Non Sequitur: When You Sign Up with AOL, You Are Theirs Forever
I’ve heard horror stories, but I didn’t realize that signing up with AOL was a life sentence.
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My sister had free AOL service for probably two years because she would call and ask them to cancel it, and they would offer to extend the service for free.
I so wish that I had taped my AOL call oh so many years ago. It took FOREVER for them to say that they would cancel, and then at the very end told me that the account was still open so that I could access my email (to tell people that I had moved).
However, if you log onto your account anytime after you cancel by phone, AOL then reactivates your account and starts charging you again three months after your last log on. (They snuck the reactivation thing into the letter confirming cancelation.)
After I cancelled I got phone calls for the next two years asking if I would come back. Yikes. Have some garlic. Die already.
This is very interesting. I’ve never used AOL, but had a similar experience once when trying to close a credit card account. I really don’t understand what they hope to gain by this type of pressure. Do people really keep their account open after dealing with something like this?
You just don’t know. You must call to cancel. They almost like—refuse—to let you go. We cancelled our service and had to give specific reasons as to why we wanted to leave AOL. Then the customer service rep got angry when she couldn’t hook me with the free service thing or reducing the price to about $5 a month (I’d told her that the price wasn’t within my budget). Then they had the nerve to send me the survey for customer service satisfaction when I cancelled and of course it wasn’t a good one.
Does privacy law now allow people to stop this kind of thing from happening? On a few occasions, I’ve asked marketers to take me off their database and so far it’s worked. (I live in Australia, though, so I don’t know if that makes a difference.)
On AOL…I still haven’t managed to uninstall the software on the PC and we haven’t been subscribed for over 4 years.