Anti-AOL

Here's a comment left by a visitor on my AOL Customer Service Phone Numbers and Contact Info page, who writes that by calling 703-265-1000 and leaving a voice mail message, he or she was "miraculously" able to cancel AOL:

After reading this web site I was finally able to cancel AOL and get them to cancel the continued billing for AOL. I'd had AOL for years but when my bank account was compromised and I got a new Visa number I was unwilling to give the number to a person in Romania who barely spoke English.

When I offered to give the number to someone in the US they refused. At that time I tried to cancel AOL. I was being billed monthly service fees but blocked from using AOL. As the monthly charges continued to increase the "total due", I was unable to cancel and convince them I had not been using AOL since they had blocked my usage.

Finally thru this site I called ....703-265-1000 and left a message on a voice mail. Miraculously I received a letter canceling all charges and finally terminating AOL.

Never give your full credit or debit card number to an AOL call rep.

You can change the way you pay for your AOL account online; visit this page for instructions. It's better to keep your credit or debit card number to yourself, especially if you don't feel "safe" passing it along to a rep in the first place.

All the same, the US rep should have at least asked for the last four digits on the customer's debit card to confirm the billing method for the account, and from there should have canceled the account when asked to.

This customer was also blocked from using AOL. My take on it is the last call rep knew that the billing was in question and decided the account may have been compromised, too, so the customer got TOSed simply to protect the account.

Since the customer was still being billed monthly for a locked-down, unusable account, there was no choice except to contact someone higher-up at AOL; in this case, that meant calling AOL Corporate (the Corporate headquarters have moved from Virginia to New York in the last year; I assume calls are being re-routed to the new Corporate office).

I'm glad this story had a happy ending - but if you're having your own problems canceling AOL, please let me know.

That's right, hackers, this is a no-strings-attached free gift from AOL to you, their nifty hackers - hack into as many free AOL accounts as you want and some of them will be yours to keep, free-of-charge, FOREVER. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity - get'm NOW before other hackers lift all the free AOL accounts for you!

The only catch? Once AOL learns a free AOL account is compromised, it will be "blocked" for about the same length of time: forever. I imagine AOL might delete it.

But hackers: Don't let AOL's silly account deletion stop you!

Even if you must stop using a hacked AOL account after a while, just think - the original account owner can never have it back, either. As in NEVER!

Not even if it was a paid account from, say, 1991, with tons of personal information and thousands of emails that got converted into a supposedly more headache-free free AOL account.

Not even if the owner of the hacked account gives every proof of payment and identity possible to AOL. You can't lose!

To ensure my accuracy, here's Randolph:

How to Make Hacked Free AOL Accounts Your Own

OK. So a month ago (around July 20-30) I was signed offline on my AOL account on AIM. I couldn't get back on. Tryed to reset my password and its telling me all my security answers and information is invalid. I phone AOL's Customer Service line. They transfer me to AOL's Fraud Department. I tell them the story, they "block" the account from anyone accessing it. They asked me to send in 2 forms of documentation stating I am the original owner of the account. A drivers license and a bank statement showing when I was last billed for AOL, on it.

Now. Keep in mind. This is a Free AOL account. It was converted into a Free AOL from a Paying AOL in 2006-2007 when the Free AOL Program launched.

So we phone (also went to) the bank and ask them to look up the account that's tied to the AOL account. It's a checkings account that has been closed for several years now. They want to charge us $6 per page to go back in time because a agency has to go through the account or something like that. So $20 total, they get the statement in a matter of 1-2 weeks and ask us to come pick it up at our local bank (branch). We go to Staples, made a copy of the drivers license and a copy of the bank statement, faxed it in.

Next day. We call up AOL's Fraud Department and speak to a Customer Representative who can barely speak any English what so ever. Make a long story short: they are telling us they need the Debit card, that was attached to the checkings accounts, number [so now we need to] fax in a document written by the bank, signed by the bank, with the debit card scanned or typed out on the paper. This was when I knew AOL really has lost it.

We aren't able to obtain that AT ALL. The card was shredded YEARS ago and when we went to the bank, they all looked at us funny and even the customers on line behind us said "no that can't be possible".....like we were crazy! The bank even said the 2 forms of ID we previously sent should be ENOUGH. MORE THEN ENOUGH.

Fast forward to today actually just now: I call AOL's Fraud Department. I get an American Customer Representative. She tells me straight up answers.

---

Quote - AOL Fraud Telephone Conversation

Me: What am I suppose to do if I can't get that debit cards information?
Her: I don't know what to tell you. It's a standard procedure to protect the owner of this account. (me obviously)

Me: So let me ask you this. If someone makes a Free AOL account at http://aol.com, how do they get their account back if its compromised?
Her: They can't, they have to sign up for a new one.

---

My jaw dropped. I couldn't believe what I just heard. That's when I just said OK and hung up.

I am BEYOND disgusted with AOL.

I filed a Internet Crime Complaint @ ic3.gov in an attempt hoping to get somewhere.

Please post any ideas/suggestions/comments relating to this. Thank you for reading.

Thanks to Craigs List (my reader's handle, not the website) Randolph (see comment below) for the heads-up.

Before you read this, it's important to know that you don't need AOL software anymore to read your AOL email. If you cancel AOL and remove the AOL program from your computer, you can just sign in at AOL.com to check your email online.

The online version of AOL email does everything that the offline version does: it saves hard copies of email to your PC, it allows you to read and reply to email using rich or plain text formats, and it stores an unlimited amount of your email.

If you would like to use the AOL program on your computer despite this warning, read on.

A Sample of My Recent Email

    From: [redacted]@aol.com <[redacted]@aol.com>
    Subject: Thank you for your web site... a few questions, please
    To: [me]@rocketmail.com
    Date: Thursday, April 23, 2009, 3:23 AM

    You have done a wonderful service with your Anti AOL web site. I hope you'll be patient with my questions. I have a high speed ISP (AT&T) and they tell me that my free AOL account is just slowing everything down, etc. I've disliked AOL for years but my wife is very concerned about what might happen to our important files, saved emails, pictures, etc., if we remove all traces of AOL from our computer and just go with the ATT service. Also, she's an avid user of instant messaging and ATT does not offer this feature. Do you know how we can be sure not to lose our files, saved emails, email address books, favorite places, etc. when removing AOL? Can all of this simply be transferred over to our AT&T account? We want to retain our AOL email addresses. So, in order to check our email (once AOL has been removed from our computer), would we have to type aol.com into the browser bar to get to the aol page to access our email?

    Thanks,
    Elliott K.

My Response

Hi Elliott,

Sorry for taking a while to respond but I needed time to get my thoughts together to give you the best answers possible.

If you're on a computer with less than 1GB of RAM and less than 2GHz of processor power you may encounter problems with AOL slowing down your computer and Web browsing.

Browsing the Web with an AOL desktop client will be slower than browsing with IE, or Firefox, or Safari for Windows, or Opera, no matter how powerful your computer is - in my experience, anyway. Your mileage may vary.

I would suggest what AT&T suggested - backing up your needed AOL data, removing AOL from your computer, and moving on to a faster browser that will not tie up your computer with so much RAM and CPU usage. I wrote about why here.

Before you ditch AOL altogether, I should probably point you to this...if your computer has at least 1GB of RAM and at least 1.80 GHz of processor power, you may want to switch to AOL 9.5 Classic. I panned it in my first review, when I was running the Beta version, but my opinion of it improved somewhat with the final release. Read the second half of the post, which is sub-titled "Update: AOL 9.5 Is Out".

I tested AOL Classic on my own computer, and the final version worked pretty well, not tying up the computer much at all. Your web browsing may be much slower than it would be in a traditional (non-AOL) browser...that is my only caveat.

[This didn't make it into my original reply: Once you back up your AOL email by following the steps here you can import your email from one version of AOL into another by following the steps here. It's also worth mentioning that AOL offers online file backup but it's incredibly expensive.]

If you're still determined to remove AOL completely, importing your AOL email and AOL Address Book into Outlook is explained here.

Pop Peeper, a free email notification tool with limited reply and email formatting capabilities, can import AOL email that still resides on AOL's servers and lets you send and receive current email from your AOL account. How to set it up to work with AOL is explained here.

If Pop Peeper is not for you, you can try a program called ePreserver. It costs $24.95, and it's specially designed to import your AOL email, your AOL Address Book, and your AOL Favorites into it's own viewer, and/or into Outlook, GMail, or Windows Mail. ePreserver's download and purchase page is here. A tutorial on how to use their program to import data from your AOL account(s) is here.

[This also didn't make it into my original reply: If none of those options are for you, About.com has an almost endless list of tutorials for importing your AOL email into any number of email programs, including IncrediMail, Outlook Express, and Mozilla Thunderbird. You can also try TrueSwitch, which costs $19.95, but is free of charge for existing Comcast and Yahoo! members.]

Once you've imported all of your data from AOL's software, my suggestion is to start here [How to Remove AOL with CCleaner] if you just want to remove AOL quickly and pretty thoroughly, or here [How to Remove AOL with jv16 PowerTools], if you want to be remove it more thoroughly.

To answer your question, I'm not sure what you mean by backing up "pictures" since AOL Pictures and BlueString closed down months ago. I wrote about the closings here.

To answer your other question, you cannot simply transfer your AOL data to AT&T. If you could AT&T would be one hot property, since everyone wants an ISP that automatically imports AOL's data for them. :)

As to how to check your email from now on, if you do go with AOL 9.5 Classic, you'll be able to check your email directly from the AOL desktop client, just as you always have, but if you remove AOL completely, you'll need to sign in at aol.com to check your email online from now on.

As to your wife's desire to use instant messaging outside of the AIM client, there are many options to choose from.

If you want to remove AIM from your computer, I have several tutorials for that (scroll down to the one you need, or let me know if you need a tutorial on it that I don't yet have).

Good replacements for AIM that allow you to use your AOL screen name to sign in and chat are:

• Digsby
• Pidgeon
• Trillian
• Miranda

If you don't mind, I may republish your email and my reply to you (slightly edited) on my blog in the near future to further educate others. One of the biggest complaints I get is that I don't write nearly enough about how to export and import AOL's email, Address Books, and Favorites; the amount of email I get on those topics reflects that.

Thanks for writing to me and for visiting my blog, and good luck getting your computer back in shape.

Sincerely,
Marah Marie
http://anti-aol.livejournal.com

---

Elliott soon wrote me back to say:

Dear Marah Marie,

    First of all, you are amazing. Not only did you answer all my questions (though I obviously have a lot of learning to do about all this)... you actually apologized for taking a few days to get back to me. I had to call my wife into the room because we don't run across folks like you very often. It's a pleasure.

    One thing I noticed from your email is that my system may not even be worth the effort of going through all this. It is a Dell Dimension PC, 4550 series, Intel Pentium 4 Processor at 2.40 GHz. It came with 512MB DDR SDRAM at 333MHz. The computer is 61/2 years old and is left on for 16 hours a day (every day). Do you think that maybe we are dealing with a computer that, even purged of AOL, will still never be very fast (at least not fast enough to notice the extra fast AT&T DSL connection that I pay extra for??

    I would value your opinion before I get further into this process. If the computer is not worth the effort, can you recommend a replacement? Are you an Apple fan?

Thanks a million,
Elliot K.

My Next Response

I think the idea that Elliott's system "may not even be worth the effort of going through all this" is absurd, so I wrote him to say:

Hi Elliott,

Your processor power is certainly more than adequate for surfing the Web, reading and writing email, working with basic photo programs, watching videos online and offline, etc. If your Dell's motherboard supports it, I would suggest bumping up the RAM to a 1 Gigabyte. If it's possible to fit another 512MB stick into a second memory slot, that will be the cheapest way to go; otherwise you might want to make a tiny investment for a full 1GB memory stick - it will pay you back in spades with vastly improved computer performance.

RAM is quite inexpensive these days; good deals are available both online and in places like Best Buy. I was ready to replace my 7 year old eMachines desktop (born in 2002!) that I'm typing this email to you on when someone convinced me to try a simple RAM upgrade first, so I did what I'm suggesting to you: I doubled my RAM from 512MB to 1GB. The difference was huge and immediately noticeable; it was like buying myself a new computer for a tiny fraction of the cost.

I'm sure Macs are fine computers, but as a Windows person who has not used Mac extensively since 1990 I shy away from giving my opinion on whether or not it is worth buying a Mac - especially when the computer you have needs no more, in my opinion, than a RAM upgrade to get it fast enough to do what you need.

---

Any additional advice from readers for Elliott and others in the same boat? The amount of email I get on the above topics is somewhere between frequent and never-ending so I'll take any help I can get. Given the way AOL ties your data down into proprietary formats and makes leaving so difficult, crowd-sourcing the best answers might be the way to go.

"Invasive AOL updates!"

A young lady from Los Angeles emailed me this week asking, "Are you familiar with these invasive AOL updates? Can you help me???"

I test AOL's software for my blog, so the answer is, "Yes and yes".

One nearly fool-proof method to make AOL's forced updates stop is to delete the stick.dll file.

You can also delete the entire folder mentioned below - either method works on AOL 10.0 Desktop but not on AOL 9.0 VR, which I need to play around with a bit more. The full path to the file on a Windows PC should look something like this:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\AOL\1144194954\ee\services\softwareUpdate\ve r1_13_8_3\

On older versions of AOL like 9.0 VR you can try deleting anotify.exe, which might stop the white auto-update nag above the system tray but will not stop AOL from notifying you the old fashioned way that it wants to update - by covering your AOL window with a huge "now or later" nag with some buttons on it to click for "now" or "later".

My reader goes on to tell me that she can't stop using AOL dial-up because:

1. I have lots of email that have important information and don’t want to lose them, so I need to go through all of them and get what I need before I cancel (case in point: I just retrieved some emails 6 months and older today with very imp info).
2. My neighbor shares his DSL with me (I can’t afford my own right now), but every once in a while I don’t have a connection and I need to use my AOL dial-up to get online and pay a bill on time.

How to import AOL email?

I would simply import AOL's email into POP Peeper. When you set up POP Peeper, and before you use it to fetch email from AOL, make sure you change its settings to ensure your AOL email gets copied to your hard drive: Go to Options, Set Options, Storage, then set POP Peeper to "Store Entire messages to disk" and check the box for "Save messages periodically". Here's a screen cap of the window you'll use for that.

If for whatever reason POP Peeper is not for you, you can do a web search for "how to import aol email". The first result will normally be for the ePreserver program. It costs money, but many of my readers swear by it, so listen to them, not me, when you're trying to decide how best to fetch your AOL email.

How to switch to another dial-up provider?

If you need to use AOL only infrequently, why not use Net Zero for free instead? (This is the first time I've recommended a dial-up ISP in almost three years of writing for this blog, and I'm suggesting Net Zero only because her need for dial-up is not 24/7). They offer a decent plan with 10 hours free each month. That should more than meet your needs. Before you switch, find out how to switch your ISP without losing your connection to the Internet.

The best way to remove AOL?

My reader continues:

Once I get rid of AOL, I plan to copy all of the files on my computer, reformat my hard disk, and start all over to make sure there is nothing from AOL left on my computer. I know this may sound extreme, but I believe it is the best way to completely remove AOL, as suggested by close friends!

Gotta love them "close friends"! My boyfriend and I cannot even agree on this. He insists I should wipe my hard drive and re-install Windows when I'm done with my bi-annual testing of AOL software (we've argued about this for three years). I insist it's easier (and quicker!) to get the computer "like-new" again than it is to format and re-install Windows - but I don't constantly complain of AOL's ravaging effects on my computer for nothing, so I'll flip our "close friends" a quarter for suggesting a computer is much better from scratch than it is after AOL has been on it - even if you remove every last trace of AOL's invasive software. Ultimately, the choice is up to you.

Thanks for the emails, everyone. I'm answering requests for help with AOL first and everything else when I can.

What follows is an email sent to me by an IT developer last week. There will be more emails on Anti-AOL soon so stay tuned.

I'd just like to comment on your site as something you rarely find. Must say I agree with all of the things you said...and grind my teeth at the same time. If you want you can add this as a post on your web site. Main message being: To all you AOL users; please, please don't use AOL for online shopping. You have no idea what a nightmare it is to keep it working properly for AOL.

I'm a lead developer in an IT department of an eCommerce business. We recently discovered that we had cookie problems with users coming from an AOL connection. I'm just in the process of testing and trying to replicate the problems. Funnily enough everything works fine if you use IE7 or FF2/FF3 through an AOL connection. Since I couldn't reproduce the problems I started Googling and soon realized AOL 9.0 VR is what I need to reproduce it. And as no shock I soon managed to reproduce the problem myself.

Just a little bit of insight. AOL 9.0 VR uses the IE engine, but only to render HTML - and even that messes up scripts on the page. Do a Google search for "AOL AJAX problems". Anyway, it also "uses" IE's settings panel. But not really; you are able to change connection settings, proxy settings - but to no effect. VR apparently has it's own list of proxies to which it connects directly rather than using the proxy that you specify. This means requests/responses fly in and out through unpredictable sockets and ports. As you can already guess, tools like Fiddler, PortMon and almost any kind of traffic monitoring tools won't work properly - or not at all. I'm still looking for something in order to be able to track requests. But that's just the tech side.

The front end problems for end point users are: You are, as already mentioned in the site's articles, looking at old pages, in some cases years old. Same problem applies to looking at your basket when you are shopping for something. To illustrate: You finally find a product you're looking for. Click "add to basket". If you're lucky that particular page has not yet been visited by an AOL user. Fat chance, though. Lucky because if it has been visited it will be cached somewhere in AOL caching proxy farm. This means that if the requested page is found in the proxy cache it's returned rather than going to the actual desired web server. If you are an AOL user, when adding something to basket this means it never actually gets added.

So you decide to check out. Good luck. If, for instance, you use PayPal or Google Checkout the response will be you cannot checkout because your basket is empty. Nothing ever got added to it. You can keep on refreshing the page (for a couple of days) until finally you get the desired item in the basket. But do it once more and you may get back to 0 again or even to some items you never added. That's because not all proxy caches get updated at the same time and only one gets updated with a newer version of the page. So, if you still want to use your AOL connection to access shopping sites be careful when you check out - you don't accidentally want to buy a new bike with your bread, do you?

Anyway, we can't really put a notice on to our web site saying "If you use AOL browsers, please use a REAL browser in order to continue" but I can, however, post frustrated posts and send long emails.

Regards,

Aleš H. Potočnik

A reader named Scott sent me his AOL cancellation story last week.

Among other things, AOL seems to be violating US phone number portability regulations with their latest scheme...

Hello Marah Marie-

I know you get a lot of these, but I just wanted to tell you my AOL horror story.

I would like to think I wasn't stupid enough to sign-up for an AOL account, but apparently I did so without knowing it. It started when many of my friends started using AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). I was suckered into believing that signing up for a free AIM screenname wouldn't cause me any problems. Boy was I wrong.

I used the AIM screenname on and off for a couple years without incident. Then AOL introduced something called AIM Phoneline. It is basically a phone number they give you attached to an AIM account. You can receive calls with it on your computer. I signed up for it and used the phone number to give out to places I really didn't want to have my real phone number, but still might need to occasionally get a call from. If someone called the number, it simply went to voicemail. I could then listen to the voicemail online and return the call as necessary. All in all it was a pretty handy service and began to change the way I thought about AOL.

This past July I needed to make an outbound call from that number (long story). I hooked up a headset to my computer and proceeded to dial. The AIM software told me I needed to have a premium account to place outbound calls, so I reluctantly signed up for one after seeing they had a thirty-day free trial. Ignoring my better judgment, I gave AOL my credit card number thinking I would cancel before the thirty day trial period was over.

The very next day I called to cancel. I was told that my account upgrade was not yet complete in their billing system so I couldn't cancel yet. Alarms began to go off, but I thought that could be plausible. I made myself a to-do and called back one week later. I received a little bit of a sales pitch, but the AOL rep representative did cancel the free trial. I was given a confirmation number and was told I would not be billed. I asked if I could still have a free account and was told that I could but I would need to go back in and re-sign up for the service. I did, and although I had to get a new phone number assigned to me I received an e-mail confirming that I had signed up for the free AIM Phoneline service. I could also go into my account area on the AIM Phoneline Dashboard and clearly see that my account type was the free one.

A month passed and sure enough, in August I got socked with a $14.95 charge for AIM Phoneline Premium Service. I immediately called AOL and demanded they credit the amount back. The rep agreed but said that she did not show my account had ever been cancelled. I gave her my confirmation number, the name of the rep I talked to, and the date and time of the conversation. The rep said she could not find any of that in her system. She insisted upon mailing me an affidavit for me to claim the charges were invalid before a credit would be issued. Strange, but I did as I was told and mailed back the affidavit and waited for a refund. They said it would be issued within 30 (!) days of them receiving the affidavit back.

I was going on a trip in September, so that occupied my thoughts and time during that month. Because a lot of charges were placed on my card while I vacationed, I somehow missed another $14.95 charge from AOL in September.

October arrived and before long I got hit again with still another $14.95 charge. That made me go back and look more closely at my September statement to find that charge. I called AOL yet again and was told by a rep named Christine that I was still being billed for my first phone number with them. The rep verified with me that my current AIM Phoneline number was on the free plan. She opened an escalation ticket and assured me that the situation would be taken care of. She gave me her name and a reference/case number. I made it VERY clear to the her that I did not want my current, free AIM Phoneline number cancelled as I had just gotten done giving it out to all those places again. She assured me multiple times that they would not cancel the new, free number.

About an hour after the call, I got an e-mail from AOL saying my new, free number had been cancelled effective immediately.

Furious at this point, I got on the phone with AOL again. This time the rep (her name was "Apple") told me that:

1. I was on the premium plan
2. I never had a second phone number, and
3. she had no record of my conversation with the rep that said that my free account would not be cancelled.

This despite me being able to provide her with a reference number. This made no sense because:

1. Just that morning I had witnessed online my new account and that it was free, and
2. I had used that new phone number.

That new phone number worked -- well, at least it did work before they cancelled it again. When I was trying to make her understand this, she hung up on me. Although I was upset while talking to her, I had not raised my voice and had not used any profanity or other derogatory terms. I'm smart enough to know that doing those things just gives the reps an excuse to hang up. No, this rep hung up on me simply because she didn't want to deal with me anymore.

I called back and immediately asked to speak to a supervisor. This rep, I think he said his name was John, refused to give me a supervisor. He seemed to think that I should talk to him instead. I finally told him goodbye, hung up, and called right back.

I got another male rep whose name was unintelligible. I again stated I wanted to speak to a supervisor. He was reluctant to give me one. Finally after making it clear that I would not share any information with him other than verifying my account, he agreed to get me a supervisor. He put me on hold for about five minutes and came back to say that no supervisors were available and asked to take my information for a callback. I made it clear to him that I would wait for a supervisor. After he placed me online for another minute, my call was taken by a supervisor named Michael.

I explained my situation to him, and he reiterated what the last rep had told me: that I had a premium account, I never had a second account with them, and I had never spoken with Christine. He even told me I had a full AOL account (albeit the free one) rather than just an AIM account. I asked him if he was accusing me of being a liar, and he gingerly side-stepped the question for awhile. Finally I was able to get some information out of him. I learned that he was located in Manilla, Philippines, and he claimed to work directly for AOL and not a company contracted by AOL.

Letting him think I was recording the call (which makes these disclosures even more shocking) he admitted that:

• There was a "glitch" in the AIM Phoneline billing system that if someone downgraded their premium AIM Phoneline account (canceling the account in reality), then signed back up for the free service within 30 days, the premium billing would continue.
• The customer would be completely unaware that this premium billing was continuing after rejoining with a free account because all the e-mails the received from AOL and the AIM Phoneline account screen would show the account as free even though the AOL systems would show it as a premium account. The only place a customer might be able to see the continued billing is if they went to the billing screen on AOL. But why would the customer do this if they thought they only had an AIM screenname and all relevant billing information for AIM Phoneline could be seen on the AIM Phoneline account page?
• The first level reps were never informed about this billing glitch despite management knowing about if for awhile. This led to the first level reps giving out misinformation and being ineffective in being able to resolve the issue when the misbilling occurred.
• Somewhat related to my issue, AOL was reassigning the AIM Phoneline telephone numbers even before 30 days had passed. This is a violation of U.S. regulations. To protect individuals, telephone numbers cannot be reassigned before 90 days. This gives the person who owned the telephone number time to notify people, particularly banks, doctors, and anyone else that would have sensitive personal information about the person of the phone number change and prevent abuse of that information. When I told Michael of this regulation, he protested saying that there was a shortage of phone numbers. That may be true, but it does not give AOL permission to sidestep that law.
• AOL is phasing out the AIM Phoneline service. Michael seemed to think this made everything OK because the service was going away.

Keep in mind Michael thought he was being recorded by me. I kept asking him questions like: "Let me clarify: AOL is aware of the fact that the AIM Phoneline account information page could be giving people wrong information, but had not made any attempt to notify customers of this discrepancy. Is that correct? Please answer yes or no." (He answered "Yes".)

If I thought I was being recorded, I would be EXTREMELY careful about what I said. I am sure AOL corporate won't be pleased with his answers. Only once did he say to me, "I would prefer not to answer that."

I also told them that I intended to file complaints with the BBB and FCC. He told me "Go ahead..." so I asked him point blank, "Let me clarify, you are telling me to file complaints with the BBB and FCC. Is that correct?" Again he replied "Yes".

I really don't know what more to do about the situation with the billing. Michael said he would have a refund issued for August, September, and October. I asked him for a confirmation e-mail of this which he swore he would do, but as of now I have not received it. We'll see if the credits post. In the meantime I called my bank and changed my card number (a huge inconvenience) and opened up the preliminary steps of disputing the charges through them.

I was initially furious with AOL, but after my conversation with Michael, I almost have to laugh. I can't believe he would be so stupid as to admit what he did while thinking he was being recorded. He must not be familiar with American lawyers and courts. At the end of the call, I told him that I actually felt sorry for him because after the things he said, corporate was going to have his head on a platter.

Feel free to post this story on your website if you'd like, but please just refer to me as Scott. Thanks.

--

Scott