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At what point did the rights of a corporation become more important than the rights of a consumer?
Ok, I'm a geek. I'm proud of it. I played Everquest 2 (EQ2) online for a bit, which is made by Sony Online Entertainment (SOE). I grew bored with it and canceled. Well I find out that they've been charging me for months. My wife asked me "I thought you canceled EQ2?" and I replied "I did. Months ago." Sure enough there was a new charge, and my wife informed me that they'd been on every month.
Well, of course you can't call them. They don't have phone support, so I sent an email and waited for 2 hours in a online queue for a customer support instant messager chat. Turns out that they have no record of my cancelation. I ask them to cancel my account, and to refund my money. They cancel my account, but refuse to refund my money. With their tools they can plainly see that I haven't logged in to the application in months, but it doesn't matter.
I tell them that it isn't about the money it's about doing what's right. I claim I canceled months ago, and they have record that I haven't touched the game in that time. Sure, it's my responsiblity for the money, but I did cancel. In my mind a good company would refund the money, or at least the most recent charge that set me off. Instead they accuse me of lying and claiming that their billing process has never had any problems. I asked them if my reporting this would count as a problem to their billing process, and that it's inane to claim a process has no problems when you dismiss all the people reporting problems as liars.
Whatever. If it had only been one charge since I canceled, they should have removed that at the very least. Instead customers have no rights, companies can do whatever they want. Well, I don't care about the money. SOE though will never get another drop of mine as far as I'm concerned.
I just....I don't know. It seems to me that companies used to actually care about their customers. Particularly companies that rely on people coming back again and again month after month. You'd think they'd have been nicer, offered me at least a month of my money back, and not called me a liar.
Makes me not ever want to buy anything from anyone ever again if I can't ask for my money back.
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