Best business practice? Not!

[alexpgp]

Looking over my credit card statements, I noticed eFax went ahead and renewed my annual plan about a month ago (without, I might add, any email notification that this was going to happen).

Now, frankly, I haven't received any fax of value from anyone for at least the past year, so in an attempt to save a little money (and to prevent such "surprise" charges in the future), I called eFax a few minutes ago to cancel my account and get at least a partial refund of the charge.

To my surprise, I was informed that there would be no proration of the charge and no partial refund of the fee.

Combined with not telling my that my plan was about to renew, I thought this was a pretty shabby policy on the part of eFax, but the fact that I've "paid" for another whole year of service (that consists of having dozens of junk faxes delivered to my inbox) did not stop me from canceling the account immediately.

eFax users, be warned!

Comments

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

Your story reminds me of a not too distant experience with Juno, an e-mail service. I had used them for years. Then one day they decided that they should charge a yearly subscription fee. Fine. I paid. The way it is all set up is that it charges your account yearly.

By and by, I merged with gmail. I stopped using Juno. If you are not the one in your family who manages the finances, you might never know juno is charging you. But my husband, the financial wizard, asked me about the charge to juno. I realized that I was paying for something I was no longer using. So I looked into cancelling the charge and the subscription.

However, it was nearly impossible to find information on cancelling. Finally I found the phone number and called them. That went fairly well until the end of the call, whereby I was informed that I should now sign up for their "watch dog" service. (I don't remember what it was called, exactly, but you get the idea.) They would keep an eye on my account to make sure the "wrong people" didn't get into it. We then had another ten minute conversation that consisted of me saying "No," and them badgering me some more to sign up for the watch dog service. When I hung up, I was pretty sure I had made my wishes known.

But no. A month or two down the road, I find another charge on my bill. I am the proud owner of the watch dog service. Believe me, when I cancelled that one, I didn't even try to be polite.

What gets me is that the charge is not terribly high, maybe ten dollars per year. It is at a low enough threshold that most people will either not notice it, or relegate themselves to paying it for a while. It's almost not worth sweating over. If it were any other organization, I might have considered it a donation. But these people were devious and rude and that doesn't get my vote--or my money.

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

Since it wasn't authorized by you, you could get your credit card company to do a chargeback...

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

I might just try that (although I'd be surprised if eFax hadn't anticipated this in their terms and conditions).

Thanks for the tip.

Cheers...