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Just Cancel the @#%$* Account!
An anonymous reader writes "PC World Senior Editor Tom Spring signed up for 32 online accounts. Then tried to cancel all of them. The most difficult to cancel: NetZero. The easiest to cancel: Consumer Reports Online and The New York Times TimesSelect. His experience was rated on a number of criteria, and highlights the hoops that commercial enterprises put in place to keep their 'customers'. From the article: 'I had a hard time canceling my $5 monthly Gold Classmates.com account, too. I couldn't find any information on how to cancel until I entered the word cancel In the site's search engine. Classmates.com spokesperson John Uppendahl confirmed that there is no other way to find cancellation information. But that was only the first hoop I had to jump through to cancel my membership. Classmates.com also forced me to click through several Web pages reminding me of the benefits I'd lose. Finally my clicking ended at a generic Member Support e-mail contact page containing a blank 'Your Question' field. Though the form said nothing about cancellations, I used it to request that the service cancel my subscription. The next day I received an e-mail message confirming that the service had accepted my request.'"
how do I cancell slash dot.. or zonk?
Try canceling MSN internet sometime.
DONT TREAD ON ME MOÎΩN ÎABÃ
...just &*!@#ing cancel the credit card.
This is precisely why I use virtual CC numbers. My bank (MBNA, now bought by B of A) allows me to set a limit on the amount of money that can be used, and the expiration date is usually two months in the future. A few companies (most recently Time Magazine) have tried the old trick "Submit a new card number to ensure uninterrupted service", but the truth is, they know that as long as they have a valid CC number they are in a much stronger position.
On a different thread, I personally found Paypal to be the hardest to cancel. The link is buried deep in the Options menu, good luck finding it, aunt Mary.
I had a NetZero account some time ago, as a dial-up account to use when I traveled. (This was before all the hotels started offering wi-fi.) The funny thing is that I didn't cancel it, instead they canceled it on me... When my credit card number changed (twice), they only attempted to contact me via my NetZero email account - which of course I never looked at. The first time the card number changed I happened to discover it and fixed the problem, asking them to contact me at a different email if it happened again; the second time, I didn't notice and they never tried.
Back when I canceled my Vonage account some 2 years ago, it took a 2 hour hold time, plus mailing their hardware back at my expense to cancel.
Plus now I get monthly "Come back to Vonage and save!" letters in the mail that I can use for kindling. I guess he hasn't gotten his first letter yet.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
And somehow Netzero was harder to cancel then that classmates.com ordeal? Grr, I might even have to click the link.
What makes these companies think that this will make them money?
Whenever I encounter a situation like this (where cancelling is made a pain in the ass), I vow to never again use the service, and to tell anyone I know about what a crappy company it is.
I have actually returned to companies that did not make my life difficult in this way. Sometimes, you just don't need the service. Maybe you will be a return customer. But when they do this crap, they piss people off. They ensure that you will NEVER return and that you will do everything you can to spread the word about what a worthless company they are.
If me girlfriend wants to have sex, she strokes my cock 3 times. If she doesn't want to have sex, she strokes my cock 100 times.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
There's more work to cancelling an account than most non-admins realise.
Not only do you have to stop the user from logging in, but you need to find any and all files owned by the user, and archive those. Then identify any processes this user might have run, like web instances and timed jobs (log rotations, SQL dumps for backup, ETRN pushes), and disable those too. Did the customer have one or more vanity domains? DNS changes too, then, as well as coordinating a switch-over to new DNS servers. How about mail aliases? Those have to be disabled too.
Then you need to make sure that no other user gets the same account or mail aliases in the future, else a new user could get mail (or lawsuits) intended for the old user, and guess who'll be blamed?
Yes, it should be easy to cancel. But I think it's entirely fair that there's a cancellation fee, and that it doesn't happen instantaneously either.
Regards,
--
*Art
AOL is still a hassle to drop. I canceled my account with them over six years ago, and I was on the phone with the rep for over 30 minutes before they would accept the fact that I wanted to cancel service entirely.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
I signed up for Wells Fargo's BillPay to pay for my car loan. It didn't actually work, so I tried to cancel. There's absolutely no way to cancel the service online (despite it being very, very easy to sign up for it). I sent them an E-mail asking how I could cancel it online and the response was "sorry you didn't like the service, we've canceled your account". Awesome, I think.
When I cancelled my cell phone last year, I had to pay $25 for "administrative charges." I didn't even sign a contract. When my girlfriend's brother tried to cancel with his cable provider, he had to answer a long survey by pushing buttons on his phone for almost half an hour before being put on hold for a person to answer.
It's interesting that he mentions Consumer Reports as the easy to cancel. When I was buying a car a few years ago, I signed up with them to read reviews and advice. Their term was a year. After I bought my car (a month or two after I signed up), I canceled the account and was credited the pro-rated cost of the time I did not use. It was so easy and honest that I couldn't believe it was really going to work. After it was done, I felt a little bad for canceling service with a company that got something so right from a customer point of view, even when it costs them money.
Try and get the Democratic party to stop emailing you!
When I went to cancel my Netflix service, they happily complied. After doing so, they conveniently "lost" all the discs that I had sent back to them. (So I discovered after getting the bill...)
Of course, Netflix provided absolutely no customer service contact information. I believe there was a customer support web form, but that was only available to members with an active acount.
I used Starz On-Demand download service almost two years ago. It was actually really good. The service did exactly what was advertised. The only problem, you can't cancel!
I look on their website. Nope. You can't cancel. I emailed them. They said call their 800#. I called the 800 number. They say OK. I watch my credit card, nope. Not calcelled. I emailed them again with the ref# and the previous email thread saying I wanted to cancel. They responded saying "Nope.". So, I wrote back and told them I would just do a chargeback of every charge. They said they would "Forward it to a supervisor". Guess what. Still not cancelled. I charged back every future one. Guess what? My credit card company told me to just cancel my card. Only problem? I pay for about 8 other things with that same card.
Why can't a credit card company just reject charges for one merchant for an account? These guys are a$$ 0's. As of today, I am still having to do charge-backs every month.
Apparently, they differentiate between cancellation, resignation, and suspension, so that they have a 66% chance of keeping your money. And if you ask your credit card company to stop charges, they can fine you $1000 It's all in the contract....
I signed up for the free .Mac trial when I got my Mac. While I didn't get charged anything when I didn't sign up, my .Mac account is still buried within Mac OS X and it pops up from time to time when attempting to configure stuff (iChat, Mail, etc.).
.Mac account. When I didn't renew it, I set up another iTunes account. So I have a bunch of songs purchased with one account and a bunch of songs purchased with another account. This sometimes confuses iTunes and a batch of songs are unplayable until I reauthorize my computer with one of the accounts.
iTunes is the more entertaining one. When I set up my iTunes account, it filled in my
(This is why I laugh whenever some MacHead tells me about how they "buy" their music rather than "rent" it. Cancel your iTunes account and see what happens to those songs you "bought".)
It literally took me 2 hours on the phone to cancel this service. And an hour and a half of that was actually talking to a real live person.
Unbelievable. It probably cost the company $50 in salary, social security, benefits, and phone usage to delay me canceling the service, all for possibly me getting frustrated and waiting 1 more month to cancel the $10 service.
I learned my lesson though. Next time I had to cancel an insurance policy, I simply told them "I've talked to you for 10 minutes. You have confirmed my identity. Cancel my account or I will chargeback any charges to my credit card ".
Seems to work ok, most of the time.
Clearly no one is within their rights to dispute authorized charges. That's the whole point of a chargeback -- it's to charge back unauthorized charges.
You can't sign away your right to dispute unauthorized charges. For example, VISA's Chargeback Guidelines (PDF) specifically address this:
BTW, reading the VISA document above is well worth time. It's useful for those checkout line arguments you invariably find yourself in occasionally. (minimum charges, ID checks, etc.)
I bet they'd get the Most Annoying One golden statue. There is no clear way to cancel on their site. Searching for Cancel in support brings up clever answer:
To cancel TiVo service, contact Customer Support
The "Contact Us"/Customer support page does not mention anything about where to call to cancel, just "Activation" and "Problems". I suppose inability to cancel online (activation is easy) is a problem. Calling them brings up morbid "voice activated system". Getting through it is not that bad, as it understood "Cancel" word. But then it simply tells you, that you have to speak to a human (with wait time of half an hour or so) and, if you happened to call outside of 7AM-8PM PST you are out of luck, because only human can disconnect the service ("for your convenience" of course). So many hoops for canceling so ridiculously overpriced service (with contracts and termination fees) that used to be cheap and nice.
Hyperom.com
Why not write a letter to your credit card company stating that you no longer authorize any charges from the vendor? If they make it that much of a PITA for you to cancel the service, make it a PITA for them with chargebacks.
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Personally I just change my bank account once a month. Changing your address once a month helps with the other bills. If you are still having trouble with companies that won't stop billing you for cancelled services just change your name and social security number monthly. If all else fails changing the country you live in monthly is a sure fire cure to billing woes. What if you run out of countries? No problem there are new ones every year. Seems a lot of countries like to change their name too.
A few years back when I was hooked on Halo 2 I signed up for Xbox Live with one of those 3-month free cards you got with certain games. I didn't have a credit card at the time to register the account with so I called my parents and used their CC info. Towards the end of the 3 months I decided to cancel the account, so I called the customer service and they told me that the account would not renew once it had expired. I had even received a confirmation e-mail regarding the closure of the account, a few months later I got a call from my mother telling me that they were still charging her credit card every month. So after calling the customer service again they said that they needed to get confirmation from the person who the account was registered to, which surprisingly somehow was not me. Somehow the account had gotten my little brother's name on it and they insisted that they needed to get his confirmation before they would close the account. My brother at the time was 13 years old and I had to have my mother call up and put my brother on the phone to give the ok just to cancel the subscription. I've dealt with Xbox Live since and had no problems with canceling though so they seem to have fixed their problems.
- We try to go to their site, looking for "cancel subscriptions". We search "cancel" and they have 2 links in their help page. But when I clicked on it, it shows nothing (both Firefox and IE 7)
- Then we try their web chat. First when I tell the web chat we are cancelling, they give me ANOTHER link for their support chat. Fine. AND THEN, when we try to use their chat, it's broken.
It starts to sound fishy to me up to this point...
- We then try to call their support line. It takes forever just to go through the phone menus, and then we were put on hold for 20 minutes. Finally, a guy with distinctly Indian accent answered the call. He did not speak English that, I have to guesstimate what he said. I have to basically just keep saying "I just need to cancel my subscription, no thanks." repeatedly to get him stop repeat the scripted answers.
Anyway... in the end this support guy said he'd give us a refund, but he'd put us on hold again to talk to the billing department. And finally he claimed the support department will refund us "in a few days". Oh yes, takes less than a day to charge the credit card, but a few days to refund...
In the end we spent half an hour to deal with the cancellation. You are free to call their support line, and then see how much time to get to their billing "department". Here is more efax horror stories. Don't ever try to use efax in your life time. You have been warned. How these companies manage to piss their customers is beyond me.I used my credit card to pay for a relative's AOL account as a gift a long while ago. The relative lost interest, but my card kept getting charged. I called AOL to cancel, but they wouldn't let me without my knowing the login password to the account. "But it's not my account!" "You can't cancel it, then." "Fine, don't cancel it, but I do not authorize you to charge MY credit card any longer." "No, you can't change the credit card info on an account you don't know the password to." "But it's MY credit card and as the only person authorized to use it, I'm telling you I don't approve of the charge! Let me speak to a supervisor!" Amazingly, still no luck. I had to get the credit card company to cut them off. This was before they capitulated on a few class-action lawsuits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL#Account_cancellat ion and http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/04/aol_billin g_litigation/, so I don't know if it's better now.
I have never had a Capital One card, nor do I ever intend to own one either. Have I tried to cancel their constant solicitations? No, for I fear it would be a LOT more trouble than it's worth.
I thought of saving all of ther junk mail and charging them for "disposal fees", but I simply don't have the time to pursue this crap.
I did once try telling the Post Office to stop delivering junk mail, but that went over like a lead baloon. Maybe I should take all the junk mail and stuff it in a big trash bag and dump it all on their doorstep one morning. Perhaps they'll get the message then.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
I've dealt with very bad cancellation experiences in the past, myself. And this article surely proves that I'm not the only one having these problems. It's as if these companies and corporations don't have proper protocols or procedures for cancellation. Not being able to find information on cancelling a service on the provider's own website is totally pathetic. Or, having to call to cancel a service is also very sad in this age of computer technology.
Sadly, I think that it will remain like this for a very long time. These corporations know that if they retain their customers, they'll have more customers in the end. These companies don't care about bad reputations; they rely on their overly cheap and "amazing" deals to attract new customers. The Slashdot crowd is an intelligent and computer-savvy group of people. But the average consumer which signs up for these services might not be, and he might not care about the cancellation process, and he might be influenced by these exit interviews to stay.
Remember, corporations have access to great analytical data. If they continue to make hard cancellation processes, it means that there is profit to be made. That there are people who will stay because of the amount of labor required to cancel.
It's sad. I would really like these business practices to change. I, for once, will never make my hosting services hard to cancel because I believe in having a good reputation and I'm satisfied by the warm emails that I get from happy customers. I'm sure that other Slashdot users who provide some kind of service do the same.
The hip way to get your IP. No ads, ever.
It would have been far easier to just cancel the payments and let them sort it out themsleves.
God Be Gone
I spent almost a year trying to get my bank to block some merchant from billing my card. I just could not get through to anyone over at this merchant who could / would stop billing me so I did it through the bank. Dozens of phone calls, several days of my time, half a dozen letters, a certified letter, a threat of a small claims lawsuit, and a letter to the CEO later, and they finally did block all those charges, for real. What a horrible payment system. The most important task for a bank is to keep people's money safe, which means being able to block unauthorized payments.
If some bank is really clever they will set up a web interface that lets you easily generate one-time-use or limited-use credit card numbers, or even physical credit cards (perhaps for a slight fee). The way it would work is you would say, "I want to create a new credit card, with these limitations: maximum billing of $50 per month." Then you give it to one particular on-line merchant, and when you want to stop service, you don't even deal with the merchant; you go straight to your bank web page, you select that particular generated CC number, and you click "cancel", and that is done.
Hello banks, this is not difficult! This would be such a great feature. If any bank offered that I would get an account with them and use only them for my on-line transactions.
People Pc online Cancelation sucks too.
From my experience; You can suspend billing of a Blockbuster Online account from the website itself. They won't bill you again, account remains open, and no futher dvds at sent to you. And you can reactivate billing to continue dvd mailings to you.
\
Take out the Business Reply envelope and the paperwork. Tear your address off, and throw those pieces away. Tear up the remaining paperwork into pieces small enough to fit into the Business Reply envelope. Insert pieces into Business Reply envelope, and seal it. Drop into public mailbox. Voila!
With any luck, Capital One will get charged extra for having so much extra in the reply envelope. And the only pieces you have to dispose of are the ones with your personal info.
Of course, if they want to ding me for this, then they're gonna have to go after me in court, because if they try TO (improperly) charge that $1000 to my credit card, I'm gonna dispute it bigtime.
The main reason for having that clause is to scare people into not disputing unauthorized charges. In other words, If I see a clause like that on the user agreement, my first question is going to be "and so, just how do you intend to jerk me around? that you have that clause there?"
Run. Run screaming, unless you really need that service (and even then....).
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Simple... just throw yourself off of a building to cancel your Slashdot account. If you don't go splat, you didn't try hard enough. :P
Vonage was listed as "No hassle" but I found quite the contrary. You can only cancel over the phone, which runs from 9-5 EST Mon-Fri. This caused a pretty big problem considering I work 6am-4pm PST Mon-Fri (Its a Mill, work scheduled overtime weekly). I figured I could do it over my lunch break. But after calling the number they list to "cancel" I was bounced to another person, and found the waiting time to be over 45mins (at which time I had to head back to work).
Basically I had to wait a few weeks until we had some downtime due to an accident. After waiting almost on hour and a half on hold, the operator kept trying to talk me out of it. I finally convinced her when I said "I JUST WANT TO FUCKING CANCEL". It was silent for a moment and then she said "OK, its all done, have a nice day." I guess I may have just had a unique encounter, but Vonage for me was FAR from easy. They have 24 hour support, but can't have 24 hour cancellations... I wont ever be returning to them. Had it been painless, I probably would have returned to Vonage when I moved.
ServerPronto (if you don't know who they are, keep it that way), was a dedicated server host I used during the (I believe 2005) hurricane season that was active in Florida. I was worried when the hurricane came through, but I had no downtime, no nothing... until a month after the hurricane passed over. Then, the servers died, their support chat disappeared, no responses to email, and their number came up disconnected (yet I got a CC charge two days later). I called everyday for a week and emailed them for awhile before calling my CC company to dispute (for all of Bank of America's problems, they have a great dispute department). They had the same problems with disconnected numbers, so they found in my favor immediately and refunded my money. Two weeks later, mostly to ensure that the company wouldn't continue trying to charge me every month for what I assume was a company that had cut and run, I call and get through. I spoke to the most rude operator in the world at their company, who had the ***** to tell me that ServerPronto had not charged me money, and it went downhill from there before he hung up on me. He also told me that everything died when the hurricane hit, even though none of this had happened for a month after the storm blew over.
He hung up on me, I called back, and ended up speaking with a generic operator who told me no one with his name worked at the company. Needless to say, I did receive my money back from ServerPronto, and got a nice apology letter in the mail.
Almost forgot to mention that a check on their company in the BBB archives at that time revealed that their mailing address was for an office front only; their real operation is hidden away at a remote site.
While this isn't a trial account situation, I went through major hassles with SBC a few years back.
I was one of the first people in the city with DSL. When I moved, I went through the usual for move of service and everything was accepted and told it was available. After I moved, they kept assuring me that they were working on a 'line issue' and would have service to me shortly. Each month they billed me, and each month I called in and got it credited back (about an hour or so phone time each time to do so). AFter three months, they finally admitted they couldn't do it. What was I told?
A) No DSL service would be available in my new area for the foreseable future.
B) They don't do a line reconditioning for residential customers (which would have gotten me service)
C) If I had qualified to have a reconditioning done, it would cost $1200+.
I fought for another 3 months or so to get them to stop billing me for DSL, having to call in and request a refund each time.
This was around August of that year.
The following January, I start getting billed for DSL service again. Out of the blue. I could not even physically get the service, had been told so point-blank months before, and had definitely NOT contacted SBC about getting service again.
It took me until NOVEMBER of that year to get them to stop billing me, and in the end I still lost about $40 that they forced out of my wallet in 'late fees' for this crap.
Not as bad as someone else I know, at least. After having DSL for about two years it turns out they never properly turned off his old dialup account with them. So out of the blue he gets hit with a bill for close to $500 in unpaid services and late fees that he hadn't seen a single bill for until then.
Even with public utility commission orders, they kept turning off his phone service as well as his DSL over this (a federal violation due to the laws that allowed phone companies to get into the internet business). This meant they got hit with a hefty fine by the state each time. He got the FCC involved, and they just shrugged their shoulders and basically said "They saw you owe them money, what's the problem?"
He hasn't had a land line phone service ever since. And to this day SBC still has never released his old phone number back into the pool to be re-used, either, so I'd say they still know they're in legal trouble over it. But at this rate nothing will ever happen.
The New York Times being hassle-free, on the other hand, is a bit more surprising (IMHO). They're just being good because they want to.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Coinky Dink? I don't think so.
Oh I'll give a shout out to Audible.com: every time I've had to ask them a question they've given me the benefit of the doubt and credited my account. Really good service.
The other day my US Postal carrier (mailwoman --but that would be an oxymoron) said to me, "I thought you moved --I'm getting all this mail from your address marked 'Return to Sender'(RTS)." I told her that, to teach these slimy junkmail-sending businesses a lesson, I was sending all their mail back. She said that any bulk mail marked "Presorted", which is most of them, is sent at a discounted rate that doesn't cover the cost of the RTS service; anything marked RTS is brought back to the mail processing plant and shredded. Ah, well. So the business never gets to see it. I guess I could still mark it RTS and get the US Post to shred it so I don't have to -- I don't like having recycled papers floating around in those public recycling dumps with my name and address on it -- but I guess I'm resigned to having to shred them myself.
With regard to credit card offers, you can tell the US credit rating companies that you don't want any more credit card offers. There's a phone number you can phone, and they ask you, "Do you mean stop sending credit card offers for 5 years, or permanently?"
At first I hesitated at permanently --what if I can't get more credit cards in the future even if I want to?-- but then I realized that I had successfully applied for one particular credit card without any solicitation. A friend told me about the good features --photo ID and signature printed on the card, 5% rebate on groceries and gasoline, 1% rebate on all else-- so I phoned and got approved. There was absolutely no downside to me being the one to take the initiative to contact them. In fact, only after I had gotten the card did I start getting offers from *that same bank* for all sorts of other cards. (Stupid bank, I just *got* a card from you! --why do I need more? Anyway, now that junk mail is blocked.)
If you sign up for "permanently", you have to send them something in writing. I did that, and my mailbox has been mercifully free of credit card offers for the past year or so. I'm too lazy to Google for it right now, so whoever wants to do it can probably get his/her post modded up.
As for the rest of the junk mail, I tried to ask my mailwoman to stop delivering them ("I just throw it away anyway," I told her) but apparently legally she is obligated to deliver it. There is a way to stop it, though; my wife tried it at her old address and apparently it worked.
It does like this: by law, you may order advertisers not to send you unsolicited mail if it is sexually provocative. But what is sexually provocative? The Supreme Court has upheld a decision that only YOU can determine whether something is sexually provocative to YOU. So, suppose you decide that the SuperSaver Coupons logo in your junk mail is sexually provocative to you. Who's to say it isn't? Your post office has no authority to decide that it isn't, so if you say it is, they must stop delivering that mail.
So, you can get this form from the post office that declares that you don't want the junk mail from that one particular source. You also need to bring a sample of the junk mail. My wife found it all on the web, so it's there, but again I'm too lazy to Google for it.
Hope that helps!
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
I signed up for an eBay business account last month, and it got locked almost straight away. I was accused of listing a load of crappy items like fake-ish looking perfume and sports goods, a few days BEFORE I signed up.
After I cleared up the amazing time travelling junk listings, they admitted their dumb mistake but still wouldn't unlock the account. The only response was "We can't unlock the account because if we do then potential scammers will be able to optimize their scamming techniques. eBay works in mysterious ways" (Security though obscurity?)
Even though there was no money involved since I didn't actually list anything, I was pissed because of course I had given them all my personal info, as is necessary with eBay. They gave me the option of giving them even more ID to reactivate (then close) the account, or else boycott eBay forever.
A funny cancelling experience was when I tried to quit a UK ISP and the support guy asked me my password for a joke because it was about 60 random printable ASCII characters, and he wanted to see if I could recite it. I wasn't amused and asked why they didn't hash user passwords. Nice security guys.
One thing you can try is to write to their customer services (using pen and paper!). Companies hate nothing more than having proof that you said what you did, and the written customer services people always seem to be in a better mood than the telephonists.
If you listen to the audio on this one, it's clear that the customer services guy has a script and is told he must follow it - he might get in trouble if he doesn't. Listening and going "no thanks" to the questions might actually have been quicker than constantly interrupting and getting annoyed. That's not to say it's right, but humans in call centers are sometimes like robots as they follow their scripts.
On the final point on junk mail: in the UK (where I live), if you receive junk mail addressed to you then the Data Protection Act allows you to write to the person who sent it to say "remove me from your mailing list". I think it's similar for all of the EU, but no idea about anywhere else.
The thing I find particularly amusing is that they're a dating site. If their service is any good at all, the whole point of it is that sooner or later you will WANT to cancel it. And hey, if things don't work out, maybe you'll take it up again later - but I can't see many people doing that with such offensive conditions.
Actually, I would categorize their options as cancellation and "everything else". The suspension is nothing but a scam to take advantage of people (including those who are tech-savvy like the author). Honestly, most people don't read through the TOS with a fine-toothed comb, nor do they expect to have to go through a million clicks.
Is it legal to have customers agree "not to dispute any charges by True.com or its authorized agents"? It seems like the RIAA's tactic where they force defendents to reveal the files that they supposedly shared illegally. Except in this case, True.com will claim every charge as "authorized" (although they probably deny this), therefore making it a catch-22.
I agree with you that True.com seems to be worse than NetZero. Not by much, but at least with NetZero, he did eventually cancel it. With True.com, he got nothing but threats and ridiculous policies.
After I called, and cancelled, they billed me for another month!!!
I called again to complain, and it was explained to me like this:
You sign up for the free trial. You use that trial, and at the end of it, they bill you for a month of service. If you cancel at the end of that month, you are then billed again. Why? Becuase the first month 'free trial' is not really free. Only if you cancel within the month. If you keep it, they will bill you for it at the end of your use.
What made this matter worse was that I only cancelled after finding out that they raised the price from 5 something to 15 something in one month!!!! I cancelled within 5 days of the renewal. I was informed at the time of cancelling that my account would be turned off right then, and that I would not get any refund for the unused 3 weeks. Then I was billed again for 15 something for the first month's 'free trial'
...that difficult. They are uniquely clueless.
No, I'm not a "Gold" member. I just signed up a few years ago because of an upcoming reunion. After a while I wound up using their web form to let them know that I was getting tired of their malformed emails that were unreadable by my mail client. I used that web feedback form to supply examples of how their MIME formatting was broken and even let them know the specific mail server that was running the faulty software that was sending out the broken emails (they used several and the others were sending properly formatted emails). I wound up receiving broken email for nearly a year before they fixed it. Then they listed me as "lost". This seems to happen to a lot of people. I've noticed folks disappear from the rolls and suddenly show up as "lost". Their database is full of duplicate and bogus entries making them not-so-useful for anyone trying to help organize an alumni function. Any attempt to include an email address in a posting on their forum results in it getting edited out. (They'll probably claim privacy but it's really to make you ante up and become a paying member.) Why on earth would anyone send $5/month to a bunch of maroons like that?
I was surprised to hear that AOL was difficult to cancel. When I cancelled my AOL service (back when Windows 3.1 systems roamed the earth) it was a snap. I did receive letters from Steve Case for around six months letting me know what wonderful services I was missing out on. :-)
Some of the other responders to this article mentioned something that is truly frightening: that some company can in effect make a permanant connection to your credit cards by making it next to impossible to cancel an unwanted service and force you to go through the exact same machinations you'd be forced to go through as if you were a vistim of identity theft. Perhaps somneone ought to bring this to the attention of some Elliot Spitzer-style attorney general who'd be interested in taking these companies to task for their actions.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Try cancelling /. account. Digg account. The ones many of you actually use sometimes. How about launchpad.net account? 99% of the hundreds of hobbyist run and/or open source related services are quite bad on this area. There's nothing automated, you will have to contact administrators.
Worst of them all? Getting rid of some email you posted as a private comment but some asshole archives them on mail-archive.com. Virtually impossible to get rid of that "service". That service is practically the lowest scum on this planet.
It's not shocking that companies are doing this. It's very very intentional, as are the apologies and reluctant refunds. They know what they're doing, and it's a very good tactic to get every last drop of dirty money from unhappy customers.
Most people are lazy. They'll just say "oh well at least they won't bill me again" when they see a parting shot from something they cancelled. It's only $15, and my time is valuable i'm not going to sit on hold and talk to someone who doesn't speak english just for $15 right? So the company makes it as much of a hassle as they can, in order to keep an extra $15 here and there. I imagine if you tried 200 companies, at least %75 of them have a policy in place to do the exact same thing. They also have a policy to own up and apologize for it whenever they're caught, by explaining that it was a one-time thing and they're very very sorry and it won't happen again. AOL did it to me several times (it's like I'd have learned my lesson once, but noooooo. Never use AOL as temporary internet access while you're out of town. Free trials are rarely free).
The first place I heard of shady deals like this, of course, were the porn sites. You sign up for 30-days, but of course you're on a recurring billing immediately. If you're not careful, you're also sometimes agreeing to a multi-site pass that costs a lot more than you initially imagined! The porn sites are banking on the idea that you're not going to call visa and ask them to cancel a charge from a porn site at worst, and that you won't even notice the charge at best. If you find out, no problem they won't bill you again (but they won't refund you!). They still get 2 months of money from a one-month sub. It's genius, and it's no wonder "legit" companies have adopted porno site practices.
This could be considered slightly offtopic, but I recently had an experience with Norton that was similar to some of these experiences.
I was attempting to uninstall Norton Internet Security and System Works for a client because it was corrupted and preventing many Office documents and applications from opening properly. After Add/Remove programs failed, I tried the Norton Removal Tool which also failed. Upon failing to find any information via their website for such a contingency, I called support where I was informed that there would be a $30 charge for them to help me. I told them that I was a skilled technician and asked if I could find this information online, to which I was told that there was not. I agreed to the charge and was guided through the process, which involved editing the registry in safe mode then running the removal tool in normal mode. (The removal tool will not run in safe mode. I tried). After hanging up, I found that the system was still infected with Norton. It took another call to disable Go Back and again run the removal tool to rid the machine of that menace. At least I didn't have to pay for the second call.
Later, the client informed me that after a dispute with Norton, he recently had his credit card company charge back Norton for these products. This made me put on my tinfoil hat for a minute to consider, what are the chances Norton sneaked some sort of poison pill into a definition update?
Like this comment? I accept Bitcoin! - 153sc8UUBXyp12ofQqfAWDmJrzyiKCYC1x
What the hell is "fraudulent[ly] report that an authorized charge... is unauthorized"? Can I even *suspect* an unauthorized charge? I mean, if you call your credit card company to dispute a transaction, it is assumed you suspect the transaction is unauthorized, right? 'Dispute authorized charges' is an oxymoron to me.
BTW, here (PDF warning) is a sample form to dispute unauthorized charges which listed some valid dispute reasons. It is for BoA government cards, but AFAIK the conditions are the same for all cards from all companies.
Not surpising that Consumer Reports got it perfect. Their host organization, the Consumers Union, published a set of guidelines they think all online sites should follow in order to promote online credibility. It's http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/consumer-reports-w ebwatch-guidelines.cfm.
h y3.pdf.
They've also compiled a list of every site that's pledged to follow the guidelines. (PDF) http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/images/praisewort
I doubt that $1000 fine would be considered lawful anywhere with any consumer protection laws.
It's a fine, pure and simple, and governments really don't like other organisations fining people.
They probably object to the competition or something:)
I got a little upset withy Which? Magazine (The UK consumer magazine) a few years ago. They set up an ISP. I checked the T&Cs, and the only way to cancel was by writing them a letter! They offered a free subscription but this automatically became a paid for sub after 3 months unless you made the effort to cancel.
Certainly this doesn;t make them the worst offenders, but I really expected a consumer organisation to be substantially more consumer friendly.
i "cancelled" classmates over two years ago. i still get 'what your missing out on now!' emails from them. cant get them to stop sending them even when i click the unsubscribe, a few months later another one will come.
That is precisely what I thought the one time I came across such a term. I figured that if they were putting that in their terms and conditions, then they must have a problem with people disputing charges and that, more than likely, they were disputed for very good reason.
Show me the company who does that.
I'll be sure to let them know by handwritten letter why they're not getting my business.
So it's either they eat the cost of cancellation, or they go out of business.
Or maybe... *gasp* maybe they just factor it right into the subscription rate, which would be no problem to me.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
of your credit card company and tell them to stop paying them...
easy..
if you cant find the legit way to cancel cause they want to prevent you from cancelling...just tell your credit card company to not pay them anymore...and for a bonus, tell them you did cancel and that any future charges should be treated as fraudulent...
or do a couple of charge back (dispute the charge on your statement) companies get nailed heavily if they get too many chargbacks.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
It's pretty easy for me to believe that NetZero has a pretty rough cancellation process. I interviewed with a company that did tech support for Dell as well as doing NetZero "Customer Retention". The goal of the retention folks was to keep the person on the line for as long as possible, wearing down their resolve in ways most likely banned under the Geneva Convention. Also, there was no team based work in retention: it was all individual, forcing the workers to be even more cutthroat.
I signed up for MySpace (yeah. I know.) from an email address with a plus in it.
Wanted to cancel, and the confirmation email never came.
Tried changing my email address (to something without a plus) and the confirmation email never came.
Wrote to privacy@myspace.com like MySpace says to in this situation... it's been 2-3 months and the account is still there.
For a couple of those months the account's name has been the uncensored version of "F*** MySpace" and its profile has been a description of how broken MySpace is in this regard. This hasn't gotten it canceled either.
Once I manage to move the account's few friends somewhere else, I think I'll have to update its publicly-visible goodness with some choice commentary on "Tom," Rupert Murdoch, barnyard animals, drugs, Al-Qaeda, minors, and whatever else, to see if that helps.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
After getting beaten by me at a online game that person subscribed me to Warner Bros Enterntainment mails. For more than 1.5 years now, I've been getting emails that are impossible to get rid of. The unsubcribe link in the mail leads me to a web page that always has said "Error
Our systems are offline. Please try again shortly." Amazing, for more than 1.5 years, that function has been non-functioning.
And every email I've tried to send to them has either just disappeared or bounced back.
After reading all the posts this may sound funny, but: you can determine how to cancel a contract. As soon as you have made it perfectly clear that you want to cancel, the other party has to oblige.
So the easiest way to cancel a difficult service is probably to send a letter. (Yes, this does involve buying a stamp and finding a snail-mail access port.) If you are especially paranoid, you may even use registered delivery. Once the company receives your cancellation letter, they have to address it. This is basic business practice.
And if they don't, you can use the copy of the letter and the receipt to defend your rights. Any smart company would of course back off here, but you never know.
When I tried to cancel my ebay account, which had no pending sales/buys in it at all, it took from early August of 2005 to October 2005 of acting like an ass to get them to cancel my account. I tried everything, including terms-of-service violations in public to get them to pay attention. I even sent email messages consisting of 1MB (or was it two or three?) each of "Cancel My Account!" It's amazing how much you can cut and paste into an ebay feedback dialog (I found out, because when they reply the quote the whole thing). And even when they finally got around to me, they sent me an email saying that it would take a few more weeks. Just how difficult is it to delete an empty account?
Why did I want it cancelled? Fraud. Obvious out-and-out fraud that I wasn't the victim of, but saw happening, and when it was brought to their attention the silence was deafening. Ebay's utter lack of even basic business honesty really offends me. Microsoft looks like a shining paragon of righteousness standing next to them. Even thinking of it now, more than a year later, a pit of anger is forming in my gut.
I can only think of one reason why they make it so difficult to delete accounts: that it inflates the user base fraudulently. Inactive accounts count as "members" and they make it that difficult to cancel hoping that the user just gives up, which is probably what happens most of the time. It really was insane how much effort I had to put into getting an empty account nuked.
Ebay, as a result, is on my list as "Not Recommended"
--
BMO
On a point of pedantry, you won't go 'splat'. Skydivers call dying "bouncing" for a reason.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
One phone call, spoke to a human being who discovered that due to some error or another I had been paying a higher rate than I should have been.
She apologised for the billing error, cancelled the account for me, thanked me for having been a customer and sent a prompt refund for the overpayment.
Not bad!
"Whenever I encounter a situation like this (where cancelling is made a pain in the ass), I vow to never again use the service"
In contrast, I come and go from O'Reilly's subscription book service all the time. When I have no time to read, I quit. When I'm in a project and I need a whole lotta texts at-once, I subscribe. i.e. rent-a-book.
One of the best sites on the internets, and an example of e-commerce done right.
-a happy customer
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
If you're a cash customer, you can thank some of those contract terms for driving up the price on what you buy... EVEN THOUGH YOU'RE A CASH CUSTOMER.
All those "rewards" you get, all those cash back bonuses, who do you think pays for them? The customers do. The prices go up on everyone, and the credit card customer gets screwed and shares some of that screwing with the cash customer because of the oligopoly powers of the credit card industry. Ever seen someone try to use a Visa card to buy a guitar pick? I have. He was told where he could shove it. It would've be cheaper if he just shoplifted it.
There currently is litigation going on regarding these types of issues. This site is a blog dedicated to it: http://www.waytoohigh.com/.
The whores get mad when the sluts give it away for free.
Even slashdot can't manage to provide this service so.... In my opionion this goes to show you that there is a lot of lousy software out there.
It would depend upon the distance from which you are being observed as you hit the ground, and perhaps your level of obesity.
I imagine that a sufficiently fat person, if one were to observe from say, 3 feet, would make a quite satisfying "splat" as he hit the ground.
But no question that a surprising amount of bounce would be involved, too. And a great deal of thud.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Learn to program, then come back in 2008.
Add that to your general IsAccountValid() function.
Surely there is a sanity check of the records before proceeding anything.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
My wife has come across fly-by-night companies that won't refund
purchases no-matter-what in spite of advertsing money-back guarentees
and things like that, and it got me wondering if maybe companies should
be required to outsource (maybe to a gov't system?) basic customer things
like returns, rebates (it's in their intyerest to process 'em slowly), cancellations,
warranty coverage, billing statement copies, etc. It could provide a real
commonality of experience and be used to enforce minimum standards.
This is a brainstorming post, so before you fire off devil's advocate reponses,
instead try to think of ways this could be made to work (or a smaller subset,
perhaps, or a different take on the same basic idea), rather than just ways to
shoot it down, which leaves us exactly where we are now. I'm just asking everyone
be constructive in their criticisms (suggest an alternative, perhaps?).
Maxim
I have always found the following to work.
Method a)
If you are unable to find a way to cancel a subscription cut the payments. Wait until they contact you and state i wish to cancel my account i was unable to find a way to cancel (x).
Method b)
Try to cancel by their method.
If you fail. Write them a letter post it first class then cut the billing information.
Inform them of this in the letter.
They normally come back with a dept collection letter or something in the UK but there isnt much they can actually do about it.
And THIS is one reason why I never use credit cards or subscription based deals,
it is very difficult to unsubscribe, (but that's a giant DUH)
For me, Online purchases are fine, you buy the item, and then you're done.
Funny enough, I always get offers in the mail about credit cards, even though
I've never had one (and I never plan to, unless for SPECIFIC, ONE-TIME large purchases
of which I have a means to %110 pay off in the future).
I'm thinking about getting Cox Communications Internet + TV (And maybe phone service if the
overall price is low enough). Any horror stories regarding them? I live in Phoenix, btw.
I have found that the best thing to do BEFORE signing up for any $$ online account, is to try to find out how to cancel by navigating the site. Things to look for: - a working phone number: test it before signing up - an email addrress: send them an email under the guise of asking a member question - other I had a hard time canceling a few accounts before, one of which was for the game Final Fantasy online
I am open source, and Linux baby!
I had a very frustrating time canceling my Consumer Reports (online) account last fall. Not only did it take a large number of clicks (including one site change), but the first time I canceled they didn't. I received an email confirmation (IIRC), but two months later I noticed they were still billing my credit card. The second time I canceled, they stopped, but man was I ticked off about it.
Maybe you should check you credit card statement next month to be sure, eh?
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
First you have to call them and spend hours on the phone explaining that you want their services cancelled, why, what you think of their service, your bank card, address, etc. etc. then they give you all types of discounts and freebies to make you change your mind when they finally do cancel it by the end of the month, they send you a 3-month free trial which if you don't cancel it, gets automatically activated into a full membership again
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Wireless companies fine people for canceling. I had a Verizon family plan with two telephones. Midterm in the contract I added a third phone that I had previously bought and paid for many years ago. Months later I canceled the service on the third phone. It was then that I discovered they had extended my entire contract on three phones for two years from the date the last phone was placed in service. I also received a bill for a cancellation fee of two hundred and seventy five dollars Plus sales tax. How do they charge sales tax on something that is not considered goods or services? How do they get away with charging outrageous fines for canceling service?
I'll tell you how! They hire lobbyists and make campaign large contributions to politicians and political parties. Big business, Labor unions and professional organizations such as the trial lawyers etc. spend big money and have been successful in corrupting government. They get away with it because Americans as a whole are gullible fools who listen to sound bites and commercials without following and analizing the candidates past performance. They vote with their hearts and not with their heads. Fooish people vote along party lines, They choose charismatic leaders instead of competent leaders and they keep the current corrupt two party system intact.
That sold websites to small to medium sized businesses, but they did it like a telemarketing company. They were told it would be a trial period and if they didn't like it then they could cancel at any time. The company made lots of money because a lot of the businesses totally forgot about the website and wouldn't know they were being billed until the next quarter when they saw the bill. Some businesses were billed through their business phone company and wouldn't even notice the charge. My friends in customer service said it was stressful because they were required to retain an insane amount of customers and the customers would just go off on them. The company got sued several times, so they ended up audio taping the customers saying yes to the website trial.
Can I bum a sig?
Individually your 4.95 and up account is piffle. In the aggregate however, hundreds, or thousands of such charges represent considerable sums. Even if company X gives you a refund after 30, 60 or 90 days, they have had, in essence, an interest free loan amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases. Not a bad plan if you a shady operator, or a marginal service, to boost your bottom line.
-- whatchulookinherefor?
...that that porn site was only using my credit card to verify I'm over 18. Sounds like I dodged a bullet.
Finally modding someone offtopic when they rant about what "Begging the Question" means: priceless.
Are you REALLY sure you want to post?
How did we get to the point where vendors get to dictate how we cancel a subscription, and where if we have a billing dispute it's our problem rather than the vendors' ?
...
I'm just thinking out loud about how we can get out of this hell...
Maybe we should have a small number of standardized commercial interaction types, similarly to the way we strive for a small set of standardized OSS licenses? Each standardzied interaction type would specify response times, techniques for dealing with various operations (cancellation, billing dispute, etc.) Because they were standardized and few, customers could fairly easily have foreknowledge of details before beginning a transaction. For example:
Standard "Pro-rated Continuing Charge Transaction" - Customer is billed $ X each month, on the first day of the following month. Customer is charged for any day that the transaction remained active. Cancellations may be ordered by calling xxx-yyy-zzzz during the following days/hours:
Another option is having trusted third parties similar to PayPal. I.e., all billing, subscriptions, cancellations etc. occur through this third party, who in some way is strongly incented to remain unbiased. That is, they have no incentive to make cancellation difficult, overbill, etc.
Any ideas?
It's not a fine. It's a charge of some other sort that is identical for all practical purposes but legally isn't a fine. They probably call it a service cancellation charge or something.
In a similar way, UK banks operate in a slightly grey area when it comes to unauthorised overdraft fees. Many people have complained that this is a fine for going overdrawn. The banks insist that it's just an administration charge. At the moment they've settled every single one of these out of court so there has been no legal judgement on the matter.
Not online, but my worst experience with this was my Counterforce alarm monitoring account. When my now-ex-wife kicked me out of the house, she removed my name from the "allowed to make changes to the account" list at Counterforce, and gave them my new address to keep sending the bills to. After 6 months of them refusing to cancel my account, (remember, I'm not allowed to make changes to the account) I finally stopped paying the bill. The threatening phone calls started. I kept explaining I wanted to cancel the account. They kept refusing. Finally, I got a threatening call that if I didn't pay up, they would cancel the account. I answered "please do! That's what I've been trying to get you to do for months." I still kept getting threatening phone calls trying to collect on the unpaid months. Finally, they sent it to collections. On the first call from the collections agency I explained the whole story, the guy was quite surprised, but seemed to understand my point of view. In a friendly sort of way, I left it at "if you want the money, you're going to have to take me to court." (of course, I think with my story I would have a good chance of winning.) I never got another phone call about the matter. I have no idea if it ended up on my credit report, but it doesn't seem to have affected my ability to get loans since.
find a single authoritative website listing that shows how much the USPS recieves from any taxes you pay.
o stalfacts.htm
start here
http://www.usps.com/communications/organization/p
read the entire "did you know" section, it'll give you a few pointers that will speed your research..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I have had great experience with Netflix when cancelling or putting the account on hold. They are very straightforward regarding the matter. I have had horrible experience with both eFax and Experian. In both cases I had to threaten to call the cc company and report a fraudulent charge before they acquiesced and cancelled the account.
What I want to know is why so many people stick with a crappy company like Verizon what with all the crap they pull on their customers (crappy custom UI on their phones, locking out features so you have to pay them to transfer camera photos off or to transfer ringtones on, making it hard to cancel their service, charging big cancelation fees, extending contracts without even telling you and so on)
Isn't it ironic that it is a hassle to cancel a PC World account as well?
After my cancellation, they sent me magazines for up to 5-6 months. I can't tell if it was (a) a mistake or (b) just a tactic to keep it going. I'd fall more for answer (b), coze they stopped sending me zines when they realized I was obviously not paying for 'em.
Not to mention I'm still receiving promotional letters from PC World every other month.
So Tom (Spring), could you please just cancel my @#%$* account and stop sending me @#%$* mail?
I find it odd that True.com would make it difficult to cancel the account. Services like True.com and Match.com are designed to be temporary. "Once You Find you Mate you don't need the service anymore". Making it hard to cancel make me feel that they are not going to try to find a match, which is what I am paying them for. I used match.com myself and when I found my now wife. Canceling the service was relatively easy. Especially in the exit interview I just put down I found my match they just canceled it quickly.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
With regard to credit card offers, you can tell the US credit rating companies that you don't want any more credit card offers. There's a phone number you can phone, and they ask you, "Do you mean stop sending credit card offers for 5 years, or permanently?"
Agreed. I did the same thing last year when I was doing my annual check of my credit reports, and I haven't gotten a credit card offer in the mail since. My wife, on the other hand, refused to do so. So she gets literally dozens of credit card offers every week, sometimes more than one from the same company, and at least two of the companies that regularly solicit her still send her solicitations even though she already has credit cards through them. If credit card companies would just stop sending out unsolicited applictions, they could probably afford to give everybody a 2% cut on their interest rates!
You guys complain of waiting minutes or hours and having to search/click a lot to finnaly cancel an account. My experience w/ iConnectHere is gotta to take the cake -- it took 2 mths! Bastards would stall constantly, ask for a second chance and never get the cancellation process going. I wanted it cancelled within the first 30 days, yet they charged my acct for two additional mths. Finally had my cc company block their charges, and soon after that they complied. Beware.
Ebay will only shut down auctions under the following circumstances (based on what I have read and observed)
1.When ordered to by a court of law or by a law enforcement official or when there is the threat of legal action and their lawyers aggree the legal action has a chance of winning.
2.When the auction is illegal (e.g. guns)
3.When ordered to by a rights holder (e.g. someone selling fake handbags or OEM copies of windows) generally because the rights holder has said "shut it down or we will go to court"
4.Auctions for junk items (for example when they shut down an auction for a piece of bread that looks like jesus christ or something wierd like that)
and 5.Any auction where not shutting it down will cost them more than shutting it down.
They dont shut down auctions where people are committing fraud (such as the people who sell a large number of small items to build up their feedback and then sell some expensive stolen goods or something else that isnt what they claim it is) because those auctions dont actually hurt ebay and also if they start shutting down such auctions it makes them potentially more liable for fraudulent auctions that they dont shut down. (at least I believe so, IANAL)
I clicked "help'
typed "cancel"
pressed enter
clicked the first link entitled "Canceling a Gold membership" which contained:
Click the link at the end which has the contact form.
His description:
There was exactly 1 page.
I wonder how many other descriptions he embellished.
I believe what you are saying, but if you can stop "sexually provocative" mail then why couldn't members of congress stop Mr. Flint from sending them complimentary copies of "Huster"? Maybe it was because of his right to seek redress from congress? Interesting idea, though, I'll have to try it.
Anonymous Cowards suck.
Also, since it is the new year, it's a good time to go ahead and request your annual free credit report from all three major credit reporting services. Even if you don't have any reason to dispute any debts on your report, go ahead and get it each year to stay on top of your credit report. It's free for you once per year, so you may as well. You can save the HTML report so you'll have it handy all year long. It's a good idea to review your report each year to make sure there aren't any mistakes.
If I sign up for a trial membership or something that requires a credit card, I create a temporary credit card (via my CC account with MBNA, now Bank of America) with a spending limit of only what I need, and use that. If the vendor earns my trust, I change my billing info to a real card. If they don't, well, good luck trying to perpetually bill the temporary card, fuckers!
I also run my own mailserver, so every vendor I deal with gets their own address which just redirects to my main address. When I cease dealing with them, their e-mail address goes away and I never see another message from them. (This is also a handy method to see who's selling their customer databases to spammers)
~Philly
Most non-small businesses are the same. I had to fill out lots of paperwork and chase after people for weeks when I didn't receive a package carried by FedEx. Someone else had signed for it - my name was written in upper case letters - and finally they declined any refund, giving the reason that I must have received the package, since it had been signed for in my name!
Once I reached the very first entry (in my case my elementary school profile), it warned me that deleting this entry will cancel my account and am I sure that I want to proceed? When I hit the "Shit Yeah!" option, it seemed to have shut the account down.
A quick confirmation by unsuccessfully trying to re-login with the same account info confirmed it.
Try it.
resulting in a nasty letter from a collection agency threatening legal action if I did not resume my subscription.
I sent a letter to the Times objecting to this trong arm tactic, and receive a nasty message on my answering machine about it.
I recently managed a small family restaurant and two years ago, we finally relented and got a credit card machine service because so many people these days refuse to carry cash on them (sidenote, good luck if a disaster hits and you can't use your credit card for a while due to the electricity/communication systems being out of operation). We were a small 30ish person business with no real leverage to negotiate terms with a credit card company so we're basically told what we could take or have nothing.
Generally speaking, there was a 50 cent charge for every credit card we swiped. Buy a $1.50 drink with a credit card and 33% of the price is that credit card charge. There was a 25 cent charge for invalid cards (account expired, was canceled, someone swiped a card type that we didn't accept, etc). Discover charged the merchants the 50 cent fee plus 3% of the purchase price (again, that $1.50 drink = 50 cent charge + 4.5 cents). American Express was 3% for a personal card and 5% for a business card. We were also charged a $1 service fee every time we ran a statement of how much credit we had been credited (so instead of pulling a credit receipt every time a drawer was counted, it was pulled once a day). There's also the added headache of having to keep signed receipts stored for a period of time just in case they were disputed.
Short story, we took a loss on every credit card transaction under $10 or so. On very large purchases the rewards credit cards took a still pretty good chunk for themselves ($400 party paid for by a corporate AmEx card took $20.50 just for swiping that card). Someone has to pay for the cost the merchants incur for accepting cards and ultimately, it is the patrons who pay. Taking a 5% loss on every transaction and losing money on all transactions until $10 will put most businesses under if they didn't raise prices to compensate... and unfortunately, that means raising prices for cash payers as well (especially on lower end goods that you might by just one of like a 20 ounce Coke).
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
I think IF you have a @mac.com one you CANNOT change it. I've tried repeatedly, I've followed the knowledge base links, I've contacted their email support and searched the web, and the reality is that if you used to be xxxx@mac.com you will always be xxxx@mac.com.
That said if you can point to a counter example, I would welcome it.
I did not succeed in unsubscribing from andy@horsetrainingandtips.com
m /
Andy's claim to fame is that he found a copy of an old book and
has republished it. He does not attribute his source.
The help email inbox is full and bounces.
Eventually I was putting the mail in my google spam and it has stopped.
www.SuperStarsOfHorseTraining.com
This Rhodesian ridgeback site also sent mail afer I had unsubscribed
info@dogtraininginstitute.org
http://rhodesianridgeback.dogtraininginstitute.co
Both sites would send messages which were primarly teasers for paid content or products
rather than useful content. That kind of hype is about as much fun as subscribing to your
own feed of yellow flashing buy now TV ads.
The dog and pony are similarly persistent folk particularly about the feed.
Janet
AOL did not reactivate your account, in your cardmember agreement it tells you that if upon closing if recurring charges still come in that the credit card company has the right to reactivate your account. And by just reporting your card stolen via the credit card you are still leaving AOL with authorization to maintain an account in your name, which means that when they do not collect money from you they can send it to collections.
Why not just cancel AOL, or of course the super-dooper-easy method get your spouse to do it.
$diff terrorists hippies
$
$rm -rf *terrorists *hippies
This was about 7 years ago, so I don't know if it is still true, but AOL was a bitch to cancel. I called them at least 5 times, they said "Sure, you're cancelled" and then I get another bill. Eventually my credit card company charged-back them 5 straight times until they quit billing me.
Total hassle.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Always use a credit card and to cancel have the bank disallow the charge, and do not use the service once you have done that (don't contridict yourself)
Of course you'll want to try at least once to cancel through the service, but even if you don't, if you decline charges via your bank, the bank will listen to you, their customer.
The power of the great consumer position.
Last year I moved across the country & was going to be without highspeed access for a month or two. I picked up an AOL account as an easy way to maintain net-access since they do make it very easy to find a local access number. When the move was complete I also changed banks, canceled my bank of america visa and picked up a mastercard. The AOL account was registered against the visa. I figured canceling the card was all I had to do. AOL would try to charge a defunct card, cancel the account & all would be good. Boy was I wrong.
We continued to receive bills from BOA. When I called to enquire they stated I had a contract with AOL and they weren't legally allowed to break that contract. A law I suspect is in place for people who buy refrigerators on a 12-month payment plan and use a credit card. It got worst before it got better, AOL wanted me to confirm my credit card before cancelling. BOA kept sending me bills. Eventually everyone fessed up and AOL even credited me for the time, but for awhile I was really starting to wonder what was going on.
As a side note I am pissed that BOA took AOL's side over mine & would be very leary of opening an account with them again. Needless to say I will _never_ open another AOL account, making that type of arrangement with Visa is just pure cheeze.
I just cancelled my Maxim subscription (don't like the new format)- took about 3 minutes. The girl didn't even ask why, just said "We're sorry to lose you" or something like that.
Not to shabby.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
I signed up for various free and paid for trials of the different 37 signals services (and some quasi-related companies like Mailroom) and never had any problems paying, changing the service rate, or downgrading or cancelling accounts.
I think that's one of the best parts of their services and they should be applauded for it.
I have done similar things, only without the abiilty to speak, using a phone is rather difficult. Another poster mentioned something about requiring that if there's a 3-click sign-up there should be a simple, 3-click cancel. That seems like the best solution so far; if I can sign up online and never talk to anyone, what makes you think I should need to talk to someone to cancel? I often have to sent in e-mails that state "I do not have the ability to speak" to cancel accounts. I imagine raising cane about being disabled may get something done about it all.
I also imagine the deaf have the same troubles - or people without phones. Ever tried to explain to a credit-card company that you don't have a home phone? or any phone at all?
I am surprised that I have not yet seen (maybe I did not look hard enough) any references to Cosmo Kramer attempting to"cancel the mail".
I call bullshit.
A physics professor I had used to say, "If you jump out of you airplane without you parachute, you get people jelly". (And yes, he said you instead of your.)
I'm the urban spaceman babe, but here comes the twist... I don't exist
I like to use virtual credit card numbers for subscription services. The card number expires in about 3 months so if they want to renew my subscription I have to give them a new number. It cuts down on the hassle of canceling since they can't bill me.
the most difficult to cancel: world of warcraft account
The worst experience I had occurred when I cancelled my Rogers high speed internet. They provided a phone number to call to cancel, and I was on hold for 20 minutes listening to some awful country and western yodelling or something like that.
You know the music from Mars Attacks, which made the martians' heads explode. That stuff. I kid you not.
Boy did they get a piece of my mind when I got off hold.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
I'll agree that the card fees are ridiculous, but unfortunately it's something that the merchants have unthinkingly done to themselves (and us) by allowing everyone to become too dependent on convenient and easily obtained credit issued by someone outside their organization and thus outside their control. It's unusual nowadays to find a merchant that doesn't accept some form of major credit card.
I haven't the first idea what a workable solution to the problem would be.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
So, instead of the DMV ... we want to turn it over to the same people who brought us the $500 hammer?
I freely admit that I don't want the government to get involved (unless fraud is taking place). Frankly, I don't believe that outsourcing customer service is the correct answer -- the company doing the outsourcing will rightfully see that their customer is the company that you have problems with, not you.
I still believe that a better solution would be pre-screening sites and buyer education (which will take time). Check out those who you do business with before handing over the cash.
Just before Christmas, I was looking for a wide screen TV. The three places with the best price also turned out to have horrible ratings. I bought the TV online, from a company with a decent rating.
I run my own mailserver (don't we all?) and I can confirm the excellent practice of creating a unique email address for each signup. I use the vendors name in the address, like:
pcmall@mydomain.com
and
macmall@mydomain.com
This works beautifully.
I have been doing this for about 6 years, and it is interesting to report that few companies sell their lists.
Pc Mall and Mac Mall both sold their address lists to spammers (or their customer lists got stolen by one). Beyond that, all the other vendors keep to themselves. Although it appears that many vendors have now decided that my previous "Opt-Out" of emails is no longer valid, and have gone back to sending me regular marketing emails for their company.
The only other problem, are the email addresses used to register domains. They get slammed.
You make a good faith attempt to contact the company (5 minutes will do), and then you call the credit card issuer and instruct them that no further charges are authorized, though you suspect they may attempt to make some.
If they do charge you, they get either a big fine, or dropped by the credit card issuer.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Probably it's for the same reasons that media companies fund cheap crap entertainment that's full of advertising rather than going for quality -- we even get entertainment programs masquerading as "news" in news-time slots. But realistically, the television companies don't work for their viewers... even the pay-TV companies. They work for their advertisers. They know that people will continue to pay for it, irrespective of whether they push crap or quality, simply because there's no alternative.
If businesses get a lot of their money from investors and from advertisers, rather than from subscriptions, it suddenly becomes a lot more about how many people they can claim to have hooked for pushing advertising at. It means a lot to be able to tell investors and advertisers that they have lots of members. Allowing people get away easily doesn't assist with this goal at all.
Personally I don't fully agree with what I just said, and I know there are more responsible ways to make money without abusing users and subscribers, but I can easily see how many businesses would see it that way.
Just try canceling the game Horizons. There's absolutely no gui form to cancel from. You are asked to go to PBT and PBT ask you to contact EI or whoever they are now.
Some people getting triple billed EVEN after they "cancel."
Several years ago, I signed up for an earthlink dial-up account so I could have access in Hawaii. There was a minimum 12 month subscription, but I figured having a backup was a good idea. Of course it auto-renewed and they charged me monthly for 2 years. My credit card expired and they sent me e-mails saying the account would be cancelled. Having not used the service at all, I decided that was a good idea. Then they started sending me threatening mail. Then they started calling me. Each time they called, I explained that I did want the account to be cancelled - so please go ahead and do it. After the fifth call, I made them stay on the phone until they could confirm cancellation of the account (I had been promised by each of the four previous callers that it would be cancelled per my wishes). This time, they transferred me to a "cancellation specialist." I again asked to cancel the account, explaining that it had been unused for years and I simply did not use their service. To cancel, she wanted a) my account number (which I don't know), b) my social security number (which there is no reason to ask for, c) the credit card number associated with the account (which had long since expired and changed), d) my account login and password (which I don't know), e) the phone number associated with the account (apparently not the number they used to call me) - not just one of these things, all of them. Since I could not provide her with ALL of this information, she told me I had to send a REGISTERED AND CERTIFIED letter to earthlink to cancel - and that the letter would have to contain all of this information save my login and password. Of course, they would neither provide me with my login information, nor my password.
Earthlink is on my list.
Happened to me too. Don't mind saying who. Global.net.uk. Total bastards. Tried for six months to cancel. Never once used the account. In the end my account executive told me all we could do was destroy the CC and issue a new one. Bottom dwellers suck scum.
A: you can't.
http://slashdot.org/faq/accounts.shtml#ac200
I had a need for an incoming fax number, but I don't have a landline (and to be honest, I'm not even sure if I still have a working modem anywhere, let alone a fax machine), so I signed up on this site that offers a free trial: efax.com. Suffice to say, trying to cancel with these guys, while not entirely unexpected given the number of people who probably just sign up for a single fax, was nearly an exercise in futility. They try everything possible to extend your account, but what's worse, they keep you on the line as long as possible while "reviewing your account." I understand they don't want people to cancel, but don't waste my time pretending to do something. I had even forgotten to cancel my account soon enough, so I got charged 1 monthly fee -- it's not like they got nothing from me.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I've been trying to close my online savings account for months. I won't tell you the name of the bank, but its initials are HSBC. Write a letter asking to cancel (as they indicated I have to do) , call a month later and discover they "never received it", write another letter, rinse, repeat. Next call is to my lawyer.
Real Rhapsody/SuperPass services
This sounds pretty reasonable to me actually. For some it's a convenience. Since cancelling I haven't had any Rhapsody charges on my card though so I don't think it's a malicious thing.I'd rate this as "moderate hassle." For some reason you can't cancel online, you have to call their phone number in order to cancel. Once you get a human, it's an Indian call center and you might have trouble hearing them (par for the course I'm afraid). My experience was pretty easy thouh. I told them I wanted to cancel, they asked me why, I told them I had a Mac and no longer desired their services or their crashy web plugin, and that was that. I didn't get any pushback or retention techniques.
My experience with SuperPass was about 3 years ago, but similarly easy. It might've been an American back then though.
Netflix
Netflix was extremely easy I thought. Pushed a few buttons in My Account and they didn't bill me on my next cycle. Reactivating my account like a year later was also really easy, but that's not what this guy was concerned about.
I'm currently having a heck of a time canceling my cell phone service contract with Cingular.
I was always happy enough with my cell service. I bought my contract plan in Boston, but eventually moved to New Hampshire, then Las Vegas, and those moves were okay, but then I moved to Alaska. Cingular doesn't own a network in Alaska, so after being here for a few months I got a letter from Cingular saying, sorry, you don't live in our coverage area, so we're going to disable your cell phone, and we'll let you out of your contract with no penalty fee.
Although I preferred to keep my service, I certainly understood why they wouldn't sell it to me anyway, and they took the reasonable step of not charging me the penalty. So, fine, I emailed their customer support a couple weeks ago and have been having a frustrating time of getting them to do anything. I've gotten responses from different agents every time I've emailed them (I reply to the emails they send me, which include tracking data, so if they wanted to they could route it to the same agent each time, but for some reason they don't).
All I want them to do is to cancel my contract, which is what they told me they wanted to do! So why is it so fricking difficult, huh? JUST DO IT ALREADY. I'm still in the middle of it all and I'm getting more and more angry each time they respond.
The best thing is that they keep telling me to call them. Hellooooo? Cingular? You disabled my fucking phone. How do you expect me to call you? With my happymagic telephonic fingerphone? All I have left is email, so that's how I'm communicating with you. Just take the action which you already said you would take, and cancel my account. It's that simple.
Back in the early 80s I had auto insurance thru them. I called and canceled. It went thru, but instead of them refunding some of what I overpaided, they tacked on a 10% cancelation fee and tried to charge me. And the state I lived in was NH, which PROHIBITED such a fee at the time.
After taking it thru a collection agency, (Whom I fired, they work for you, not the original company), a lawyer, and finally the state attorney general, they waived the additional charge, but never did refund what they had over collected.
It has been over 20 years, and guess what, they still don't get business from me.....
Unfortunately, I signed up for a trial at true.com. I did the suspension thing the guy talks about in his article, but I made sure to read the whole page to find out I need to cancel it by calling them. I'm going to call tomorrow and I'm not looking forward to it.
I don't feel so bad about the sodas when restaurants charge over a dollar for something that costs them mere cents.
I also do the unique email thing and it's left me pleasantly surprised. Not one company has sold my address. However, my personal one which I give to friends and family gets a lot of the recent stock spam. I can only guess that someone who has my email address has had their PC zombied. This can happen even in forwarded email as the malware can scan messages for addresses too.
You could have just called the credit card company and told them to stop payment for any charges from Earthlink. Then made another phone call to Earthlink to inform them of the change (making sure you get the guy's name). That's a lot less of a hassle than changing your credit card number.
+++ATH0
a 20 ounce bottle of water or pop cost us about 55 cents to buy (plus storage, refrigeration, labor, etc once we had it)... Figure probably 65 cents by the time everything went into it. Energy drinks cost about $1.25 directly from the distributor and those we sold for $2.25.
$1.50 for a drink
-$0.65 to put it on the shelf
-$0.55 service charge for your credit card
-$0.12 sales tax
-$0.05 bottle deposit
13 cents profit on that bottle of pop (and ($2.25-1.35-0.55-0.17-.05) 13 cents on an energy drink as well). Granted, margins on fountain drinks are much, much, much higher and that consumed the bulk of our beverage service(instead of a fractional return, it was more like 4 cents for every penny invested). Still, we had to raise the price 25 cents from $1.25 to even make a profit once we factored in people who would come in and want to buy just one bottled drink with a credit card. You'll also note that the state makes just about the same profit margin for taking absolutely none of the risk. The bottling distributor and especially the credit card service are the two winners that are making the bulk of the money.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
A number of years ago I was sent an unsolicited Discover card. I never used it and every time they send me a new one instead of validating the card for use I call to cancel. I've almost given up bothering to try and cancel since they ignore my requests. The cards they send go strait to my shredder. I would say that years of trying to close a Discover account I never wanted in the first place aught to qualify for the Guinness World Book records. I won't give in on this and use it.
Thank a veteran -- George
Don't subscribe or buy any online services or products. How do you get recourse when the company or representative basically lives in the ether? If I have a problem with my telephone (old style land line) or cable TV or net provider I can go to the main/branch office. I guarantee you if you go talk to an actual person and look them in the eye your likely to get better service. Just like on line behavior in games and chat rooms often differ from what said person would behave like if you had direct person to person contact, the company representatives likely will not behave so poorly if you're standing in front of them, And if you refuse to leave and then they call the authorities you'll have a nice police report on file - and when confronted by a judge as to why you wouldn't leave and you tell them they wouldn't cancel your account or kept billing you for services you haven't used or disconnected some two months ago... well, they'll likely want to avoid this sort of publicity (or having a hard copy record on file about their business practices).
Bottom line is thst Internet commerce has been set up to favor the "business" and not it's patrons. The problem with this situation is further exacerbated if congress were to get involved - they'll just want to tax it, or control it in favor of the largest campaign contributor.
Until I can get the same level service online that I can get at a brick and morter establishment - I'll pass thank you!
On a similar note, do you know what Armor guys call the Infantry?
"Crunchies"
tone
About 5 years ago, maybe more. Then recently I started getting email from them about my account. It turns out it was never canceled. I don't think it's possible. They keep it forever.
Hotel California (slightly rewritten): "You can log out any time you want, but you can never leave"
This has always worked for me.
First--Don't do business with squirrelly people.
Remember TANSTAAFL.
If you think you can suck the bait off of the hook, go ahead and try. Just remember why they call 'em "suckers".
Second, find the physical address you'd write to if you wanted to terminate the contract.
If you're entering into a contract with legitimate folks, this should be easy to find. If it's not, something's wrong.
If they're legit and you want to properly document, then it will cost you about 5 bucks for certified mail & return receipt.
Write a letter telling the folks you want to quit/cancel/terminate service, whatever.
* Reference the the certified mail item number at the top of the letter.
* State the date you want the cancellation to be effective.
* State that you want written confirmation of the cancellation.
* State the date and method you want confirmation sent.
* Cite the terms of the contract that apply.
* State again that you want to end the contract.
Fill out certified mail stuff with return receipt requested and take the whole thing to a notary.
Sign the demand letter in front of the notary, have them sign it, and photocopy the result.
Take it to the PO and mail it, then wait for the return receipt.
Check your credit report and follow up as required.
If you need to prove you quit the contract, you've now got proof you requested to quit and they received the request.
YMMV.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I believe that all voluntary membership locations should do everything in there possibility to make cancellation easy. So many companies choose to make the process as complicated and tedious as possible to retain customers. My most recent debate was with LA Fitness. Why must we jump through all these hoops to cancel a gym membership? If I was going to the gym jumping through hoops might be easier... but since I wasn't using it, canceling it was my only option. Isn't it enough that they received my membership dues for over a year of use, when in fact I only actually used said membership facilities once? Why do they not have an online presence... maybe it's because I'm a Progressive Auto Insurance customer, but I do in fact demand more from a website of any organization I do business with, and first and foremost, Account Management MUST be part of this website.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
This is an area that needs a serious look by the people who are in charge of controlling the ethics of operating on the Internet. One of the things some companies like to do is to bury the cancel button or make them bump back and forth to the same website pages. Page one will take you to page two; page two will (nstead of cancelling) will bump you back to page one, ad infinitium. Another trick they will do comes from CCBill and some others which bills you continually and ask for new credit card information despite your request to cancel. They are also notorious for supplying only partian information so you have no recollection of the service they are trying to "continue." As for Classmate.com I am hoping when the year is up, it will die a natural death--we will see.
That joke is how I figured out what masturbation was! What an odd blast from the past.
Bank of America. Worst cancellation experience of my life.
I had several Bank of America accounts in college, including a checking account, savings account, and a Visa credit card. When I got a job after college and moved to a different state, I set myself up with my company's credit union, which of course was a much better deal than B of A.
Cancelling the checking and savings accounts was fairly easy; I did that in person at a branch. But they told me I would have to call customer service to cancel my credit card.
I phoned the national number, and spoke with a representative, who asked for my name and social security number. She transferred me to a credit card account rep, who I gave my name and social security number to. This was not the person who could cancel, so she transferred me. The next person I spoke to (and who I gave my name and social security number to) was cancellation for accounts in $NEW_STATE, and could not help with cancellations of accounts from $OLD_STATE. He also transferred me. Then I spoke to (and gave my name and social security number to) representative from $OLD_STATE, who transferred me to the cancellation department of $OLD_STATE, who I had to give my name and social security number to. This person looked up my account and noticed that I opened the account in $ORIGINAL_STATE before I moved, so she transferred me to a rep from $ORIGINAL_STATE, who I gave my name and social security number to, just to have him transfer me to a cancellation rep of $ORIGINAL_STATE, who I was also required to give my name and social security number to.
FINALLY, the person I was talking to had the authority to cancel my account, but she wasn't going down without a fight.
"I'm sorry to hear you're leaving us, Mr. AeroIllini. I am authorized to offer you an automatic 2% rate reduction on your credit card if you choose to stay with us."
"No thanks. I have a credit card with my company's credit union."
"May I ask what the rate on your new card is?"
I told her.
She laughed and laughed. "Sir, there's no way I can match that. I will cancel your account now."
Two hours on the phone (there was hold time with every transfer) and giving out my social security number SEVEN times, just to be strong-armed into staying by a company with inferior customer service.
Never again.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
Use cash, and politely ask if they offer a cash discount? Most places will happily provide one.
Go to AOL keyword CANCEL and it'll tell you how to cancel by fax or mail. Follow the instructions exactly for best results.
It's well worth all 39 pennies to cancel by mail (or however much it costs you to send a fax) not to have to duke it out with a "customer retention specialist".
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
A subtle message to all other wireless carriers: It's the network, stupid!
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
The agreement states that a consumer issuing a chargeback is causing damages to true.com and that both entities agree that the consumer will pay $1000 to make true.com whole in the event that he initiates a chargeback.
That being said, I really doubt any judge would enforce that provision of the contract. A consumer is specifically entitled, by law, to dispute any charge made to his card that was not authorized. Judges, at least in my line of work, don't seem too keen on harshly penalizing someone who is exercising his legal rights. Of course, you get the pleasure of going to court if you want to know for sure.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I can do all that stuff you claim is so hard in 2 lines of perl.
The fact that you don't know how to code should not be your customer's problem.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
How do I cancel my Slashdot account really? I accidentally had a cut and paste error in my user name and now it has this messed up URL as the user name....