Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unless you expect nobody to ever cancel your paid services, then why should there be a fee to this? With all that work it should be well scripted out and never require administrator level input. If it does then the programmers really fouled up. I should never be charged because the company was to incompetent. If you want people to pay you should provide them with the ability to stop paying nicely, sans fee.
MSN Internet was on the list. They scored as "Big Hassle"
Here is the Big Hassle list:
* AOL
* BlueMountain.com
* Classmates.com
* ESPN
* MSN Internet
* Napster.com
* NetZero
* Real Rhapsody
* Real SuperPass
* True.com
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".)
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.)
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.
- 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'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.
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.
\
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.
Say what? You have to be kidding.
Cancelling an account should never take more than a few keystrokes and a button click. Maybe two clicks, the second one being a verification -- but if you've ever watched support handle confirmation screens, you know they aren't going to look at them anyway.
This is what admins are FOR: writing the backend code in the DB (and elsewhere) which ensures that, yes, when a user cancels their account, all traces of them are either removed, or the account is put into a 'hold' status if there are things like (as you said) e-mail addresses to worry about.
And no, there should NOT be cancellation charges on ANY service. Ever. None. Zero.
That is what long term contracts are for. If I say I want one year of service, then I pay for one year of service. Even if I cancel after a month. If the company offers me PART of my money back, cool! I think we are on the same page there in a way - a lot of people see a 50 dollar early termination fee as hideous, even though they are actually getting out of, say, 9 months of a 40 dollar per month service. I just despise situations where I *have* to sign a contract, and I have no power to negotiate and nobody else offers shorter terms.
And yes, I've been an admin at a company that had to deal with such. No, it wasn't shockingly difficult to create the system for dealing with this. Though, I admit it was made easier by the fact that, by law, we had to retain most of the information, and thus didn't have to do much more than null out CC#s and put the user in the inactive bin.
Personally, I'd like to see a law that states 'Cancelling may not be any more difficult than creating.' Four clicks to create? Four clicks to cancel. Big bold 'Create Account' button?... You get the idea. If you can create an account via the web, you can damned well figure out how to cancel one.
Anway, enough late night rambling,
Cancelling an AOL account is easy in my experience
Just call them, press 0 about a hundred times[1], and tell them you want to cancel your account. If they ask why you want to cancel your account, just be honest. If that's not good enough, start swearing. (I'm fucking tired of your assholes charging me twice what the local ISP charges...)
[1] The old business man trick. If you do it, you'll get better treatment from just about anyone.
After all, I am strangely colored.
I use Citibank Master Card Diamond Account Preferred and got exactly this. I'm able to generate virtual credit card and set limit and expiration date.
Maybe you should try that too.
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 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.
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
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.
I actually reported my card lost and had it replaced in order to get rid of an Earthlink DSL account a couple of years ago. Even though I (or anyone else) hadn't lived at the DSL location for 6 mos, and the phone line asociated w/ the acount had been disconnected for the same amount of time, they would not cancel the acount, so I did what I had to do.
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?
I'd like to add one to that list, though not really a PC online service. Xbox Live.
When I had to leave for college a year or two back, I couldn't bring my Xbox with me (because it wasn't even mine. It belongs to my brother. I brought my Gamecube instead) So when I decided it was better to cancel it rather than pay another $50 for a year of a service I rarely used (I only played a few games, and Splinter Cell taught me to hate 13 year olds like nothing else), for a system I wouldn't have, I went to cancel, but, surprise, Microsoft's web pages have no information on canceling. After a great deal of googling, I found out the only way to cancel is to call a special tech-support hotline. And of course, the operator asked about 15 times if I was sure, and listed so many alternatives ("Maybe someone else up there will have an Xbox."). Thanks to that, I don't think I'll ever play another Xbox (or more realistically, a 360, if I ever get the system) game online ever again.
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.
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
I just canceled a real Superpass account I'd been meaning to cancel for ages. It was dead easy. I told them I wanted to upgrade to Rhapsody. It so happens the memberships aren't directly transferable so they have to de-register you from Superpass and then you have to manually sign up for Rhapsody. So they canceled my Superpass but, of course, I never signed up for the Rhapsody. In fairness to them, I understand the Rhapsody service itself is pretty good as far as those subscription music plans go, and also it ties into one of the Sansa products. Their Superpass was also a decent deal (it included 10 purchased downloads a month) until they decided to tack on some useless bonus software as an excuse for jacking up the price. So I think they've got some decent offerings at their core, but if Real ever want to compete with iTunes, they're going to have to quit with the silly/sleazy business practices.
One other thing. People here keep trotting out that VISA Terms and Conditions which says the merchant is not allowed to bind you to XYZ terms (e.g., they can't penalize you for using virtual cc numbers) But if you contractually agree to the penalty, I wonder if the Visa T&C will be a valid defense? After all, just because they've breached their contract with VISA doesn't mean you (necessarily) get to breach your contract with the merchant. Presumably your defense would be fraudulent inducement? Any case law on this?
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
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
I wonder what would happen if a subscriber didn't update their credit card info once their card expires to let the account lapse.
In a related note, that very thing happened with me with Gold's Gym - my credit card lapsed and I had moved after college. I got a hold of them about the account after finding negative marks on my credit report. I paid the rest of my contract but they didn't tell me that after my contract was completed, I went to automatic monthly renewal. They also didn't tell me that I couldn't cancel that automatic renewal over the phone, neither could I go in person into one of their local locations. I tried to do both of these, visiting their gym when on vacation because I lived in another state at the time. For the phone cancellation, they said that they worried that some joker might cancel my account for me over the phone. I couldn't cancel at one of their locations because they just didn't cancel an account there...which was odd because a whole gaggle of tanned/manicured individuals were there to *create* accounts for people. I had to fax in a signed statement to their corporate offices (for that set of gyms) saying that I wanted to cancel my account.
So, not only did I have to pay for 6 months of gym "service" while living out of state because they had put me on automatic renewal, more bad credit stuff showed up on my credit report.
When I talked to them on the phone about the whole deal, they politely (sarcasm) responded that automatic renewal was in the contract so it was my own fault. So when I moved back to the state where the account was, I opted to avoid their gym like a basket full of snakes and spiders.
Let's give it up for self-serving companies who go to great lengths to sign people up but have to be threatened with legal action or with a public relations campaign to improve their practices in order to avoid destroying their own customers' credit. Btw, I know a guy whose credit was actually completely ruined by that same chain of Gold's Gyms - which btw is in the Salt Lake and Provo/Orem areas of Utah.