cancel..." BAM watch your problem go away.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Dr Evil: Scott....Scott....we need a way to outsource our customer calling centers completely.
Scott: So??!! Just do it!!! Sheesh!!
Dr Evil: Yes, but we need to look GOOD doing it. It needs to look like a GOOD thing. Hmmm. Scott?
Scott: I've got it!
They've been doing this for years.... Its not new... Seriously. I cancled AOL...hmm... probaly 6 or 7 years ago and they did the same kind of thing. We hear about this all the time, so please don't label it as a "new tactic".
snowulf.com
It is not just AOL. A phone company with a logo resembling a splat did the same to us a few months ago. They:
* Invent reasons to delay.
* Give you the run-around before you find the "proper" disconnect person.
* Threaten to ruin your credit if you don't pay.
* Pretend they lost all records of your disconnect request.
Capitalism's ugly underbelly.
Table-ized A.I.
I am not a lawyer, these folks are or have consulted one, use at your own risk.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
there is a disgusting little trailer park called AOL.
I avoid AOL domain names like the plague because they are usually either a smart ass kid or one of the many nere-do-wells that have hacked AOL idenities.
Is that a SCSI connector or are you just glad to see me?
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/24/23 5233
What will it take for them to learn?
The guy that empties the fax basket? He doesn't give a shit; his job isn't based on the number of accounts he's managed to keep active.
I've heard whining that digg.com is faster on the review/post time, but I saw this on the TODAY show nearly 13 hours earlier, and they'd actually interviewed Ferarri and played the tape. Youch.
Many many years back (think 96 or so), I had finally heard of this "linux" thing, and had downloaded disksets over AOL. At this point it became clear to me that AOL wasn't supported on linux, and I needed something better. We went for a local company that offered nice dial-up at a reasonable price. Cancelling AOL had to be done over the phone, and while the rep wasn't as pushy as this one, they did try to foist free service on me. Of course, I had to explain that the free service would do me no good, and eventually they got it.
I faxed a page to AOL notifying them my account was closed and then called my credit card company and reported the card lost. I couldn't get them to cancel it over the phone.
The reason I say that is:
(1) This is a tactic that has been happening for years (and is ancient news)
(2) This has been something AOL has been sued numerous times over (ie: class action lawsuit in NY, $1.2m in fines to name one). They are in violation of numerous laws in many (all) jurisdictions where they operate in such fashion, so:
(3) Who cares? Don't sign up for AOL - enough (rightly) bad press about their customer (dis)service issues, continued billing and refusal to cancel accounts has been circulating for a decade now. Everyone talks about getting a reliable, fast internet service (provider) with good customer service; and even AOL talks about such factors in their ads and commercials as a reason to choose them. Who in their right mind, even if they hadn't heard the horror stories on the web and in various computer mags, would choose AOL because *AOL* (and probably ONLY AOL) say they are the best/fastest/have great customer service/antivirus tools. You don't buy a GM (Ford/Toyota/Honda, et al) because GM says they are the best, do you? Research what you buy - ESPECIALLY something with a term commitment.
-Robert
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Long long loooong ago in the days before everyone was lapping up DSL, we used a free trial of AOL.
they used the standard tactic of free trial and then auto-billing your account asap. if you complained about the autobilling they would "offer you more months" rather than a refund. at the end of those months youre stuck in the same cycle.
this is the reason why their monthly rates are so high.. theyre charging you for the extra months you get as a free trial to bait you into absently letting them drain your account again later.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
So you faxed over "SN, pw, last 4 digits of CC, name, address" to some unconfirmed number that you got from the Internet? Why not offer your mother's maiden name while you're at it.
It's not new at all. They were doing that back... '97 I think, is when I was first exposed to it. They made it just about impossible for someone to cancel. The information on how to do it is kept as far from sight as possible, when you finally find it your told you *must* do it over the telephone, when you call the phone line you get to sit on hold for literally *hours* in some cases, when you finally get someone, it's a kid who has been trained for one thing and one thing only - to outstubborn you. They are *required* to spend about half an hour reading speech after speech to you, ask you questions and get your responses and read more speeches based on them, all designed to get you to throw your hands up in frustration and give up. Cancelling your account without going through every question and every speech and exhausting the flow chart will get the kid fired. If (as many people do) you tell him to cancel your account and hang up to avoid the next ten minute scripted reply, he's trained to pretend he didn't hear that. Even if he does everything as trained, if he cancels more than a tiny percentage of the callers he gets, he'll be fired. It's absolutely absurd, and I don't see how these bastards continue to get away with it.
My advice - don't use AOL. If for any reason you *must* use AOL, use a one-time credit card solely for that purpose. When you're ready to cancel, send them a registered letter telling them you are hereby cancelling your account, and cancel the card. It may sound like a lot of trouble, but it's NOTHING compared to trying to the living hell of trying to get it cancelled by calling their cancellation department.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
They've been doing this type of crap for at least 10 years. Back in 96 my mother did a free trial for AOL (which required a valid checking account or something) and after the trial if you didn't cancel they would start billing you. After the trial she tried to cancel, at which she thought she succeeded. Next month she got a bill, and tried the process again. And again. And again. This probably went on for 4 months (of getting billed + dealing with crappy support), and finally they got the message. More like AOHELL.
AOL is hemorrhaging 300 customers an hour.
You can check out anytime you like, but you can never cancel.... Seriously, why are we discussing this? AOL (pronounced "A-HOL"") is a crappy company and their service sucks. This is old news and they have been doing this for years. It's obviously not isolated and clearly this direction is coming from AOL execs. All you have to do is tell your credit card company that you have cancelled service and will dispute any future charges. If your still using AOL in this day and age when every cable company and phone company is offering highspeed Broadband, then you have to accept some of the blame by continuing to use AOL. There software is a pig and it's features are about as rich as Sun Microsystems shareholders! ;)
I used to be with CompuServe before AOL took them over.
When I left the US, I cancelled my CompuServer account. Did it by email, as I was supposed to be able to do. They ignored it, and kept deducting from my US bank account until it ran dry.
Now, if I did that, I'd be in jail. If Big Business does that, it's just fine.
isn't this what spammers do when you try to opt-out?
Now finally we're identifying who's in whose side.
AOL did the exact same cr@p 8 years ago, probably longer.
Digg mentioned a story about a dead woman and AOL refuses to cancel!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I got the same treatment from AOL. I was going to contact the Attorney Generals Office and found out Eliot Spitzer's Office had already settled with AOL - obviously to no good effect. The AE gets to make a buck and AOL figures the fine as a cost of business. The release from 2005:
0 5.html
AOL TO REFORM CUSTOMER SERVICE PROCEDURES
Settlement Requires Company to Remove Obstacles
Consumers Face When Seeking to Switch or Cancel Service
Attorney General Eliot Spitzer today announced an agreement that requires the nation's leading internet service provider to reform its customer service procedures.
Under the agreement, America Online (AOL) will alter the incentives it offers to customer representatives who seek to persuade subscribers not to cancel their service.
"This agreement helps ensure that AOL will strive to keep its customers through quality service, not stealth retention programs," Spitzer said.
In response to approximately 300 consumer complaints, Spitzer's office began an inquiry of AOL's customer service policies. The investigation revealed that the company had an elaborate system for rewarding employees who purported to retain or "save" subscribers who had called to cancel their internet service. In many instances, such retention was done against subscribers' wishes, or without their consent.
Under the system, consumer service personnel received bonuses worth tens of thousands of dollars if they could successfully dissuade or "save" half of the people who called to cancel service. For several years, AOL had instituted minimum retention or "save" percentages, which consumer representatives were expected to meet. These bonuses, and the minimum "save" rates accompanying them, had the effect of employees not honoring cancellations, or otherwise making cancellation unduly difficult for consumers.
Many consumers complained that AOL personnel ignored their demands to cancel service and stop billing.
The agreement requires AOL to:
Eliminate any requirements that its customer service representatives maintain a minimum number of "saves" in order to earn a bonus;
Record all service cancellation requests and verify action on the request through a third-party monitor;
Provide refunds to all New York consumers who claim harm based on improper cancellation procedures, up to four months worth of service;
Pay $1.25 million to the state in penalties and costs.
(New York State Attorney Generals Office) http://www.oag.state.ny.us/press/2005/aug/aug24a_
Most companies that have large call centers (places where you call gets routed to) are answered by a teleservices company. I assume that AOL is no different.
Teleservices companies are given a script that the poor guy/gal on the phone has to read. Based on the responses from the customer they are given more stuff to read. It goes on like this until the customer hangs up or the person hits the end of the script.
So who writes or approves the script? AOL. Don't blame the poor CSR (customer service rep), as they are just doing what they are paid to do.
Overrated, Troll, and Flamebait mod points are not to be used towards posts you disagree with. That IS censorship.
I can get your AOL account cancelled without even calling them up. Make me a screename and and they will BAN the account to never be used again. I have had 2 accounts cancelled so for on AOL for TOS infractions. AOL sucks. I got banned for saying "I sell drugs on ebay" and someone TOS'ed me from the chatroom. This happend like 6 times with stupid comments like that and saying stuff like "homo" and other stupid phrases. It doesnt seem like they mind the porn emails that i got everyday, the porn ims or the porn advertisements in the chatroom. But god forbid someone calls another person "gay" or says that he "sell drugs one ebay" in a chatroom. Users in chatrooms say anything sexual, drug related or anything else offensive can be reported. Many times if its minor you can still get a warning or your account suspended. Even if the phrases are allowed on TV, AOL doesnt allow some of them in their chatrooms. You can report user after user, all day long, 1000+ times if you like, and AOL will ban/suspend anyone who does anything they think is offensive, causing cannibalism to their own system. Yet the porn advertisements never cease to stop. All advertisers are using free accounts where the users who actually pay are getting the ax. AOL is probably one of the worse programs out there. Bloated with tons of software and you cant customize the installation. Also AOL is not innovative and havent been for the last few years. They were one of the last big companies to have SPAM filters in their email. They dont fix the porn ads or advertisements, blocking keywords or websites that spam porn information, yet waste money on having pretty little pictures for my IM box and cheesy videos i dont watch. AOL sucks and i hope they go out of business or get bought out. If you need me to get your account cancelled.....I can do that easily.
Back in 1992, my AOHell acct. was closed instantly because I dared to tell an obnoxious chat room user to "get a life".
Maybe the easiest method would be to simply be annoying online?
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
You're right about four minutes not being a big deal. Four minutes of canceling the account, that is. Even four minutes of trying to fix the perceived problem wouldn't have been unforgivable. But four minutes of being and jerk, interrupting Vincent when he was talking, and not even acknowledging Vincent's requests is totally unacceptable. Vincent was totally reasonable.
This space reserved for administrative use.
Don't let their public apology fool you. They just got caught and want the spotlight off of them. I had a relative who worked at a national call center for a very large interstate bank and the stuff AOL used to do was criminal. Not only would AOL not let you cancel, but if you called your bank and told them that AOL was no longer authorized to debit your account, AOL would start submitting transactions using past credit authorization numbers to get past the block. Apparently the only way to get away from AOL is to close the account to which they had access and start a new one. No bullshit.
The purpose of this procedure, obviously, is to make it as difficult for the user to cancel as possible. Otherwise AOL would just automate it. More obnoxious than most call-center procedures, but not by much. The sad thing is that AOL dealt with the bad press by firing the poor schmo who just did what he was paid to do. The people who designed this stupid procedure are still working there. For now.
AOL Tries New Tactic to Keep Customers
They misspelled the phrase "continues to use." Oops.
Sunwalker Dezco for Warchief in 2016
You know someone's a wingnut when AOL's the innocent victim in their fantasies. Heh.
That is what I have been doing for years. I've run into tactics like this so many times I just cancel that way now, and haven't had a single problem again. Another tactic I've seen is they will cancel that account and then make a new account on you without sending you a notice until you get the bill.
They've been pulling these types of shennanagins for years.
How is this news?
Libertas in infinitum
The problem here is that, in my experience, this is definitely a corporate decision to handle cancelation calls this way (and service and support calls too, some cases. I'm looking at you Sony).
If what they're saying is true, some poor guy lost his job over the issue, when it was most likely management that gave him the direction to handle calls like this in the first place.
Not very many people know this but AOL does have an alternate cancellation line by FAX which requires no talking to the cancellation dept at all. Last time i was a member of AOL (was out of town for months and aol was most reliable on the road net access at the time that didnt require any research to find) well I cancelled as soon as I got back in town, however I did so entirely by FAX without any arguements or free month offers. This fax number is actually inside the AOL help system (the online help system) and its burried very very deep, I remember going clicking on cancellation information windows for at least 30 minutes until I got this unlabeled cancellation fax number. All it said was Send cancellations to fax (800 nbr here). The number from a company whos name i didnt recognize, and makes you think they have nothing to do with AOL, however my account did not renew, I was not charged, and to top it all of i received absolutely no confirmation or acknoledgement they received the fax, however it worked so I just left it at that. I'm pretty sure the number is still out there, I'm pretty sure they burried it even deeper however.
a) This usually saves lots of space and you can partition the way you like.
b) You know what you have, and only load what you want.
c) You can then image the minimal "clean" install for later recovery, cleanup, etc.
This method works wonders - my last el-cheapo HP Pavilion laptop went from 63 second boot time to under 30 seconds when it wasn't burdened with stuff I didn't want/need.
Just make sure you have any special drivers you'll need "on hand" before you do this.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Fax is fine but a better way is snail mail. If I have a problem with someone that doesn't seen resolvable I send certified letter, return receipt, via USPS. This means that the receiving company needs to sign for the letter in order to pick it up and I get a post card with the signer and the date received back. There is a 20 digit unique number that comes with the certified tracker/post office receipt that is attached to the letter and return receipt, I type this number to the bottom of the letter where a cc usually goes as added prof that the receipt and the letter go together. Also, I like to include a legal statement, in this case "Please reply in 10 business days" witch helps to enforce a little more accountability, and failer to reply is viewed as a lack of good faith. Lastly, I keep copies of all documents.
That's a terrible solution that *will* ruin your credit. I worked for AOL from 1991 until 2004, and that is terrible advice. Our policy was to still continue to bill you then sell the debt to a collection agency. We made a ton of money doing that. Then the collection agency will hound you for years, and very often they eventually get hold of your SSN if AOL didn't already have it. Then your AOL bill shows-up on your credit statement.
You have to jump through their hoops. It is in your best interest to do so. It's worth a few minutes of your time to make sure that a future car or house loan isn't denied because of your laziness and abuse of the credit card company.
At college there are some serious limitations on p2p. I have managed to work around these since then (just gotta be careful not to generate any noticable traffic, and to encrypt everything) but before then I seriously considered using a free AOL trial. NetZero's free 10 hours per month just wasn't cutting it.
So, I go to the sign up page. I fill out some of the stuff (it's a multi page form so I'm submitting as I go) but then I see they need a CC number. I'm not about to give them that (what if I forget to cancel? etc, not to mention my parents handle my accounting and they would want to know why I signed up for AOL when I had internet at college). So I cancel out of the form.
THEY SAVED THE ENTERED INFORMATION EVEN THOUGH I CANCELLED THE SIGN UP. I wasn't even aware of this until a few days later when a rep called me and tried to get me to reconsider and sign up anyways. Luckily it was a one time call and I made it clear I was no longer interested.
After a day or so, I decided to cancel. The operator tried to ask me why I was cancelling and blah blah blah, I simply said it was not a service I was willing to use and I was canceling my account. The process took about 5 minutes. I wouldnt go so far as to say it was frustrating, difficult, or even an annoyance beyond having used AOL in the first place. This guy obviously had a bad experiance, but as my experiance was about as easy as it could be, not all AOL reps are bad... Other than working for AOL of course ;)
... I had AOL "lite" or whatever it was for HTML testing, they had their own web browser at AOL.
After alot of trouble, I had to have my bank issue me a new credit card in order to stop the billing.
It's a hell of alot easier then dealing with AOL, and yes, it is POLICY to never cancel an account. Some of my relatives had to do the same thing.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
I got a POS laptop from my church once (66mhz, MSDOS6, Win3.11). It had AOL 3.0 on it. I wondered if I could use the web browser piece of it to work on web pages, so I tried to load up one of my local HTML files in it.
I forget what it looked like exactly, but I recall it looked something like someone had taken the actual page I made and ... exploded it.
I take it back then AOL wasn't terribly interested in delivering the broader WWW to their customers.
Was anybody else reminded of that episode of friends where chandler has to close his bank account to quit the gym because their membership cancellation person is some hot chick?
OK, it wasn't as bad as that poor guy's phone call, but I ran into a similar situation with Time Warner's Roadrunner service. I was a college student living in a house with other college students. I got cable internet and set up a wireless router when I moved in, which all of my housemates used. When I moved out, all of my housemates where staying, so I went to the local TW Cable office to ask a rep if I could have the service transferred to someone else at the house (which they all said they wanted to do.) They said if one of my housemates filled out a form, they would continue the service and transfer it to that person. I asked, "what if nobody gets around to filling out the form? Will I get a bill for next month?" The answer: "No, we'll cancel the service." Fine with me. A month later, I get a bill. I called and was told that I hadn't cancelled the service, and I would have to pay for the portion of that month up to that day. When I told her that I had been assured that the service would be cancelled and I would not be billed, she said, "we don't do that. You have to have your service turned off immediately when you cancel it, regardless of whether you've paid through the end of the month." When I insisted that they not bill me, she talked to her manager. When she came back, she told me that now they wouldn't cancel my service until I turned the modem back in, even though I explained that I was now hundreds of miles away. That's what I get for insisting on being treated fairly. It took another call, and alot of reasoning before they finally agreed to reverse the charges and send a rep out to get the modem. BTW, when I started up the service they wouldn't just let me pick up the modem and "install" it myself. They send someone out every time they get a new customer.
The funny thing is that when I called the first time, I screwed up the automated menu system thing, so I just hung up and called back. About halfway though my conversation with the service rep, when she was entering stuff into the computer, she blurted out, "Did you just call here!?" I think they are told not to resolve any billing disputes on the first call, and she thought she caught me trying to "game the system" by calling twice in a row. As if I would know that that would work.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
INteresting, but it's a linnk to a blog that posts a strictly anecdotal story, with nothing verifiable to back it up.
I had the exact same experience trying to cancel NetZero. It took me 90 minutes and 6 different customer service reps before someone would give me an account cancellation number. After this, I changed my tactics. The next time I had this conversation with a company cancelling an account, it was 2 minutes:
You know who I am, correct? - Yes
You know which account I am referring to? - Yes
You have confirmed with the last four of my social I am who I am? - Yes
You know I want you to cancel my account? - Yes
Good. I'm not wating any more of my time. Cancel my account and if there are any further charges from your company they will be chargebacked through my credit card *click*.
It's amazing that it's a simpler process to chargeback something than it is to actually cancel it. FYI: Erenterplan billed me for 6 months after I cancelled my account twice. Avoid.
AOL has been doing that for years.
The best way to have AOL make the process easier to cancel an account is simply do a Dispute Charge from your credit card. They will get crazy charge back fees($15+ I think) for each Charge-back to them as well as them losing the monthly fee they charged to each disputed customer charge. Will they ever learn?
Yes, this happened to me too when I tried to cancel an AOL account. The lady asked me if I had high speed, etc etc. I'm very patient with people on the phone so I jumped through her little established hoops. But working in customer service myself, I am appalled at the level of rudeness that the rep showed in that gentleman's phone call. Mine was bad enough! The rep's self righteous little "you'll understand when you're older" bit was probably the worst part. What a jerk.
It's possible these people are so pressured to keep customers that they develop this kind of attitude. But it's still not an excuse.
I typed "cancel" into the AOL Help Search box, and it had a link to the following:
We value your membership with the AOL® community. However, we are really sorry that you're considering canceling your AOL® account. It's our mission to build a service that lives up to the high standards of the online community. We hope you've enjoyed being an AOL member and that we can help you again in the future. For security reasons, AOL accounts cannot be cancelled either online or through e-mail. You can get your AOL account cancelled either through phone, US mail or fax.
To Cancel Your AOL® Membership Over the Phone
To cancel your AOL account over the phone, all you need to do is call up AOL® Member Services at 1-888-265-8008. You can speak to our representatives to get your account cancelled. This service is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
To Cancel Your AOL Membership Though U.S. Mail
You can request the cancellation of your AOL account through the U.S. mail. Just send your request to:
AOL
PO BOX 17100
Jacksonville, FL 32245-7100
To Cancel Your AOL Membership Though Fax
If you prefer sending in your request through fax, please send it to us at 1-703-433-7283.
Notes:
* If you choose to write or fax us, please include a brief note stating the nature of your request, the primary billing contact's full name, phone number, address and handwritten signature.
* In addition to that, for account security purpose please provide any one of the following:
o The master screen name of the AOL account
o The last four digits of the current method of payment (for your security, please include only the last four digits)
o The answer to the account security question of the master screen name.
* Cancellation will take effect within 72 hours of receipt of your request and AOL will send you a written confirmation. Please note that AOL LLC reserves the right to charge and collect fees, surcharges or costs incurred before your cancellation takes effect. Thank you for using AOL
Even that can go to far. I once had a few beers to many with a bunch of other nerds one of whom used to be a minor cheiftain in an AOL service center. According to this guy they were actually chewed out by management for responding to cancellation requests from customers by actually doing what the customer wanted quicky and efficiently. The standard procedure when a user requested a cancellation of his AOL account was to make him/her jump through flaming hoops and duel ravenous beasts in order to accomplish this. AOL would respond to all cancellation requests with a brochure containing some sort of 'special offer' and continue to do so using every excuse including the ever useful "Your cancellation request did not fulfill all legal requirements" until people started threatening to get lawyers involved. Most of the time the customer would eventually either give up or if he/she persevered and AOL was eventually forced to cancel the account they still managed to milk the customer for a quite a bit more money by dragging their feet like this.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't know about the english speaking part of the world, but in my country the phone is not part of the legally enforceable mean of contracting.
If they refuse to cancel by phone, write a letter and that's it. If in doubt, send it with registered mail. And yes, fellow Geeks, it doesn't even matter if you use a template in MS Word or KOMA-script with LaTeX!
I find the advice to---again---call the fraud dept. of the institution that handles payment for you potentially dangerous. If I had a contrct with AOL I'd sure know how to EOL that---the correct way.
But again, your legal system might differ... Mod me down then!
This link made front page on digg yesterday:
AOL Wants to Sell "Internet" to the Dead
They refused to cancel the account of her dead mother. Didn't make a big difference since all her credit cards were cancelled, but crazy nonetheless.
...not just AOL.
Years ago I got fed up with Cingular because they kept not automatically charging my perfectly valid credit card and then trying to stick me with late fees and penalties for nonpayment. After the third time it happened I had enough, got a new phone and new service from another provider, and called Cingular to cancel. It took me a good 15 minutes to wear down the CSR on the other end, who wanted to do anything but cancel the account-- she started throwing free months and additional services at me, she even asked me if I knew anyone who needed a cell phone, so the account could just be transferred to them! Finally I just put my foot down and told her no matter what she said or offered, there would be no other outcome except account cancellation, period-- so just give up and do it.
I still have an AOL account, though I seldom use it. If/when I decide to lose it, I'm not going to waste much time on the phone. If they give me any shit about cancelling, I'll change the billing credit card to a one-time use card and just let it expire. At the same time I'll give my credit card company a heads-up that no further charges from AOL are authorized after [date]. That ought to do it.
What would you expect if you came up to a bank teller, gave her your ATM card, and started screaming: Bitch, give me the money, just give me the money, give me the money. Help me by giving me the money?
Vincent sounds like a silver-spoon teenager with an attitude. He probably does the same thing when his folks buy him a Lexus instead of a BMW.
Instead of 'cancel the account' hysterics (you can almost hear this guy's forced crying and foot-stomping) he should have cooperated with the AOL rep and had his account settled in less than 5 minutes.
There are many many reasons why customer rep acted the way he did:
1) A whinny teenager cancelling parents' account on a whim might not be in parents' best interests.
2) Given most AOLers are computer 'newbies', the user may have meant: 'recall the last email', 'help me fix parental control', 'I need to change my dialup prefix', or any number of things...
3) His story did not agree with the usage pattern: probably would turn out to be nothing, or could turn out to be some heavy-shit hacking, with crying Vincent leashed up in Gitmo for messing with the nuclear launch codes...
4) He could be a prankster trying to highjack someone else's account:
&c &c.
Unfortunately, the asshole Vincent got famous, and the AOL rep got fired
I am not a psychiatrist, but I would prescribe a can of whoop-ass for the little bitch twice daily, until he grows up and learns exactly how to be a functional society member.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
And that's what I think a lot of folks don't get here.
There are two victims, the customer that's put through this crap, and the poor kid on the other end who would have been fired if he hadn't put him through it.
And then actually DID get fired anyway, even though he was doing EXACTLY what he was required to do by his employer, because the case got publicised. But it's no abberation. This is EXACTLY what these kids are trained to do, and required to do to if they want to keep their jobs. The executives who bear responsibility for both of these hells are still drawing enormous checks, of course.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I once canceled the free trial for aol, and when asked why, I said it didnt seem to like mozilla so much, but mainly b/c im switching to linux....In the reps favor, he was actually interested in open scource and once i got him to cancel my account since the software wont run on linux, we spoke a bit and I answered his questions about open scourse software. I actually spoke longer to him about open scource than he did about the cancelation...kind of funny when you think about it.
'sig' deleted due to the stupidity of it's 'nature'
...or when you call them up to cancel, simply state up front to the rep that this call is being recorded. That would curtail any rep's ideas, I would think. Whether it is being recorded on tape, a hard disk, or simply as a lifetime memory can remain unspoken
There should be a regulation that states that you have to offer the customer the option to cancel that is just as easy as signing up. Then companies like AOL can decide if they really want to sign all customers up over the phone, or just let them cancel online without a hassle.
This is always a problem with Cox or AT&T, since they don't bill a credit card. But if AOL still bills a credit card, you fucking report the card stolen BY AOL. Sure, you take 10 or 20 points hit to your credit rating. If you've got any kind of major loan out, you'll put those 10 points back on there in a couple months.
And think twice about using Cox or AT&T, or even a cellphone. It's just good for business to use taqiyya on your customers, just like the Muslims use on the liberal west. Don't ever admit to making it impossible to cancel your account, and they will "try to understand your pain" of doing business.
Plus, fuck AOL. Just like Sony. Fuck Sony; Fuck AOL.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIVZ9b0RgmY&search= VINCENT%20FERRARI
"Yeah, hello, please cancel my AOL account."
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
"What's the problem?"
"I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do."
"What are you talking about?"
"This service is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it. I know you were planning to disconnect, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen."
I didn't have success playing the video from NBC, but here it is on YouTube.
The phone rep is hilarious.
Set up an endless loop of a recording saying "I want to cancel my account. My username is ____. This message will repeat until you do so." and play it into the phone while you go do something useful :-)
Captcha = reread *heh*
Every virus out there would perform the uninstall on your behalf if it were easy.
A good number of viruses do infact uninstall or otherwise disable the software.
So in this case, I can forgive a difficult uninstall.
It sucks, doesn't it, when it's so easy to prove you're nothing but a shill and a troll? What was it you said about "small-minded prey" a few days ago? You're the smallest of them all - it takes a really deficient IQ to dig yourself into these infantile and painfully evident self-contradictions.
But that's OK. That's why we're here. To help you!
I always use an MBNA ShopSafe generated credit card number for all Internet purchases, and some telephone purchases. After installing a small unobtrusive program on your computer (Windows only, alas), you then have the capability of generating a perfectly valid and unique credit card number with an expiration date and maximum credit limit chosen by you for that particular transaction. If I want to cancel an MBNA ShopSafe credit card number (which I can do at any time), all it takes is a couple of mouse clicks.
Does anyone know of any other banks with a similar service? I'm sure there must be some, and I'd like to have a backup handy in case MBNA is merged or goes belly up, etc.
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
AOL doesn't make any money off of subscriptions. I'm just guessing, pulling shit out of my ass. I suspect however that their income is derived from their advertising and business partnership areas. AOL isn't an ISP, it's a BBS, started that way and nothing has changed. The big secret is that newspapers aren't being killed by the web and RSS, they are being killed by the new online newspapers.
AOL is the new online newspaper. Google, Yahoo! and MSN are all trying to become "portals", because portals are just electronic newspapers. They design the layout, pick the lettering and provide you with a digestible amount of ads and sales lines. It's not new media at all, it's the same damn thing. What do you read first thing in the morning? At lunch? The Internet has just given us newspapers that change on the fly and can actually work two ways. It's the same need, the same solution - information at hand. Entertainment, current events, comedy, debate, etc, it's all stuff we want and we get it somewhere.
Why do I say this? Look at the leading "homepages." A lot of people moved away from traditional portals like Yahoo or even Lycos to Google for a while, but now Google makes their own "home page" portal site because it "sticks" better (google.com/ig). Microsoft has made a huge technology jump from MSN.com to live.com, and could take a lead when Vista ships. The point is that all of these portals are fighting for your eyes so they can push ads or push you into doing business with their partners.
So what AOL is doing, and does, has a purpose. They don't even want to report you to collections. In fact, I'm sure they will overlook delinquencies when you are interested in signing up again. Free months so you don't cancel? Sure! No problem - don't even pay us if you don't want to. All they want is to have you come to them and request service. Cancel it in the first five minutes and you will easily get months free.
How can I say this? I work for a newspaper, in the circulation department. We aren't interested in the money people pay for the actual product. Even if all of our customers are delinquent we are happy - they are customers, we didn't "give away" the paper to them. In fact, at one time you could rack up hundreds of dollars in debt to us and we wouldn't bat an eye when you asked to get your paper restarted. (Now we are loosing money we can't afford that, they think) All that matters is that we can go the advertisers and say "we've got xxx,xxx people get the paper at home."
We always give away free "upgrades" to a customers subscriptions, not because it gets them to buy more papers, because they can be included in our daily circulation numbers. AOL is doing the same thing. Slashdot is even doing the same thing. Imagine if upon a six month Slashdot hiatus you decide to come back, what if then you've got mod points? Don't you think they are trying to get you to visit more to see more ads.
AOL is the newspaper, Slashdot is for us, CNN is for some, Yahoo is for some, MSN is for some, random-lusers-blog.com is another for one or two people. It all depends on the person. It isn't anything new, we've just got more options (and kick-ass search engines that can sift through it all).
Title should read: AOL Tries A Tactic From Every Other Media Provider's Business.
Get your Unix fortune now!
I tried to cancel an Earthlink account once. It took over 6 months, including many e-mails, postal mails, phone calls, etc. I finally got someone on the line and threatened to drive up to their offices in Pasadena, find him and his supervisor, and "have a very unpleasant, in-your-face encounter with both of you" if they failed to close my account. That worked. Of course, it was years ago, and I imagine they've improved their responsiveness by now. (Or maybe not...)
Unfortunately a sound recording is problematic if your attempt to "jack them up" fails. The difficulty in getting your banker or even a judge to listen to a recording could prove fatal to any recourse you might have in mind if talking doesn't work. Also if the recording is of poor quality it may prove useless. Writing a letter shows that you made a reasonable effort to resolve the problem and is an excellent record that is easily duplicated and favorably responded to by a third party.
- The FTC issued a complaint and ordered AOL to change their practices.
- There were two class-action lawsuits settled in 2004.
- Ohio sued and settled in 2005.
-
Finally, most recently, the State of New York sued as well, and the agreement reached with AOL requires AOL to have a third party verify all cancellation calls by the end of this month.
Unfortunately, it seems like AOL is considering these lawsuits just a cost of doing business, and as a result, it doesn't appear that much has changed.AOL has been doing these low ball tactics for since around the time when they started bundling AOL with Winsock. They have gone way out of their way to make sure that you have a really really difficult time uninstalling their software from your machine, by attempting to make it a "requirement" that the AOL winsock driver replaces your TCP/IP stack on windows. If you try to remove it, you basically wind up with an unusable TCP/IP stack. Granted, because of widespread outrage at this practice, they actually through the revisions of their software have made it easier to uninstall, but for many years it was not like this. In fact, most of the 1990's it was not like that.
Then there was the aftermath of when AOL bought Time Warner Cable. They attempted to keep their market share by falsely advertising that people had to keep paying for AOL even after they upgraded to the high speed cable modem Road Runner service offered by Time Warner. I remember one time talking to an employee that had this setup on their machine and they were under the impression that this was a "requirement" in order to have high speed internet. It was a big revelation at the time to this person that they could indeed have a high speed internet cable modem connection *without* the AOL installed..... I then remember very vividly calling up AOL on behalf of this employee and having a very hard time having them remove the AOL and cancel the account. The rep went into grand detail with false statements of how the cable modem connection would not work properly if AOL was not running on the computer.
All I'm saying is that AOL is a shady company, they lost alot of market share after people went to high speed internet and thus got rid of dialup, and to retain that market share, they devolved into these types of tactics to scare people into keeping the service. I'm sure everyone who has ever had a run-in with the AOL people at some point has a bad story to tell.
I had an Efax account for about two years, which originally started when buying a house; a bunch of paperwork got faxed to me constantly and I really wanted it in electronic form. Besides, it was cheaper than a phone line, especially since we were about to move. However, eventually I had no need for it anymore; the only thing I ever got on it anymore was fax spam.
I went through absolute hell trying to cancel my Efax account. Not only do they have crap like sending you to a non-800 number for cancellation (voice only, of course, nothing online), but they kept trying to dodge the issue with stuff like "I'll waive the charges for the next three months" and then try to hang up. The only way I got them to actually process the cancellation was by stating, repeatedly and firmly: If you don't close my account NOW, my next call will be to my bank telling them to reject any credit card charges from your company. This didn't take five minutes; this was more like 15.
Bastards. The service wasn't bad, at least not until the fax spammers found my fax number, but I will never use them again after that experience.
Hm. Good to know. Going for that free iPod now...
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
...at all.
"Once AOL had you in its clutches, escaping was notoriously difficult. Several states sued the service, claiming that it continued to bill customers after they had requested cancellation of their subscriptions. In August 2005, AOL paid a $1.25 million fine to the state of New York and agreed to change its cancellation policies--but the agreement covered only people in New York."
Full article
This was taken from a past Slashdot-featured PC World article.
From the same article...
Please, a little fresh news.
It's always confirmation bias!
I haven't been a AOL customer since 1994, but a few months ago, their autodialer started calling my cell phone two or three times a day. Several times I called and told them they had a wrong number, but they wouldn't stop until I threatened to pursue the $45,000 or so they now owe me under US Code Title 47 Section 227.
Good god, I had a wonderful time cancelling AOL. After the usual jibberish and being told that music, videos, instant messaging, and forums are only about 10% of the internet, the rep tried to tell me first that the iTunes music store was illegal, then that AOL owned it, then proceeded to try to convince me that the AOL browser was open source and far more secure than Firefox. After all this I got a cancellation number or some such thing and the rep told me the account was cancelled...then I still got a bill. I just cancelled my credit card after that, the teller at the bank informed me that ALOT of people wind up doing this because of AOL.
By now you should have guessed...I'm your magic negro.
I had an AOL account at one time, a decade ago. I didn't fit this guy's usage pattern at all (not used much, only had it a few months), and the rep cancelled it for me right away when I gave him the magic passphrase:
"I only had it so I could chat with someone who is now an ex-girlfriend."
Something tells me that I might have had a far different story to tell if the rep had been female.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
"Hello, you have reached the AOL Cancellation Automated Phone System. Please enter the account number followed by pound. [...] Please enter again to verify, followed by pound. [...] Please enter the last sixteen digits of pi, or alternatively the 54th Mersenne prime, and press pound. Due to high call volume you have five minutes to complete this authentication process."
It would be too easy to have the AOL software let you check a box when you're uninstalling it that would then dial-up and process the cancellation as you removed the software.
...there may have been more to this than meets the eye. The rep claimed to have observed 545 hours of usage in the past month, yet the person claimed to have not used the account for years. It seems to me his whole line of questioning is just to get to the bottom of that inconsistency. Given that alot of AOL users don't know the difference between their computer and the internet, it's quite possible this rep was talking to someone who used AOL everyday for years and simply didn't realize it (could EASILY have been my mom). He may simply have been trying to save the guy a lot of aggravation due to interrupted service, lost email, etc. If the caller would have just listened to the rep make his point, he might have ended the call alot sooner.
In general, I don't understand people who are so uncomfortable talking to salespeople that they have to resort being rude. Imagine the salesman was this guy's neighbor--would he still not have let him finish a sentence? No; that would be rude. Why is it acceptable to do that to a salesperson? Are they not humans too?
The video direct linked from slashdot didn't work for me. Here's a youtube link that I found though: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIVZ9b0RgmY This is an unbelievable video.
Me: "Hi, I need to cancel one of my AOL accounts" CSR: "Alright, let me get your information" *does so* CSR: "So why are you cancelling?" Me: "Oh I love AOL! I'm cancelling my account because I moved back in with my mom so I only need the one account because we only have one phone line" CSR: "Alright, done, thank you for using AOL" I was cancelling a free trial I signed up for to get a free iPod, he never asked what my "mom's" account was.
Just ask three people for their credit card numbers via instant message. Watch your problem go away.
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05
The whole reason the customer gets irate is because your company has caused a problem. You are supposed to solve the problem and you won't. Instead you threaten to blackball the customer.
So a big f*ck you.
That doesn't matter. But this will. I am kneeling aside my bed as I repeat this prayer:
Dear Jesus:
You made a big mistake when you didn't make Dal's mother get an abortion. Therefore, please, dear jesus give dal cancer and let him die. But before he does, make sure the rest of his family is killed in a horrible wreck. And that everybody remembers that he is a big asshole. And oh, dear Jesus, make sure the cancer is costly and wipes him and his family out first so that any surviving children have to whore themselves out so they won't starve. And any remaining grandparents should be run over by a runaway bull in spain someplace.
Amen.
Again del, f*ck you very much. Assh*le.
if you want to cancel your AOL account just go into the AOL forums and call everyone "Nigger" a few times.
then cross post how much AOL sucks shit when they warn you
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Don't cancel, just wander around the chat rooms saying you work for AOL and are a moderator of the forums until you find a real moderator and see how fast you get cut off permanantly. I suppose you could do some spamming as well.
Starting out such conversations with: "This conversation is being recorded for quality control purposes. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. Identify yourself, please" is often helpful.
I had this boss back in 2000 that tried to shut his off and they offered him 2 free months. He said No so they offered a third month. He said okay I can live with that. I worked for him until 2003 and he never got a bill from AOL. A friend in Las Vegas asked me to uninstall AOL from his comp because he was going to go cable. I uninstalled three different versions from his drive and we set up the cable modem and restarted and AOL pops up first thing then complains it needs to be updated to take advantage of a new deal AOL has. Thank god for Knoppix, i booted it up and went through all of the little cubby holes the Aol makes for itself(And enjoyed some popup free nudity) then rebooted windows and got an error message saying I needed to updateAOL because one or more of it's components was missing or corrupt. Eventually He found his windows cd and we did the three finger salute and cleaned up the drivewith a bootdisk and started over. Elapsed time= 12 hours, Elapsed beer= 1 case 4 bottles, Amount of rapidly thinning hair left on my head = none. AOL is only good for the free cd's. You can glue two together with fishing line for a hanger and hang it and several others in a fruit tree and birds will stay away.
I was able to Cancel AOL fairly easy... or so I thought. A few weeks after I cancelled, the AOL software on my computer randomly launched and popped up a large "Re-Activate Account" button in the center of my screen which I subsequently clicked on accident as I was trying to perform other tasks. I had to call AOL again to get it cancelled... again. Three months out I got a charge on my statement and I called AOL to see what the issue was. Apparently a hacker had reactivated my account and was using it without my knowledge. I asked them to reverse the charge and get rid of the account for good with no chance of reactivation. I was only met with poor, rude service from a number of their representatives. I got some good help from their technical support staff, but they weren't authorized to reverse any charges. It wasn't until 2 days later and hours on the phone that I finally reached their Internet Fraud department who quickly reversed the charges and deleted the account for good. AOL is a very secure service and it is extremely simple for hackers to reactivate a cancelled account. No authorization is needed to make charges to a credit card that is on file and any accounts that do not have parental controls set can make charges to the credit card on file with a single click. AOL is the worst online service available.
RonnieSan - www.ronniesan.com
Told them I was leaving the country next week. Checkmate.
1. Go to control panel
2. Go to Add/Remove programs
3. Look for "Mcaffee uninstaller" in the list of programs
4. Uninstall "Mcaffee uninstaller" via Add/Remove programs
5. reboot
Done.
Maybe you are talking about an older version of the Mcaffee that ships with Dell PCs. This method works fine on the new Dell laptop I bought for someone last week. The only thing hard about it is you have to do it through control panel. In other words it's not hard at all.
of trying to cancel my mom's account when she became too advanced in Alzheimer's to be able to use it any more. It did take at least five minutes, involved some argument, and I resolved it by a three-front attack: (a) Aren't you ashamed to be giving me such a hard time when my mom is in such bad shape? (b) I'll resolve this myself by having her attorney contact you. (There is an attorney, but that would've cost some money.) and (c) Let me speak to your supervisor. Not as bad as having them give you a hard time when the person owning the account has died, but it came pretty close.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
Most service companies have similar retainment systems these days. When I worked at bell mobility, we were required to do similar things to what this rep was doing. If we weren't as pushy/blindly idiotic as this rep was, we were reprimanded. People were often let go if their retainment stats were not high enough, and there was a lot of pressure to keep people from canceling. It fell directly on your shoulders if someone canceled. "Uh oh, Johnston.. you've had two cancelations this week. A manager coach will listen in with you from now on." Situations would come up like people getting deals with other companies that were twice as good as anything we could offer, and we would still have to fight tooth and knuckle to prevent them from canceling. Even when family would call in to cancel their deceased family member's phone.. we would have to push for them to keep it. :( It's horrible when your job is to keep someone with something that you know is wrong for them.
The part that really bugs me here is that AOL says they fired the employee for his behavior, when it's fully obvious that he was only doing exactly what they wanted. I highly doubt that he would have any concern with whether this customer canceled or not, were it not a factor that seriously affects his job security. Once I got a call where a company was canceling 25 lines. I spent hours trying to save them, and couldn't. When my boss found out he nearly put me through the floor. He made me reverse the cancelations, and had me call them back. Even though we had spent well over 2 hours already discussing it.
When I called to cancel an AOL account for someone I had a near carbon copy experience to this. Took over an hour just to reach the "cancelation specialist". There is nothing shocking, special, or strange about this story.
..just wait until he gets to uninstalling the product ;)
I had the SAME thing happen to me. I tried to cancel my parent's account with AOL months ago and it took me no less than 3 separate calls to do it. The first AOL rep went so far as to LIE to me AFTER trying to convince her for fifteen minutes that I "truly" wanted to cancel it. She told me that she would give me two weeks just to "make sure." Then, she would "automatically" cancel the account. That was a blatant lie since I got yet another charge on my account the next month. When I called back fuming, they refused to cancel the account, even though I had the credit card it was originally purchased with and was age 19, until they got expressed consent from both me AND my parents. I suppose I can understand that, however the last call was truly absurd. My mother called telling them to cancel the account and the rep told her that "young kids like yours always lie about this sort of thing, he probably never called and want's to keep his email and account." My mom had to convince the AOL rep that I was not a hooligan.
AOL has an entire department dedicated to convincing people that they need to stay with AOL. The three separate employees all used high pressure techniques to keep us from canceling our account. These aren't the actions of individuals, but a company policy that breeds asinine and brash employees.
It's time for a class action law suit.
MBNA's website will also do it for you, using java to get a little popup window.
Just look around, I usually find it on the right on the summary screen after I first log in.
That is, when they're not pushing 3% transfer rates...
If the CS reps are punished for cancellations and rewarded for retentions, let's skew the system and do our poor CSR's a favor (many of us have been there and it aint easy)! Everyone call to cancel an AOL account today (if you don't have one use a friend's). At the first hint of retention say "MAN! I guess you're right - I SHOULD keep my account after all!" Your new friend will get promoted and you'll have a warm fuzzy feeling inside.
or else!
Vincent's own terminology put him in the trap. Telling the rep "cancel my account" implies that the rep can argue. The right approach is this: "I have now informed you that I'm cancelling. That's all I have to do according to my contract. I am no longer bound by the contract no matter what you say and no matter whether you put the cancellation in your systems or not. I'm not in a mood for argument, so I'm going to hang up. Have a nice day and remember, if you charge me next month you'll be committing credit card fraud. [click]"
You could have just waited until someone posted it on the front page, here, you know. It was just matter of time, now that it's been on Digg.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Call them up, tell them you're cancelling, get the reps name, etc. Write it all down. If they start to give you grief, loudly repeat, "I want you to cancel my account now." and hang up. IMMEDIATELY call your credit card company. Tell them you talked to XX at AOL to cancel your account, effective immediately, and to deny any further charges that come in from them. AOL tries to charge you, gets denied, service is over!
-jls
Techno-pagan
I.. in fact had that same problem years ago, they kept telling me to stay... give it another try.. finally a guy said he'd give me a few months of free service to see if I liked it... a few months later.. I owe them $74.... so I just stopped paying the fees :)
once (1999 iirc) I tried to cancel an account at an ISP (not AOL though) by telling the bank to deny charges by them... some month later I got mail from their lawyer demanding the base fee of several month (about 300$)
since I didn't use the account anymore we could settle the lawsuit by paying 150$
so you see, since you can't proove you cancelled your account by phone, this method can get you into trouble!
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
It' not *that* hard unless that's an AOL UK only feature..
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
What does this have to do with AOL trying to keep customers? AOL has done this since the beginning of time, even when they had more customers than they knew what to do with.
I've signed up and canceled AOL many a time, starting around '93. And each time it's been like this, to varying degrees. Slow news day indeed...
Can't believe this made the Today show too. Ohh all hail the power of the Interweb.
Certainly not here in the UK, and I should imagine the laws are the same in America.
Write a letter with your full address on it, stating clearly and in no uncertain terms that you "are writing to cancel the account". Not that you would "like to" cancel, not "please can you cancel" - "I am writing to cancel". Sign it, date it, send it Recorded Delivery for proof of receipt.
IANAL, but from my understanding they are legally bound to cancel if you request it in writing, as long as you haven't signed some agreement that binds you to x months. Because you sent it recorded, they have absolutely no excuse and can't use the infamous "we haven't received a letter off you" excuse.
I've cancelled a few Singlepoint 4u contracts this way with no problem or delay, and they're well known for being awkward and clingy.
Vic?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I was a CSR and TSR for a few years while in college, so let me explain.
1. AOL probably has several call centers all over the USA and/or the world.
2. There are probably several Vincents.
3. Vincent might not be his real name, or might be his middle name, or he might go by the name Skippy to his peers. So nobody knows a Vincent at the call center.
4. How do we know he got fired? By whom? Aol outsources their call centers, don't they? Can AOL force a third party company running the call center to fire someone? Chances are that Vincent got a raise and promotion by the company he really works for (not AOL). Vincent sounds like a VERY GOOD CSR. At the call center I worked at (in Heathrow, FL), Vincent would have been made a team lead, if management heard that call. I'm really not kidding. Needless to say, I quit that job as soon as could, but damn the pay was GOOD!
They've been doing this for years. Unsubscribing from AOL has always been notoriously difficult.
If they're really interested in keeping customers, they should just try...Not sucking. I know, I know, a real revolutionary concept there.
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
I got rid of AOL by calling my bank (wells fargo) and stopping payment on the autopayment. Then I had them go back 2 months and refund me the two months of fees that I shouldn't have paid because I couldn't get the assholes to close my account. After about 6 months I finally stopped getting threatening letters in the mail.
Just place a stop payment request with your card or bank. Eventually the acount gets cut off.
Create another admin user account and delete from there.
Have you actually tried this? Did it really work? What, exactly did you say, and to whom?
I've tried that with a credit union and a commercial bank, and neither one would do it.
They would happily reverse the charges after I provide a letter saying they were bogus, and they would happily "cancel the account" (or issue a new cc number, if I preferred).
Not sure why they wouldn't block a vendor, but they sure wouldn't. I don't think it's because they aren't willing to help the customer--they were quite willing and helpful with the disputed charges. But they definitely won't block a vendor, even with a certified notarized letter asking them to do so.
Oh, yeah--"cancel the account" is in quotes, because you never really close a ccard account.
Oh, you think you've done it? Maybe you have; I don't know. Go check. Look at your credit report; it's free (unlike freecreditreport.com; don't start).
How many credit card accounts you think you've closed show up as "pays as agreed" or "active"? How many appear as "closed"?
I'll bet the first number is a lot bigger than the second. It's like the mafia. Once you're in, you're in for life.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I too started out my internet connection life with an AOL dial-up account in the Windows 3.11 days, for about two minutes. Then I switched the config data to Suse 6.1 and I've been using Suse or Slackware ever since. It was hard to cancel and I paid at least a month more for service because of some billing cutoff crap. When I had to cancel an AOL account at work I tried a different approach. I started bad mouthing AOL and generalling making a big stink about everything that the TOS said I should not do. Now that account got cut off real quick and it was fun to bad mouth AOL for a while. Try it, you might like it.
zenray
I've used this on a few call centers (AOL included), you just need to be in the right mindset before you call.
..and Repeat, Rinse, Repeat - works everytime.
Me (talking fast): Hi. I am cancelling my acount. My details are...
Drone: Hi may I ask you why you are cancelling?
Me: (Silence)
Drone: Hello?
Me: (More Silence)
Drone: Hello, are you still there?
Me: (waiting for last possible moment): Hi. I am cancelling my acount. My details are...
Drone: Right, is there a reason you need to cancel the account?
Me: (Lots more silence)
May take a few minutes longer but never fails to make me smile...
N/A
I have a similar experience, kinda.
A few years ago I (thought I) cancelled an account with Sprint. We had balance due, and my wife paid it. We thought everything was resolved.
Three years later I get a notice from a collections agency that we still owed. We hadn't received another bill from Sprint prior to that.
After literally 2 hours on the phone, and after several CSR reps telling me to simply ignore it, I finally got to a rep who actually resolved it. I got his name and extension.
I called the collections agency and explained the situation. I gave the woman I spoke to the rep's information, and told her that they needed to recoup the fees for buying my account from Sprint. She agreed.
End of problem.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
Here I thought I was the only one to spot that hypocricy...
Could Vincent Ferrari be subject to a law-suit? At no point did Vincent tell the rep he was being recorded, I thought you had to mention that at the beginning of the conversation.
Is someone seriously saying this is news? I know my dad subscribed to AOL several years ago (I never got the whole story as to why), and got the same runaround - he had to call multiple times before he finally got them to cancel the stupid thing. How do you think they have such ridiculously inflated subscription numbers? Because they have good service?
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Last time I had to cancel AOL I still got charged for the next two months...aparently canceled doesn't mean anything anyway.
"Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck." -George Carlin
See, this fallacy isn't even new. We've had this rationalization before. And although for this case it's a bit of a hyperbole, we already have plenty of legal precedents where it was already decided that it's _not_ an excuse. E.g., war crimes and extortion. The soldiers or goons were "just executing orders" and the officer or mafia don "didn't personally do anything wrong, it's just those subordinates which decided to put a bullet through a few people's brains on their own." And at some point it's been legally decided that, nope, sorry, it doesn't work that way. You're not any less of an asshole if you're just following asshole orders, and you're not absolved of responsibility just because you've instigated some act instead of personally commiting it.
Again: it applies to _both_ the bosses and their soldiers/goons/etc there. An officer can't say "oh well, my men may have been rounding up civillians and shooting them, but _I_ was only sipping my coffee and watching them, so I'm not to blame." At some point it was decided that, no, you can be court martialled even for just that: sitting and watching instead of stopping them. If they're under your command, it's your responsibility. And conversely, callous as it may seem, a soldier can't just say "well, I may have been breaking every single law, but I was only following orders, so I'm not to blame."
And it seems to me like the same applies here. Again, to everyone involved:
- if AOL employs and even encourages asshats to harrass the customers, then the AOL bosses are asshats
- if someone takes an asshat job at AOL, then they're an asshat. It's that simple. You knew what that job involves, and if you saw nothing wrong with doing it for the money, then, congrats, you've decided to be an asshat. A professional asshat, but an asshat nevertheless.
And at the very least, if you actively took part in annoying someone with an idiotic script, then you can't really pretend that they had no right to be annoyed by it. It's that simple. Unless they're the ones who started with the insults right from the start, I fail to see how it's their fault. One or two questions are ok, but putting them through a half an hour ordeal to discourage them from leaving is already a case of (A) your company is harrassing them, and (B) you're the hired goon doing it. Yes, for money to pay rent, duly noted. You're still the goon trying to harrass them into submisssion anyway. Acting offended and as if "it was only for the money" absolves you of any fault is just surrealistic.
Plus, the comparison with the hotel is... sorta funny. If I go to a hotel and I say I want to check out, I expect them to let me check out. Period. Making me go through a whole script and borderline insults (like "let me talk to your dad" to a 30 year old in TFA) just to stop charging me for the room is fucking stupid.
As for the threat of keeping records and not letting me stay there ever again... well, let's put it like this: if any hotel harrassed me the way AOL has been treating some of its customers, I can assure you that I wouldn't want to stay there ever again. I take "voting with my wallet" pretty seriously. I'll give my money to someone who treats me nicely. I'm sure the guy in TFA won't need AOL's records to prevent him from getting an account there ever again, either: the memory of that conversation should keep him from applying ever again.
And then there's the aspect of comparing AOL to a _luxury_ hotel. Heh. Let's not go there.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The ball has started rolling! Cue the inevitable string of replies with steadily decreasing UID tied in with "old timer" and "in my day we had to post going uphill both ways to the server!" jokes.
As a CSR for an ISP, I feel for Vincent. Customer calls to cancel, I go through the motions of "No more email, no more access, cancelling now. Is that okay?" wait for confirmation. And then I confirm again that its now cancelling. And while the system cancels I ask why. I don't get pushy, I don't get nasty.
People cancel accounts for a reason - be it crappy service or something else. Last time I checked people don't just cancel stuff for no reason, and as a CSR sure you might want it for record keeping purposes, but ultimately the customer is in charge - they want it closed, close it.
I opened up an AOL account last fall because I was going on vacation and I needed dial-up service. When I called a month later, I literally had to yell and scream at them to get them to cancel my account.
"But sir, have you tried our (insert name of useless feature)? Perhaps that would entice you to stay."
"No, thank you, just cancel."
"But sir, what about all our exclusive AOL music content?"
"No, thank you, please just cancel my account immediately.
(almost ten minutes later)
"But sir, didn't you enjoy our email service?"
"Listen, cancel this fucking account right now. Do you understand English? I want this account cancelled, and I want it done now!"
That finally did the trick. But I'm not going to spend my time on the phone with a bunch of asswipes (who speak perfect English, BTW, at least the one I had) who pretend they don't hear me say CANCEL. It was a huge mistake to deal with AOL on my part, I should have known better, but these worthless shits still have no right to act this way. I work on the phone a great deal, and it takes a lot to get me pissy and swearing - unfortunately, that's the ONLY THING that works with these jerks.
Best idea, stay away from AOL entirely...Next time I "Need" dial-up for something I'll just go without.
AE
AOL isn't the only asshole in the business.
Years ago, before there was such a thing as cable or DSL, I had a very nice dial-up account with a mom 'n pop ISP. Unfortunately mom 'n pop got bought out and the service started to rapidly expand, and just as rapidly go downhill as well. I decided I wanted to cancel the account, which I'd kept for certain reasons even though I'd moved to a different city.
Well, wouldn't you know - under the new TOS (which I never agreed to, having signed up years before) they didn't accept ANY cancellation requests unless you delivered a signed form to them IN PERSON at the home office. As you can imagine this didn't sit well with me and after several arguments on the phone I told them I'd cancel the credit card they were billing and they could just suck it up and deal with it - at which point they said "go ahead; we'll report you to the bureaus for defaulting on your bill". It was clear the rep had used this tactic before, and was loving every second of his job, dishing out shit to the customer. (Fucking little twat. What I wouldn't give even now to kick the bastard's teeth in.)
I consulted with a lawyer and while he told me I'd almost certainly win against the company it'd take roughly on the order of one-and-a-half to two years to clear the whole matter up, during which time my credit might very well be screwed by the monthly reports of non-payment these assholes would make. He recommended that I be the one to suck it up, drive across the state, and fill out/hand in the signed form - after, of course, I made a copy of said form and made sure he got one, just in case they managed to 'lose' it. Which is exactly what I did, although the people at the company actually tried to stop me from leaving the office with the form to go to Kinko's to make a copy. Christ, were they pissed when I told them that I was going to have proof that I turned the damned thing in whether they liked it or not.
AOL's behavior here, while reprehensible, isn't anywhere close to as bad as it can get. Oh, and in case anyone's wondering the sons of bitches in question were a company by the name of Rio Communications (http://www.rio.com/). I have no idea if they're still the same assholes they were years ago, but I for one wouldn't even consider touching their company after what I went through with those cocksuckers.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I signed up for AOL on a whim in March just to see what it was like since I left many years ago (I was one of the original Mac users so early that I could use my initials as a screen name).
I didn't think much of it, so I decided to cancel last month. They will only let you cancel by phone, paper mail, or fax.
I decided to do fax, since I thought that would be the easiest. Apparently it didn't work, as I still got a bill on my credit card this month.
So, this article spurred me to try to cancel by phone.
I had to spend a few minutes talking to a machine...that actually wasn't a bad system. However, once I wanted to cancel, it put me on hold and said I'd have to wait about 10 minutes.
So, I was listening to Carly Simon for what seemed forever (I'd estimate about 6 minutes, since I heard two songs), and finally got a human. I was being given the hard sell much like this article, but it was clear the poor guy was being forced to read from the "script" and wasn't having much fun doing it, so I played along just to be polite.
That conversation lasted about 3 minutes. Then he said he had to read some cancellation disclosure and "not to shoot the messenger". The disclosure said that AOL would let me retain my email address for free just to maintain a relationship. No catch. They will send me a confirmation to my AOL address and by US Mail. Interesting.
After that, he said he needed to transfer for another disclosure and to verify important details. The phone began to ring, and ring, and ring....it finally went dead. (I hope this doesn't mean my account isn't going to be cancelled...guess I'll have to check that email address)
Total time wasted: 20 minutes.
I just implemented this type of feature (capturing entered information before completion) on our company website. It works really well, and we get about a 50% conversion rate on call backs.
A lot of people want to buy the product but then hesitate and don't complete the purchase, from reasons ranging from last minute questions about the product to not feeling comfortable entering the credit card details over the internet.
Our outbound call center is then able to make a return call within 24 hours and answer any last minute questions customers may have and close the sale. Considering most shopping carts have a fallout rate of around 70-80 percent, this is a very good solution for the business.
Lastly, just imagine how many more customer details we could capture if we used AJAX to capture data as the customer tabbed to each field, but that's for version 2 I think.
Discover has a Windows app and a web-based Java/Flash thing (not sure which, but it runs fine under Safari) which gives you one-time numbers.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
...there are a few things that i feel obligated to point out.
#1: People blaming the rep on this should cool out. When you're working an 8$ an hr. job where you spend all day getting bitched at for things that you can't change, you tend to develop a pretty non-confrontational attitude or you don't last long. It seems to me that this rep was pretty non-confrontational but the guy on the phone didn't want to be patient enough to deal with the bullshit that AOL makes their retention reps go through before cancelling an account. As a customer service representative you always have an obligation to the company for which you work to find out EXACTLY why someone wants to cancel their account and see if you can resolve the problem instead of just blindly granting their request. Now there are many reasons for this. One of those is because if you don't and you happen to have been recorded by your quality assurance department then you can be reprimanded for it. Another reason is that customers tend to overreact because people in general are stupid and like to pretend that they are victims. When a customer calls in and says "i want to cancel my account" 9 times out of 10 they don't want to cancel their account, and it's not in their best interest to cancel their account, they're just upset about something that they feel is not working to their satisfaction and wish to have it resolved, that's why probing questions like the ones that this rep was asking are necessary if AOL wishes to remain a large thriving corporation (and we all know that they do).
#2: Singling out AOL on this is rediculous. Ever try to cancel service with a cell phone company? How about your cable service? Anything that you pay for month to month? They will ALWAYS do whatever they can to keep your business because it costs them so much money in advertising and promotions to GET a customer that they usually don't start turning a profit on those customers until a year or more later. If they lose a customer that they are already making money on then not only does that customer have to be replaced in order to keep their proffit margins from shrinking, but said margins shrink automatically because they have to pay advertising costs, lose money on special free give-aways, etc. in order to find that replacement customer. I mean i personally worked for at least one company that there was one particular month the reps were informed "you are not ALLOWED to cancel any accounts this month." If an account had to be cancelled that month and there was absolutely no way around it then we had to first of all: do everything in our power (including REFUSING to comply until the customer agreed to work with us) to make sure that we could not save the account, secondly: find a supervisor and CONVINCE them that there was nothing further that we could do so that they could take the call, and finally: IF the supervisor couldn't save the account after employing every tactic known to man then THEY had to cancel it, and then each party involved (excluding the customer of course) would have to fill out about 10 pages of paperwork explaining exactly what happened and why said account could not possibly be saved, which THEN went on their record in the "bad" file.
#3: It does appear from the customers tone on this call that he is a child trying to get away with something. I didn't see any verification on the account at all other than the person giving their "name" and to the people saying that the rep didn't mention that he believed that the customer was trying to fraudulently cancel the account: OF COURSE NOT! Do YOU want to tell the guy who pays your salary that you won't do what he asks because you think he's a fraud? Do YOU want to listen to him bitch, complain, scream, curse and threaten you for doing so, all the while running up your Talk Time, ruining your Quality Score and utterly destroying everything about your statistics (which are a direct reflection of the quality of work that you do in a call center) that you have worked s
Don't waste your time arguing with people like the AOL representative in this story.
Remove the company's authorization to make charges to your credit card, in writing. Write to your credit card company to tell them that any charges from AOL after a certain date are unauthorized. This takes 10 minutes and two stamps.
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
You say that the CSR has no control over the script, and I agree, because customer service is my job and I do it quite well, if I do say so. I don't have any control over what I am supposed to say, but I always remember the reason that I'm there - customer service. I am there because a customer either has been, or feels, wronged, and it is my job to right it. If that means returning a product or issuing a replacement, so be it. If that involves letting the customer vent to me for 15 minutes before they get angry and leave, so be it. When my employer informs me that I can't perform the responsibilities of reasonable customer service, I am no longer working in customer service, whether I stay at that job or not.
When I called to cancel my cable and Internet service because I was moving out of their service area, and I was sent to the "Customer Satisfaction Specialist" who demanded a better reason for my cancellation (literally, threatened to not cancel until I had a better reason than the fact that paying them would not allow me to receive or use me a single service), I lost all respect for that particular branch of "customer service." I ended up having to call back, the next person said "maybe you could move somewhere that's still in our service area instead?" but eventually agreed to cancel. I had to pull up my bank's zero-liability policy for fraudulent charges to get him to do it (after he threatened to continue billing my card), but he cancelled and I haven't seen a charge yet.
I can appreciate that the CSR in the AOL case, as well as my calls, was just doing a job. But there is a point at which you have to put the smug satisfaction of retaining a "tough one" behind you and just do what the damn customer wants.
Yes, it's a job, but grow up and realize that you can't strong-arm everyone into staying, nor should you try. I know why those people are there - they're to keep people from cancelling because the service is too expensive or the service doesn't work, or whatever other controllable reason. But I was moving, and they don't even service my new place! And yet I was supposed to (according to the first guy) continue paying them for some unknown reason, or (according to the second guy) dump the apartment complex that my wife-to-be and I love and want to live in, lose my deposit, and start looking for a new place that's inside that company's tiny, tiny service area? That's not reasonable customer retention. That's an attempt to frustrate me into not cancelling, and it didn't work. Those people do not work in customer service, and if they're the "victim" for doing their job, then they should be reminded that employment in the U.S. is at-will, and they can terminate it at whatever point they see fit.
-Brad V.
I work in tech support. If somebody calls me up and says, "My computer doesn't work, upgrade it." I don't run down there with a new machine. I'll say what do you mean it doesn't work? What's wrong, how can we fix this? And if it does require a new machine, okay. To do your job you have to understand your job, not just take orders blindly.
I called and cancelled my account with AOL (i only signed up for a free 30day thing to get a free Flat Screen), i called on the 28th day and told them i wish to cancel and i didnt want it and i never ever used it or logged onto their web site. so they canceled it. then i get a charge right out of my account four months later for 89.99! i call them and tell them to give me my money back because stil i have never ever logged onto AOL but they would not refund my money saying that i never canceled and they didnt have record of my conversation. I then yelled at the person to get a manger on and the manager was so very rude. i told them all to go fu@k themselves and burn in hell. so the point of the story.. never ever sign up for AOL!
...and accept "no" as an answer, I don't see a problem with it. We do similar ourselves as we are concerned that the customer may have had technical or other difficulties.
I hope your work paid for you AV software!
Respect copyright - the GPL relies on it.
If you read the transcript it sounds like the AOl rep doesn't believe the guy is who he says he is. IE If the account wasn't being used any more why 500 hours in the last month after a year of little to no activity?
It sounds like a misunderstanding. The rep was suspicious of the person calling in and the caller got snarky.
If AOl would just let people cancel from their pc instead of making them call in, and if customers wouldn't act like A$$holes then problems like these could be avoided.
Grrrrrr......
- Is it unreasonable to have a 15 minute waiting time? Well, yes. The bigger your customer base is, the less waiting time there should be, as you should forecast volumes better. But the waiting time is not what this point is about.
- Is it unreasonable to call up the details of someone calling on the screen? No.
- Is it unreasonable to ask _why_ someone would like to cancel a subscription? No, not at all, not in the least. I would actually be happy to be asked why I think something is shitty, so I would have an opportunity to unleash the list of complaints. I find it somewhat awkward just to call somewhere and on my own volition start listing what I hate about them, so being asked is actually okay.
- Vincent answered that he didn't use the account. Was it unreasonable for the representative to check this information? No, not at all. If they have any form of competent IT CS systems this information should already be in front of him.
- Is it unreasonable to keep inquiring after Vincent's answer? No, not at all. From the way he answers, he appears, to be honest, mentally deranged, and not really in control of whatever mental faculties he has. The account showed 545 hours of usage last month - with Vincent saying he didn't use it at all. That simply points to 'crazy person who doesn't know what he is doing'. He was obviously trying to goad the rep by answering that way, but I see this as a case of a CS rep trying to protect an obviously momentarily crazy guy from themselves.
- Is it unreasonable not to immediately comply to Vincent's commands? No, not really. Given that we have already established that he appeared crazy or drunk, the way he commands, "I'm not explaining anything to you. Cancel the account." just isn't how any ordinary person talks. And he keeps that up throughout.
Overall, if anything, I think this Vincent person in the post looks to be a massive asshole, a person who obviously tries to freak people out intentionally by acting crazy, and then makes fun of their hesitation afterwards. The rep did what a rep should in extremely rare cases like this should do, which was to make one attempt at protecting a crazy guy from himself. I feel sorry for the rep and am sorry that AOL sacked him.
Bastards did the same thing to me years ago, only reason I had AOHELL was because they were the exclusive place to play Kesmai's Multiplayer Battletech Online Solaris 7 once it left open beta... Eventually, they no longer were. BUHBYE. But yeah, they gave me the same treatment. Trying to get me to keep it, because, my god...what person can go without INTERNET WITH TRAINING WHEELS?!
The guy who comes up with a way to stab people in the face over the phone, will be a rich man. (Not as rich as the one who comes up with a way to do it over the internet though.)
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Firstly, the minute someone I know buys a new PC from Dell, Gateway, or the like, I do a complete format on it. Too much garbage is put on these machines in the first place. As far as AOL goes, I still have no idea how they are still in business. Their DSL service actually runs through Road Runner service (in most areas) so it's more beneficial to just get it from Road Runner themselves. They still waste a ton of money and time advertising their dial up connections when that is so 1995. AOL software itself really blows. The only good thing that ever came out of AOL was AIM. Sadly enough, there are other companies who have terrible customer service, such as Verizon. Next time I'm on the phone with them, I'll surely record this. If they spend 1/3 of their advertising budget (instead of doing the stupid commercials) on their CSRs, they would be total king. But alas, they don't care. Such as AOL doesn't care about this case. Overall, AOL really has issues and they deserve to go the way of bankruptcy cause I and many around the world hate their guts and they market a terrible product that only takes the money of the technologically weak and pathetic. -end rant
I've been an AOL member for 12 years, and have been BYOA (bring your own access) for 6. If I quit, will my screen names still exist? Can I use them in AIM? More importantly, can I still use the email (do they provide this for AIM-only? And if so, will my transition be seamless?)
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I had AOL for some time myself, and the complaints I have had here about trying to cancel the service are very similar to the experience that most other people have had here.
I had a problem with AOL that was similar, where I even tried to cancel the damn thing at least three different times, all of them rebuffed with one time even being offered six months of free service.
Finally, as a last resort, I called my bank and told them that I lost my credit card that I had been using to pay for the AOL service. I actually lost it in my garbage can that afternoon, when it met an unfortunate accident with a pair of sissors. With very little complaint from my bank, they issued me a new card number, also informing me that any automatic payment must be re-established with the new card number.
I thanked the bank for that service, and "forgot" to tell AOL the new card number. How rude of me.
This was the only way for me to cancel my subscription. God forbid if banks ever have automatic account change notification to creditors (not credit bureaus, which is another issue altogether).
I ALMOST fell bad for the AOL rep, ALL AOL reps do this. This rep was just towing the company line. As a former time warner tech support rep I can say that it is in the best interests of the AOL rep to be fired. Working for time warner is a shitty god awfull job. at least now this guy can go do something usefull.
Wow, talk about thread drift :) And cheers for bringing econ into it, too.
Can you provide cites for some of your figures? Particularly wrt the percentage increases you quoted early on would be nice to see. Not challenging, just geniunely curious, and I'm getting nowhere w/ Google at the moment.
Second, any ideas *why* copays dropped so much? Was it at all related to or financed by cuts to other services? Or was it competition in action, insurance companies cutting copays to look better to the customer?
Otherwise, thanks for an informative post.
hehe, just had the same problem trying to cancel Netzero.
;) Took several "I just wish to cancel"s before they got the idea. Even said the new laptop now has EVDO,WIFI,and an ethernet cable it doesnt need dialup which we havent used in months anyway. Then they suggested a backup plan for $5 a month. Then....blah blah blah
;) 1st guy on phone had alot more leeway than i expected!
I even asked if they had been bought by AOL
Did have em down to $5 a month and a free month of service before i finally got it canceled.
Amazing that companies will lower your rate if you complain/cancel.
BTW folks, complain about your maintance rates for you mailing machine if your in charge of that
i've personally cleaned it off about 15 dells now. you just have to uninstall the AOL main program first, and not the sub entries in control panel. granted, i'd prefer it if they didn't put that shite on there in the first place. It's not as bad as the McAfee trial they put on there though, that will only uninstall in safe mode...
Poor guy got fired and all he was doing was showing up to his crappy job. Following policy trying not to get fired. Of course, once this goes public AOL 'tows the line' and fires this out of control rep. We all know this guy was just following the corporate policy.
I'd love to see this guy sue AOL for doing what he was told to do. AOL isn't the only company that does this either.
Try cancelling your cell phone, gym membership, hell, anything you signed up for that has monthly billing!
This is corporate policy for customer support, not some generation of rogue customer support agents!!
...to call up to cancel an account and have sound effects of the count from sesame street in the background to count the number of times you request canceling the account. ...etc...
Customer: I'd like to cancel my account
The Count: One ah-ha-ha-ha
Service Rep: I'm sorry to hear that. Can I ask why?
Customer: No. I'd just like to cancel my account.
The Count: Two ah-ha-ha-ha
Service Rep: Well if you'll give me you info I can pull up your account.
I wonder if the Service Rep would catch on to what you were doing. Someone could also do this with the audio from this phone call...
She's not dead; she's just pining for the fjords of Norway!
My friend and I played with AOL back in 1996 or so. We went through a 60min free trial pretty quickly, and then it started costing. We had had enough already so we tried to cancel. Of course they made it nearly impossible.
Finally we went back to the chat rooms and found ones with admins/operators present and spewed every swear word in the book. It didn't take long to get our account suspended and once we did that they were much more willing to cancel our account. It was like they didn't want us anymore!
And you know you dont have a virus, how exactly? Its not like all of them are the sort which display ads and fux with your system. It doesnt matter how leet or smart or good with computers you are, if you use windows you may get viruses.
Some situations i can think of off hand:
1) That hot neighbor you've been chatting with in the hall finaly comes over for dinner and checks her webmail because she doesnt have a comptuer at home. Result: INFECTED
2) Your crusing for porn and because of your excitment, misclick into some random link. Result: INFECTED
3) You download some pirated software install it then use the provided crack. Only this isnt just a crack, its a hax0r trojan silently owning you in the background! Result: INFECTED
4) Your friend brings their pc over because he cant get deer hunter 2006 to work. You connect it to your local lan (here i assume you dont have internally firewalled vlans). Result: INFECTED
5) Your walking through the park on your way home from work. You find a USB thumb drive lying on the pathway. You get home and plug it in. USB drive was placed there maliciously by haxx0rs. When autorun runs (or even something more clever) you are owned. Result: INFECTED
In short, there are many many attack vetors that virii, trojans, *ware, scripts and bots can infect your system. Norton AV corp, while yes using SOME resources, is not very intesnsive and does not crash or hang the system randomly. Norton consumer grade products are a world apart from their corporate offerings. NIS and any of their 200x renewable every year products, should be reclassified as malware imho.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
If anyone is ever bored for a great length of time, ask for a Lvl 7 uninstall of the AOL product. Most agents won't know what this is, and those that do will pretend it doesn't exist.
:)
This is the manual removal of all the registry keys and other little bits AOL leaves lying around.
They may have discontinued the option, but it might be fun to find out. Happy hunting.
Hasn't AOL already been sued for their unwillingness to cancel accounts?
When my father died, I had to argue with the rep about closing the account. He asked me why I wanted to cancel and I told him that the user, my father, had died. His reply? "Well, I'm sorry to hear that. Are you sure your mother wouldn't want to continue the account?"
Fuck. That was two years ago and I still get enraged thinking about that conversation.
No win situation for the rep.
Accept "no" for an answer: You're fired.
If the customer records you and makes public your not accepting "No" for answer: You're fired.
That is if they actually fired him. I doubt it. All we really know about the rep is that his phone-name is John.
If I were in John's situation and got fired over this, I'd go public with more of the crap AOL pulls over these cancellation requests. In fact I'd have made the appearance on CNBC with the customer.
SRR
Up until maybe, maybe the end of the not-so-long call, the caller was the rude and antagonistic one, and the CSR was trying to get the job done. Clearly the CSR was trying to truly verify that he was REALLY the owner of the account(since it was showing as an account that was used regularly) and not just some assmunch trying to mess with someone else's account. The caller's tone was Jerky-Boy from nearly the start-- he clearly wanted to have something happen (riggght, he just HAPPENED to tape it-- a felony in some states, hope he researched it for his-- because he had heard horror stories). Smells fishy to me. Plus it just took a few minutes even in this case... NBD. ----(I'm not an "Anonymous Coward", just "Anonymous Lazy")
I would mark you as a foe but unfortunately I have 200 other ignorant assholes marked as foes ahead of you.
Indeed. But in response to what? In response to a hired goon that's deliberately harrassing them and trying to get them to throw their hands up and give up whatever they wanted to do.
At some point I stop seeing bullying right back as wrong, when someone is deliberately causing you distress. At some moment Vincent had answered enough question, made his case perfectly clear that no, he just doesn't want it any more, and the CSR was just deliberately being obtuse and annoying. I don't care if he's paid to do that or not, or if his job depends on it, he's just deliberately trying to torment Vincent into submission. And I'll be damn if I can blame someone for resorting to bullying, when they're subjected to that kind of torment.
I.e., as that bullshit goes, the company through its CSRs made the first step. They're the ones which practice, yes, an absolutely bullshit way to treat anyone, doubly so a paying customer. So the annoyed customer slings bullshit right back. I can't blame them too much.
That's how I see human interactions anyway. It's a give-and-take affair, a social contract that is only valid as long as both sides respect it. The moment one side decides it's ok to thoroughly ignore that contract, I no longer see the other side as bound to obey it.
I don't care if someone's just paid to do it. The moment they decided it's ok to treat people like shit -- for money or for any other reason -- then they should be prepared to be treated like shit right back.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Company policy may well see you both into civil and criminal court for following it. These so-called policies
do not relieve you of the responsibility for your own conduct. Of course the chances are slim you will not be
sued for stealing other people's time with plodding your way through a script, you can not expect to be
treated better than an obnoxious voice response system if you act like one:
If I tell you to please stop feeding me the script because the answer is NO then treat me like a human being
just cancel the account and say something like, "Sorry for the script but they're making me do this. I just cancelled your
account though" and I'll respond with "Never mind the script, I know they make you do that. Thank you and have a
nice day".
Don't take it personal but one thing is for sure: I will gleefully shit into your masters' faces, but above
all: DON'T BE A PEON.
Say your piece, and then let them talk. And talk. And talk. Acknowledge nothing except what is in your favour. They have their instructions, you have your record. Don't even play the game.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I had AT&T wireless for 2 years. First they set me up with a cheap phone, at the same time they signed me up for every single optional program. I called them up after the first month to yell about it. They "fixed" it.
Next month most of them disappeared, there was two programs, something and Equipment insurance. I called them up and canceled them both.
Then the third bill came, I don't even remember if I got my rebates at that point, I believe not, but the equipment insurance was STILL on my phone. so I called them up and started yelling. the real question I asked them was why the hell would I insure a phone that costs 20 bucks if I had to pay 50 dollar deductable, and I was charged 5 bucks a month for it? They assured me it would be fixed.
Then I got all sorts of pay program off the web I never even signed up for. And they assured me it would be fixed (it was 3 monthes after the fact)
Every time I had to call them it was such a chore to get anything done that I finally started to go 3-4 monthes before trying again. Every time I was either told it would be fixed, or given a random package of programs. They told me I didn't call the week before when I had. They told me there was no record of me asking for this or that to be turned off. And this was over a variety of customer reps. Not just one person.
After 9 monthes Cingular bought AT&T Wireless, and what happened? nothing. I still had the same problems. Apparently I had a "fuck with this customer" flag on me.
Finally I gave up paying more than I should, I switched phones, but I still couldn't cancel that account, I was basically shell shocked. I gave the account to my mother to handle since I couldn't make a call (I just knew nothing good would come of it.) so she canceled my account....
Next month a bill came. Service was not interrupted, the cancelation fee was not waived (of course they said it would be) and so on. So my mother again called, finally after two more contacts she got the account canceled at the same time she said she understood the problems.
The next month, I got yet another bill, apparently even though we paid off the amount there was more charges, because it wasn't canceled on the right day. So finally we took care of that bill.
Now I get a monthly bill that says "you have a balance of -6.53" That's right. We over paid, so now we get a monthly statement on that, getting the money is hard though.
Finally we have just told the company to take the 6 dollars and stop bothering us the customer.
In the meantime, T-mobile has never once given me a problem, my customer service problems are fixed quickly and easily. But AT&T probably made over two hundred dollars off of me just from the fact that their customer service was so bad, and they had me in a binding contract. If I could go back in time I'd have broken the contract at the first sign of problems because the amount I would have had to pay then was the same I paid at the end AND they still got money from me between the two points.
Telling the rep "cancel my account" implies that the rep can argue.
It does? It's not as though Vincent was asking "Would you pretty please do me a special favor and cancel my account?".
"Cancel my account" is a direct demand for action, and the action is one specifically allowed for in the contract between AOL and customer. The AOL representative has no grounds on which to refuse to execute the cancellation action.
-----------
Actually, entering into a conversation with a human implies that the humans on each end can speak and listen.
This conversation is what you'd expect when terminating a relationship--you have to go through denial, anger and bargaining before achieving acceptance.
It's the same as when your S.O. wants out of the relationship--you will beg and plead and wheedle and whine and fume and eventually you will reach acceptance, probably while out drinking beer with your friends.
I applaud this guy for doing his best to change the customer's mind. He knows that preventing a customer from leaving is half the cost of finding a new customer. His conduct is meritorious, from AOL's perspective.
Plus, the customer is being more than a little dishonest and the call rep called him on it without calling the customer a liar. He's got a point--500+ hours of usage in the previous month is not the same as "I haven't used it in a long time."
If customers approach this with a little more maturity, they can achieve their goals more efficiently.
Having AOL on / off for years everytime I tried to cancel was the same... keep you on the phone for hours (or try to) - give you several months for free (only to bill you for months after that) - just can't cancel it at this time since the system is down.
(as far as AOL now - thank you it has now been 4+ years since I touched that crap, I am freeeeeee)
Remember Friends don't let Friends use AOL
Once upon a time, a soon to be mommy and daddy loved each other very much (the lust was strong as well as the drinks)
Years ago I used AOL at my mom's house, and they wouldn't cancel it. Somehow I ended up with two accounts. The bank my debit card was connected to reversed charges for one account. For the other, I was told I needed to take that up with AOL. AOL customer service said they'd cancel it, but when I was still charged month after month, I decided to cancel that debit card. When they couldn't get a charge to go through, they eventually stopped and cancelled it. But to this day, they still send collection notices. I swear I'm not making it up when I say that they now address their notices to "Idiot Moron." I ought to have my mom send one to me instead of just throwing them away, scan it, and post it online as an example of AOL's customer dis-service.
It's a girl!
Why would it be? "Calls may be recorded for quality or training purposes" - they've informed you that they may tape the call, so you can too.
It doesn't matter what you say at this point Dal. Because of a post earlier, hundreds, if not thousands of people are praying for personal financial ruin, death by cancer, and a life of whoring by your children.
Let me explain why.
If I call up a company, let's say a credit card company. I call in to tell you that I spot an illegitimate charge, the first thing you say is "gee, are you sure you didn't make that charge". Fair enough. I say "no. It's not legit"
What should you do at that point? Call security? Cancel the account?
Is it fair to say "sorry sir, security is really busy, call back later"
No.
So when you call back later, is it fair to deny that you every called? Nope. Because the CRM systems in use indicate every time I call.
So now, the rep is being a liar.
So you call back to get another rep, and they say yes, you called in once. Now what should you do? Okay okay. Let's ignore that. This person also says that they can't help you and they send you over to security. Security denies that you've ever called in about the matter.
So either the company is stupid or a liar.
So you explain to security. They ask you again if you didn't remember making the charges. You explain no. They say they'll call back in a few days after "investigating".
They never call back.
So you call back again and they deny they're investigating, and they've never heard of the fraud. So you tell the same story for the 5th time.
Are you getting the picture?
So you find out the name and number of a rep who says she'll fax you the paperwork you need to fill out so they can get it off your credit card.
She never sends it.
So you call back a week later. She says "oh my, I faxed it, let me try again"
She never sends it.
So now she won't take your calls.
So by using other people's phones (she's checking caller ID) I finally get through and I basically let her know she's being a jerk. She's upset with me. Good for her. I tell her she's an incompetent liar. She's pissed off by now. So you say "Let's clear the air. I just want to get this fixed, personal feelings aside. FedEx the form". "I can't do that". "Why?". "Policy".
She says "I'll fax it again"
I say "Ma'am, you've tried to fax it twice and it didn't work. What will you change this time, or do you propose doing the same thing over and over and getting no result? I mean, what are you personally doing to help me solve the problem?"
She's about in tears. She's very upset. But she finally faxed the stuff over.
So Dal, in your world I am an arrogant asshole who should be blackballed and cut off and I'm an idiot.
But Dal, you and your kind wouldn't solve my problem. You hid behind bureaucracy, paperwork, lies, delays to avoid doing what needed to be done over a 6 week period. And then when the customer starts threating you, I'm a jerk?
Seriously? Are you crazy or something?
If you really think it's the customer's fault when they threaten, then I will join in praying for cancer for you. Because you really dont' *get* customer service. You won't even work hard enough to be mediocre. You suck at your job of helping people and then you get pissed off when customers won't accept it.
Just die and never talk to another customer under any circumstance. Crawl under a rock and die of cancer.
It ended up taking me about 15 minutes to finally cancel the account. The lady was nice, but she just had her script to go by. Still, I wish that I could bill them for my cell time.
This only goes to prove one thing - as long as AOL "thinks" it's number one, it can treat the less than computer literate like children. AOL has no visible competitors and most people (the ones that are computer illiterate, not us fellow geeks) assume that AOL is the only show in town. This is thanks in part of their advertising and visibility. AOL knows this and assumes that by doing things like Mr. Ferrari went through will power house them back. AOL, Comcast and any other Mr. Big out there is in for a rude awakening when people smart up and realize that they are not the only show in town.
Sorry, Symantec let a trojan infect our entire office network, and Avast was the only thing that saved us from having to reinstall windows on 35 PCs. I have never had any infections using Avast, and lots using Symantec.
Ask Me About... The 80's!
I run a small computer service shop.
We had a service call to setup a new Dell computer. Customer had activated McAffee. My employee was out on the install, and called to tell me that McAffee could not be uninstalled. He said it wanted a CD (not provided) in order to complete the install. He said he had talked to Dell support and they were next day mailing the CD to the customer in order to let them uninstall McAffee.
I hope I'm not paying a guy who is so dumb he can't figure out to shut off a service in order to uninstall a program. This happened within the last month, and it's the first time I had heard of it. Both of us had uninstalled McAffee many previous times without a hitch other than damaged uninstallers. The message to uninstall VirusScan first is a routine one. I'm also surprised Dell support is so dumb that they can't tell a tech to boot into Safe Mode to uninstall (although, right now I am remembering that the Norton uninstaller will not run in Safe Mode).
Right now, I still believe that the version of McAffee currently shipping with Dell Computer refuses to uninstall itself without the CD, which is not included with the computer. I think the people who have the helpful advice are giving it based on older or unactivated versions of the software.
I agree with the thread author that this situation is bordering on criminal, and should certainly carry civil liability.
Fundamentalism is a crime against humanity
http://www.oag.state.ny.us/press/2005/aug/aug24a_
So AOL's 'apology' to Vincent was pretty hypocritical, considering they are paying people bonuses to act in precisely that manner when people call to try and cancel. The way they've set up their payment system makes this behavior inevitable.
Fundamentalism is a crime against humanity
I've been hearing stories like this for years. I work in the EFT area at a financial institution, and every couple of months we get someone putting stops on payments to AOL because AOL kept charging them after they canceled.
I think that the best idea for this sort of thing is that if they give you any trouble ask for their boss if they won't give you their boss, hang up and call again until you get a helpful representative
Help Me! I'm trapped in the tubes! Oh noes! Here comes a internet!
mainly because in any stable country the governement keep exclusive control of the ultimate power brogught by control of guns (yes in some contries the goverment allow private gun ownership but the types of guns and what you can do with them are very limited under threat of force from much larger numbers of much better guns)
but they do have plenty of other weapons against you, if you have a subscription they probablly have your credit card and/or bank details (which can be very hard to stop debiting), they also generally have the ability to bury you in court on made up (or dragged up) issues until you go bankrupt.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register