1. I can attest to this. Back in the mid-to-late ’90’s I had signed up with AOL overseas and used it for several months until the bills started piling up. I followed the (purposely, I’m sure) barely intelligible instructions at the time on how to quit the service and thought all was fine. Years later, my wife and I found out that they had been nickle-and-diming us ever since then, even though we had officially quit the service. They had simply kept billing our bank account a few coins here, a fraction of a Euro there, every month, in such small amounts that we didn’t catch it, ostensibly as a surcharge to keep my account open. After we caught it, we did the math and realized that they had bilked us out of several hundred Euros over years, but that there was very little we could do at the time except block all further charges at the bank. AOL simply didn’t have us in their system anymore, but had somehow kept charging us at a low level. When we went to the authorities in order to recover those lost charges, we were told that we had very little recourse except to sue, which we couldn’t afford at the time. It wouldn’t surprise me if these statistics were found to be including many folks who stopped using the service but are continuing to be robbed in much the same manner and don’t realize it.

   Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.