Another AOL Double Billing Episode
Sunday, November 12, 2006
Heidi Jongquist
Manager, Escalations
AOL P.O. Box 65771
Sterling, VA
20165-8806
Dear Heidi,
Today I spoke with someone in the fraud department at AOL, and she told me that the investigation into my claim of double billing could not be conducted until I provided copies of my bank account statements going back as far as the double-billing occurred.
I asked the customer service why someone at AOL couldn t have called me, or written, or sent me an e-mail letting me know the information that was needed in order to proceed. You have my address; I filed a fraud claim in September, two months ago. I filed a complaint with the Department of Justice several days later. I filled out and signed a verification under oath and mailed it back to AOL in late September or early October. AOL knows where I am. I have been waiting for two months for some result, some kind of finding. Did you think I would learn of this need for documents through telepathy?
On October 2, 2006 you wrote to the Department of Justice, State of California, that AOL had already investigated my claim, and that once I sent the affidavit in my claim would be processed and the appropriate refund issued. I m enclosing a copy of that letter. Either AOL has done an investigation, or it hasn t. Which is it? And why do you need my records when you have your own records, which show the double billing occurred? I know this, because the very first person I spoke to at AOL, back in September, a nice fellow located in India, told me so. And he was even kind enough to confirm that the double billing went back even further than I had initially thought. What is so special about my personal records that you don t have now? Why do I have to prove what you already know to be true? Why are you stalling instead of working on this, as you told the Department of Justice? Why don t you just admit that this was most likely an inside job that has been repeated thousands of times, apologize, and give me my money back? No hard feelings, just give me my money back. That s all I want. Someone at AOL is or was dishonest, and stole money from me, a lot of money maybe not a lot of money to you, Heidi Jongquist, if you really exist, but a lot of money to me -- and I want it back. Just give my money back and I'll stop writing to you.
AOL, why is it so difficult for you people to not double charge customers in the first place? The term, "double billing" seems to imply it's a benign infraction; an oversight perhaps. But with you guys it's happened so often, and lawsuits and so forth...it's hardly coincidental.
But more to the point, why must the customers good enough to employ you - and make no mistake that it is the customer who keeps you employed - have to jump through hoop after hoop to get their rightful money back? Their money, I may add, that they should receive PLUS interest? Their money that should never have been taken in the first place.
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Visiting Dear AOL, for example, will reveal a petition that some are signing in order to stop AOL from sending allowed spam to your AOL email-box.
Are you being threatened with trademark infringement? Have you been ordered to transfer your domain name over? Here are some resources:
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About This Blog
This blog was formed after AOL™ or America Online ™ - an online service provider - sent a threatening notice to the Registrar of the domain name www.aol-icq.net telling them to transfer it to AOL. The notice made assertions of copyright infringement of the name and even went so far as to assert their ownership of the once non-AOL controlled name ICQ™. At first blush, this may seem not so unreasonable. However. The former owner of www.aol-icq.com, acquired circa 1998 for the purpose of helping AOL members use ICQ while on AOL, is the same owner of www.aol-icq.net, which was acquired in 2002 when an accidental missing of the deadline left it open for AOL to register it.
Therefore, does this latest AOL threat sound like Reverse Domain Name Hijacking?
