AOL had a choice, either they could go to court and fight or they could settle. The reason? They were accused of refusing to let customers cancel. To anyone unfamiliar with AOL, this accusation seems absurd. What company in their right mind would refuse to allow a customer to cancel. For those familiar with AOL, you know how plausible and true this actually is.
Not wanting to have to go to court and fight, AOL decided to settle for $3 million dollars which will go to 48 states and the District of Columbia to pay for their investigation, not to the customers who were affected. Customers who were affected however, will receive refunds from AOL for any fees that they incurred after trying to cancel their accounts.
I never did have AOL as an ISP, however Ryan did several years ago. When he called them to cancel, the AOL representative offered three months of free service. Ryan took them up on their offer, and after the three months was up, he called back to cancel. Again, he was offered three free months of service. This happened at least 4 times before the AOL rep finally cancelled the account! Of course, they were hoping after the three months of free service was up that he’d just continue using their service and get billed for his use.
It’s been reported that employees at AOL would receive bonuses up to a whopping $3,000 if they were able to convince a customer to stay with them instead of cancelling. So my question for you is, what was your experience cancelling AOL? I’m sure there are stories to tell… 
Source: BetaNews
Boy do I have stories…
Couple years ago I signed-up for a free ‘30-day trail’. Never used it and called AOL to cancel.
Call #1 — If I didn’t know any better I thought I was talking to Apu over at the Kwiki Mart (is that a Slushy Machine I hear in the background?). He basically chewed me out for wanting to cancel even though I never activate the account. He was going to send me a bunch of links to the AOL e-mail and added three free months. He went on to ’sell’ AOL even more at which point I made a critical mistake and interrupted him with “I just want to cancel” ****CLICK***
Call #2 — I don’t recall her name but she said she was in Tucson. If I didn’t know any better I say she was a UofA cheerleader working part time. No ‘normal’ person who works in a call center would be that hyper. Again was lectured about how I had not activated the account and she was going to give me 6 months free. At this point I was exhausted so I just accepted the offer. She informed me she would send me a confirmation letter.
The Letter — A week or so later I got the letter confirming my AOL service (which I had still not activated) was extended. However there was a once sentence clause that went something like this ‘If you with to end your service, complete and return the form on the back of this letter.’ I did that and attempted to FAX it to them (long distance of course). Guess what, their FAX # didn’t work (or at least that what the machine lead me to believe) or it was over-loaded.
I was going to mail the letter but had forgotten about it. A couple weeks later a get another letter from AOL saying that per my request my service had been canceled. HOWEVER, if this was done in error or I would like to come back to AOL, just call or sign in with the scree name and my account would be active again with a free 30-days…
From my days working for Target VISA I would get disputes calls for AOL (big surprise there). People say they had canceled AOL and they were still being billed or my favorite, AOL would just start billing them again after a few months (chances are they accepted (or were forced to) a ‘retention offer’ and didn’t know that they were going to be billed again). Multiple charges in the same month for different products. Or if the credit card kept getting declined they wouldn’t shut-ff the service they would just keep trying (up to a couple months later) until they get the charges to go through. I had seen one where they had been charged 4 times in one month, but then looking back the account it had been over-limit for the past three months (with no AOL charges).
While I did not work in the Charge-Back department I am sure AOL was the most common merchant they dealt with. Sadly I am not in contact with any one at that department anymore, I really would have liked to known how they handle AOL. I wondering if VISA International had set policy just for AOL charge backs or if Target just ate the money.
Several offers for free months. Even after I refused they still transferred me to additional reps. There they offered me free gifts consisting of mainly coupons towards things like travel discounts (according to my memory).
That was about 10 years ago. What can I say, I was young. I used AOL because I didn’t know any better.
I was offered a ‘answer a survey and get up to $10 on your bill’ thing where my bill was a total of $10. So the survey would have covered the bill without problems, but that’s only when a survey was valued that much. Most of the time I couldn’t get a survey selected for me that was worth more than $5. I canceled after about a week of that.
It’s funny to hear everyone else’s stories about this. What strikes me as amazing is that almost everyone has the exact same story to tell, and as CoryC said, it’s probably just because we were young and didn’t know better. Then again cable/DSL wasn’t as widespread 5-years ago as it is now.
Plus back in the day AOL was like 1 of 3 ISPs among Prodigy so there wasn’t much of a choice and people often times fell in love with AOL from day 1 and just stuck with them because they knew it and because what a headache it was to cancel.
Ahh, Prodigy…forgot about that one. I think there was Juno as well.