When my wife asked me to buy stamps to mail out our Christmas cards, I thought it would be easy to buy the postage online and print it on the envelopes so I logged into Stamps.com. She had already stuffed the cards into the envelopes and sealed them though, so I found I was not able to run them through my printer that way and wound up not buying any postage from stamps.com.
One month later I was surprised to see a charge for $15.99 hit my credit card from stamps.com. I went back and looked at the emails stamps.com sent me when I had visited their site and discovered I had somehow (without realizing it) signed up for 4 week free trial, and if I did nothing to cancel it, a monthly service with a fee of $15.99 would automatically start. At that point I googled stamps.com and found usacomplaints.com and many other web sites with complaints concerning stamps.com's business practices.
I found on stamps.com under their Help button that you have to call a toll free number to cancel your account. More than a little irritated I called the number and asked them to cancel my account which they did, but when I asked for a refund of the $15.99 that had already hit my credit card since I had not used any of their services at any time, they refused, saying the charge is not for usage but for access availability.
I told the rep to never mind, that I would just keep my eyes open for a class action lawsuit and join it. She immediately offered to forward my call to a supervisor. The supervisor repeated the little speech about why they are not obligated to refund the charge, but said she would make an exception and agreed to refund the charge.
So if this happens to you, just look up the toll free number on their site, try to remain calm with the phone reps, ask to escalate it to a supervisor when they initially refuse, and hopefully you can get your credit card refunded too. Hope someone finds this helpful.
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