My wife and I began a 45-day free trial of AOL internet service near the end of May. After using the service for most of the trial time, my wife and I decided that it was not worth the price you are charging for it, so my wife called to cancel the service. After repeatedly telling the service person at AOL that she wanted to cancel the service because it was too expensive, the service person offered my wife another free month of service.
On August 27, I called again to cancel AOL because it is over three times more expensive than our other service, and you don't offer any additional features that are of value to us. While I was trying to cancel the service, the AOL service person told me that our plan had changed from a 1045-hour per month plan to a 5-hour per month plan, and that since we used 68 hours we now owed $187.80, which they charged to my credit card.
I don't have access to my AOL account now, so I can't verify any notifications that were sent, but to the best of my knowledge, I received one message referring to a change in plans. I don't recall what it said exactly, but I thought it was just notifying me that the free trial had been reset. I know if it had mentioned that we only had 5 free hours and that you were going to charge $2.95/hour after that, I would not have spent 68 hours using it.
I also recall receiving one pop-up that mentioned premium services, but it said nothing of what the premium service was or how much it cost. When I saw it, I shut down the AOL browser to make sure I wasn't using any of your premium services, but I had no idea that it was referring to just being connected. When we logged on after that first time, there was no indication that we were being charged by the minute.
My advice to anyone who is using AOL is to call them up and cancel their service and switch to a provider like Big Zoo, where you get a much better service at a fraction of the price.
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