New AOL Policy: No Cancellations

[Jessterw]

Obviously the title isn't quite true, but after reading and then listening to this, it makes you wonder what drives a customer rep to be that incompetent...

http://www.nbc10.com/news/9406462/detail.html

An incredible video from CNBC shows an AOL customer trying to cancel his account, but a phone rep won't let him do it. What customer Vincent Ferrari got when he tried to cancel his account was a lot of frustration.

It took him 15 minutes waiting on the phone just to reach a real, live person.

And, what happened next was recorded by Ferrari on audio and lasted about four minutes...

The video is on the right-hand side. It's just the standard transcript with the audio playing, but it makes the whole conversation that much more... erm... amusingly surreal, I guess you could say.

[Dr Mordrid]

Our card kept being billed for 3 months after cancelling an AOL account we used as a backup. They finally refunded it after some bitching, but unbeknownst to us they kept the service on for almost a year after. Finally they sent us a ~$400 bill

After confirming it still was working from a friends system I gave 'em hell on the phone. No joy so I then turned it over to the Michigan State Attorney Generals office.

The account was off within minutes of their call

Dr. Mordrid

[Jessterw]

Had similar problems with AOL back in the day, though not to the same extent. Almost everyone I know who has had to cancel their account has had a story to tell, usually involving the same sort of continued billing.

[KRSESQ]

My demon was Juno. Three years after cancelling that account, just out of curiosity, I went to the website and checked if the email was still active. It was and there were about 1000 messages. I immediately logged off and thought nothing more of it. Lo and behold, the next month there was a $9.95 charge from Juno on my checking statement. Went to the bank and told them it was a mistake and they did a chargeback and retrieved the cash. No more charges after that.

Kevin

[Dr Mordrid]

I'm still getting email through the old Comcast account, and that's been gone a long time. They haven't stopped sending their newsletter to the digitalvideo.8m.net account either.

Dr. Mordrid

[Technoid]

Now we know where all the escaped mental patients go to work