p2pnet - rss feed: AOL ‘illegal billing’ charge
p2p news / p2pnet: Under a “common, uniform and continuing” scheme, AOL has been illegally billing customers by creating secondary accounts for them without their consent, says the Associated Press.
Time Warner’s “AOL exploits its subscribers’ confidential billing information to unlawfully generate additional revenue by charging subscribers for additional membership accounts that they neither order nor request,” a lawsuit alleges, says the story.
A class-action, “mirrors more than a dozen other actions that have been pending in state and federal courts throughout the country,” AP has Stuart Talley, a California lawyer attorney representing the plaintiffs in an Illinois lawsuit, saying. “All of the federal cases were consolidated in California two years ago, he states.
But AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham says the Illinois lawsuit is a, “legal rehash that has as much legal value as refiling your personal income taxes from four years ago.”
The “important thing is that we deny the allegations now as we’ve done several times, and we will defend this case as we have other cases accordingly,” he said, noting that AOL “takes extraordinary efforts to resolve any issues the members raise,” according to AP, which adds:
“The latest lawsuit alleges that AOL misrepresented that subscribers may add up to seven different screen names to a membership account for free. But AOL ‘in many instances’ spun off those screen names into additional membership accounts without the subscribers’ knowledge, then charged and collected a separate monthly fee for each account.”
And, “To maintain its customer base, according to the lawsuit, AOL has instructed customer-service contractors such as ICT to prevent AOL subscribers from canceling their accounts ‘at all costs’ and to resist giving refunds. Customers who complain are offered at least one month of free AOL Internet service instead of refunds or credits, while ‘unsatisfied customers who insist on canceling or terminating their AOL memberships are obstructed and delayed from doing so,’ the lawsuit claims.
Also read:-
Associated Press - Lawsuit accuses AOL of illegal billing, December 2, 2005
December 4th, 2005 at 1:45 am
Yet another reason not to sign up with this monolith.
December 4th, 2005 at 3:39 pm
AOL is like the “Roach Motel”, once you check in, you never check out. They’ve been doing this for years. In my case, it took several phone calls and the cancellation of my credit card to get rid of them. That was a bad experience and a lesson learned.
December 4th, 2005 at 6:11 pm
“AOL has instructed customer-service contractors such as ICT to prevent AOL subscribers from canceling their accounts ‘at all costs’ and to resist giving refunds.”
They also tell the customer that the account is canceled then give them six months free. the customer thinks it’s over with then six months later finds the charges reacurring on their credit card statement.
December 4th, 2005 at 7:36 pm
AOL Has sent me Disks offering free for the 1st month. Every time I had called to in form them that my credit card has been charged they have refused to give me credit for the charges. I say AOL Sucks.
December 4th, 2005 at 8:34 pm
AOL stoled thousands of $ from me and I got my money back from my bank, but they did not say they were sorry. I did not ever sign up for AOL or ever go to there web site (nothing). Someone signed up using my imformation from a cheque. They then took thousands of dallars from my account. they have no secruity to stop this sort of thing and do nothing but give you a hard time for saying - WTF where is my money? Google AOL theft and you will see a problem that is growing.
December 4th, 2005 at 8:49 pm
Also to make things worse the RCMP in canada did nothing to solve this case of theft. I had to do the whole thing. We just don’t have the man power to spend time on this sort of thing I was told. Lots of time to eat donuts and pull cars over for no seatbelts though.
December 4th, 2005 at 11:12 pm
This as much as loading down your computer with excess junk not needed by the user but used to both reap information from the user and provide most of the time unwanted ads is what makes AOL so disliked by those that are old hands to the net.
The very worse thing you can do is provide such a company your credit card info to either prove you are 21 or to get service from them. They are just short of being as bad as spyware and malware and once they get their hooks in your credit account, they leech as long as possible.
The old scam of terminating your account with a credit in user time wore thin long ago. Also the one of giving you a free month of service if you bitch, doesn’t fix the problem of rogue operations and methods.
There is one thing I would thank AOL for and it is about the only thing I can think of where I would credit them with anything. That is proving that cd’s don’t cost that much. Doesn’t take a wizard to figure out if you see them everywhere and get them in the mail to boot, they aren’t very expensive to make. Up till that point the cartels had that new shiny disc and no one could say it what cost that to make the disc. Now everyone and their brother knows they aren’t expensive. Very hard to justify the price of paid for music when looking at it that way.
December 5th, 2005 at 10:29 am
I used the free month service about six times over a couple of years and managed to avoid paying.
The software is bloatware, I agree. But if you say install using the disks through the mail, and be sure to cancel four or five days before the ‘trial’ is up, you’re free.
I think if you choose to sign up, use the small print. AOL feeds of peoples laziness or the fact that often you forget.
I think, in total, I probably got nine months free dial up from them. A couple of times when I phoned up to cancel, they’d chuck in a month or two to keep me going!
But this is the UK experience talking here.
December 5th, 2005 at 12:57 pm
Do you want to know how much those disks cost? Here’s an example: A friend of mine is a manager for a indy music rock band. They had a CD professionally pressed, duplicated, and packaged. Total cost for 1,000 CDs, plus packaging? ~$1,300.
December 5th, 2005 at 1:07 pm
My own experiences with AOL resemble the others described here. Yet, the venal, vicious leeches eventually agreed to set me up on some sort of “Pay by the actual time spent online” scam, where I was assured that my monthly bill would be $4.95/mo, unless I exceeded a certain specified time limitation each month. The only reason I went for it was that I wanted to have about a month to let my correspondents know of my intended change to Sprint (Ohmygawd!!!! That was an even bigger nightmare than AOL!!!)
So, I ordered Sprint (and to this day do not fully understand why I let them screw me out of $180.00 for the “free gift” I was supposed to receive for signing up). In the meantime, my next bill from AOL, which I had used less than miserly (spending no more than ten minutes per day – which would have been five minutes per day except for their lengthy login rigmarole!!) was for $35.00!!!!!
Leave out the grisly details, but they never did drop that bill, and in fact continued to bill me at the usual $21.95/month fee for six months afterwards! Like many, I asked my bank to change my credit card number. Failing to do so, they lost my business to a different bank, where I heaped all my credit card debt into one monthly bill, with a NEW CREDIT CARD number!
All of that was about seven or eight years ago. It’s amazing what lessons of life will be force-fed down the throats of generally unsuspecting, honest, law-abiding citizens by the avaricious denizens of cyber-space — supposedly upright, honest, legitimate American companies. I have tried to tell everyone I know of my AOL and Sprint experiences, but it’s amazing how many people still use them! My poor sister still believes that it was her daughter and son-in-law that drove her AOL bill so high every month!
December 5th, 2005 at 9:04 pm
i signed up for a free account in may. cancelled it
(through their automated phone service to cancel your account) yes they actually have this feature.
found out that it didn’t actually cancel my account.. even the number it had generated was not legit. i called very angry and wanted my money for 2 months they had billed me for. they told me they would refund the account but could not CLOSE my account until the money was refunded. i told her that was the stupidest thing i had ever heard. 2 weeks later the money was refunded. i called and cancelled the service AGAIN. still waiting for next month to see what happens.
December 5th, 2005 at 10:43 pm
It happened to me, too. Luckily, I had someone with some clout on my side and it was quickly hushed-up.
Sue the s-o-b’s!
December 5th, 2005 at 10:44 pm
Same here.
December 6th, 2005 at 4:40 am
This has been going on for years and years.at least since 1998 that im sure of. why did it take so long for them to figure it out?????