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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
(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".)
.mac account after you cancelled .mac - it continues functioning as an Apple ID. You can even change the email address associated with it, so while your Apple ID may be R3dM3rcury@mac.com, the email address associated with the account could be R3dMercury@fancydomain.org
.Mac Preference Pane, and removing your old info.
There's nothing to cancel, iTunes isn't a subscription service. All the songs you purchase are linked to a Apple ID, which doesn't expire.
Also, you could've continued using the Apple ID created with your
As for the ID being "buried" within OS X, try opening up the
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 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.
"Oh yes, takes less than a day to charge the credit card, but a few days to refund"
no comment on efax... but... some companies (and the one I work for is one of them) trust the general customer service agent to charge your card but not to give money back.. because they dont want extra fraud going on by employees.. such as putting money back onto their own cards out of the company accounts...
Its a hassle because then the companies typically only have one or a small number of people authorized to put money back on to a card and thats part of what delays the refund.
ariven.com
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.