consumerist.com — The Florida Attorney General has successfully sued America Online for their abusive customer billing practices. The State's Attorney office received over 1,000 consumer complaints about cancellation requests being ignored, erroneous charges and unauthorized account reactivations.
Dec 12, 2006 View in Crawl 4
cixelDec 13, 2006
someone should sue florida's unemployment department for being so horribly unorganized and unusable. i didnt realize moving here from california eliminated my safety net. apparently the state of florida wants to encourage poverty by making it very difficult to get unemployment. the guy at the job corps office told me things get lost in the system all the time.
drmangrumDec 13, 2006
AIM isnt a protocol, it's simply a modified chat server. If AOL were to ever go under ( and that is HIGHLY doubtful), a company would purchase the ip address of the main server(s) and continue on, probably with a lot of ad's injected. Besides, it's not like there aren't a plethora of other instant messaging services. AIM wouldn't go down over night, just notify your contacts of which services you'll be using and use Trillian as your client.
djekzDec 13, 2006
How about GAIM? It supports yahoo, aim, msn, irc, icq, googletalk, etc.
tebixanDec 13, 2006
I live in Florida and went through this as well, I wish I had known about this lawsuit, I would have joined in.My ex-girlfriend started an AOL account using my debit card, without telling me (note: EX-girlfriend). When I tried to cancel the account, they wouldn't let me because her name was on the account, even though it was MY bank card being charged. I ended up having to close my checking account and open up a new one so that AOL couldn't get to me.f**kers billed me for 3 months before I managed to cancel the account
fordiDec 13, 2006
@surfing:Correct. The protocol is called 'OSCAR', with a subset called 'TOC'. It is not, by the way, called 'AIM', which is, essentially, the name of a client/server ad-paid-service model, operating via OSCAR/TOC, between a number of clients running a known client program and a set of servers, the addresses of which are preprogrammed into the client.What would happen to AIM if AOL went under? The purchaser of their DNS records would quickly set up new OSCAR servers at the same old locations, and would likely later introduce new libaim based OSCAR clients under a new marketing name (preferably one that has AIM as its acronym). These new clients would be able to deliver ads as well or better than the old one, which the owner of the new servers would do well to take advantage of.Point? AOL's imminent death != the death of AIM. The gap would be quickly filled. And if not, there's always Google Talk (which I dropped AIM for a while back anyways).
fordiDec 13, 2006
Heh. My mom had an account back in '94, which we eventually cancelled. Didn't take long, though. A friend who'd gone through the ordeal had later found out you can fax in the request to cancel. She gave us the fax number, and sure enough, it was done by the end of the day.
screwy1138Dec 13, 2006
Collection agency, good point. However, as far as the recurring charges, I've dealt with this with Discover at least. They said they would happily put a block on it if I tried to cancel because they have had too many customers charged after cancelling, and it's more of a pain for them to try and re-imburse / rectify than to just block it in the first place.
kennmacDec 13, 2006
It took me 25 minutes of waiting time and 50 minutes of screaming time to finally cancel my AOL account. The rep even told me I was crazy for not accepting his offer of an additional three months for free. The f**ker told me I was crazy!