Consumerist
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aol
Zombie AOL Account Crawls Out Of The Grave Nine Years Later
Jennifer, like many people, one subscribed to AOL. She paid for the service originally, then received a free account while employed with Time Warner. Then she joined the 21st century and didn't use AOL at all, but her free account remained in the system. Until AOL started billing her. Nine years later. More » -
aol
AOL User 927 Gets Staged Reading In New York
Back in Aug '06, a researcher ended up releasing 500,000+ AOL user search histories online and all sort of heck broke loose. One of the pieces of fallout was the search queries of User 927, who displayed a fondness for mold, mange, orchids, beauty and the beast disney porn and testicle festivals. The only sensible thing to do, of course, was to make it into a play. More » -
It's like the dot-com boom is finally over. Time Warner is spinning AOL off into its own company once again by the end of the year. AOL will get most of the terrible customer service in the divorce. [Bloomberg]
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AOL Has A New CEO AOL has named Google Senior Vice President Tim Armstrong as its next chairman and chief executive officer. Current Chairman and CEO Randy Falco and Chief Operating Officer and President Ron Grant "plan to leave the company after a transition period," Time Warner said in a statement. [UPI]
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tips
How To Delete Your Online Accounts
PC Mag has assembled a list of instructions on how to wipe your account from a long list of websites, including Classmates.com (you'll have to call), Windows Live ID (it's complicated), and Friendster (ha ha ha). In many cases, canceling is as straightforward as clicking a link and authorizing the cancellation, but it's nice to see all the phone numbers and tips collected in one spot. More » -
insiders
Teleperformance USA: Call Center Of Customer Service Nightmares
Wanna know why your call to customer service went so poorly? Maybe because it was routed to an outsourced call center run by Teleperformance USA where, according to an insider, customer service goes to die... -
WalletPop
AOL Repackages Personal Finance Content, Names It WalletPop
AOL just launched a personal finance website called WalletPop. It's a combination of news feeds, blog entries, and a ton of calculators (which I just bookmarked in my "tools" folder). Mashable seems to like it—they write that digging through the content can be confusing, but there are some "nifty services such as deal finders and tax forms." ArsTechnica is underwhelmed:
Apart from the quite adequate assortment of calculators, it's all a big heap of plain-Jane articles slotted into categories by simple tags.
...maybe you're better off thinking of it as a fat news feed, packed with ads and a layout that can get tiresome for long articles.
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aol
AOL Just Wants To Be Left Alone
Please just leave AOL alone! AOL is raising their dial-up internet access prices by $2 for everyone who refuses to promise not to call technical support. More » -
bad customer service
AOL Tops MSN Money's Customer Service Hall Of Shame
Earlier this week, MSN Money published the results of a national Zogby poll they commissioned on who delivers the worst customer service. The winner was AOL, ranked "poor" by 47% of respondents, while Comcast came in second with 42% suckage. Sprint ranked third at 39%.
"We've seen a fall in customer service as we've gone into a recession," says a customer service consultant in the article. "As the cost cutting occurs . . . they start to cut the wrong things." But that implies that AOL had good customer service before the recession, doesn't it? Wait, what? More »
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how to
Quit AOL Using Highlighters
It looks like AOL is up to its old shenanigans and is still making hard for some people to cancel service (yes there are still some people using AOL), but reader Richard figured out a way to finally get through to them, with a highlighter. He writes:I could not find a way to contact AOL to stop my service. So I took a yellow marker, drew a line though that line item on my credit card bill, and wrote on the bill...."Do not pay, account in dispute". I paid all the other items on the CC bill that month. It took AOL about 2 weeks to call me.....I told them what I thought of their service, and instructed them to terminate my account, while I was still on the phone. It worked. They seem to understand when you tell them you are not going to pay.
That's one way to go about it. You could also call up your credit card company and request a chargeback, but this has the added benefit of zero hold time. First rebates, now AOL cancellations, this highlighter is starting to look mighty potent. -
shady
Azureus: Other ISPs May Also Be Throttling BitTorrent
Azureus has released data that suggests that Comcast may not be the only ISP throttling BitTorrent, says TorrentFreak: More » -
leaks
Exclusive: AOL's Collections Guide Encourages Agents To Lie And Deceive
An anonymous tipster sent us AOL's 153 page internal collections guidebook for prying money out of delinquent account holders. The guide shows that AOL is following some of the debt industry's most egregious collection tactics by encouraging agents to deceive and lie to customers. After the jump we present AOL's scare tactics, tricks to negotiating a substantial discount, and the full collections guide.
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lawsuits
Apple, AT&T, Sued Over Visual Voicemail
A firm called Klausner Technologies has just announced that they are suing both Apple and AT&T for patent infringement over the iPhone's "visual voicemail" feature. Klausner Technologies has already sued VOIP provider Vonage and AOL/Time Warner for the same darn thing, and both companies chose to settle and license the technology from Klausner. More » -
AOL is STILL trying to extort money from people who canceled their account. STILL STILL STILL. [KUTV]
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class action suits
9th Circuit Court Says Companies Can't Change Contract Terms Simply By Posting Changes On A Website
Parties to a contract have no obligation to check the terms on a periodic basis to learn whether they have been changed by the other side. Indeed, a party can't unilaterally change the terms of a contract; it must obtain the other party's consent before doing so....
- Ninth Circuit Court ruling (PDF) that that Talk America couldn't just post contract changes on its company website and compel customer acceptance without otherwise notifying customers....Nor would a party know when to check the website for possible changes to the contract terms without being notified that the contract has been changed and how. Douglas would have had to check the contract every day for possible changes. Without notice, an examination would be fairly cumbersome, as Douglas would have had to compare every word of the posted contract with his existing contract in order to detect whether it had changed.
[via CL&P Blog]
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cancel the account
Not Canceling The Account Costs AOL $3 Million
AOL has avoided what was certain to be an entertaining court battle by settling with 48 states and the District of Colombia over allegations that it made it, uh, difficult to cancel for the many customers who were fleeing to broadband. More »
aol
New York, 12:59 AM
Mon Jul 6
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