For the last four or five years, I’ve had an eFax Plus account. This is a fax number of my very own, local to me, that you can send faxes to and it shows up as an email attachment in my email. This was very useful when I was working on the Fanime con dealer’s room, as a lot of faxing was going on between me and the dealers. As time went on, though the only thing I’ve used it for is the occasional received fax from my financial advisor… which, if need be, could have been sent to my work fax, as it’s just down the hallway. For this privilege, I’ve been charged $13 a month. Today, I finally got around to canceling this account, but it turned out to be less simple than that.
I forgot the actual number, as it’s been so long and I only have it written down in my Palm Pilot (which is dead). So I had to have an email sent from them telling me my number when I put in my email address. That got caught by my spam filter, and I had to fish it out. Then, I had to request my PIN from them after entering the fax number. That took 30 minutes to go through, and was also caught by the spam filter.
After logging in, I tried to find the cancel account button. Now, there was something odd here that I’m not really going to bother looking in to, but still is unsettling. They were still charging the $13 a month to my Visa, even though the expiration date had passed, and I was on a new expiration date. (This was an issue a few months ago when a bunch of automatic charges failed and had to be re-setup.) But anyway, searching through the online help eventually told me that I need to do one of those stupid online chat things with a customer service representative to actually cancel my account.
The guy would not let me go. The general gist of the conversation went like this, although many things were repeated back and forth multiple times: “You want to cancel? We’ll give you two free months, and see how you feel after that.” I haven’t used it in three years, two months isn’t going to make a difference. I’ll just forget to contact you in two months (which is what you’re banking on) and we’ll be back where we started. “I can set it up so that it automatically cancels after the two months.” The website says that it’s not considered canceled until confirmed by a customer service rep. “Okay, it’s canceled.”
Only it took 15 minutes to do so. Why couldn’t there just be a button on the website? No, they don’t want to make it that easy. They want your money.
Well, they don’t have mine anymore. I wish I had the money of mine back they already have.
Sounds like EA and Earth and Beyond. I had to call them up and cancel over the phone, and it was a serious sales pitch to get me to keep (not) playing. Of course, E&B is dead, now. 🙂
— ZC