Direct TV
Hidden Cancellation Fees and Misleading HD Channel Advertising

Direct TV is just another new business run by people who do not care about their customers. They lie to the public with false advertising, such as claiming to have XX number of HD stations. You can count them, and there is nowhere near the number they claim. Once they entice a "sucker" with their false advertising, you are contractually committed to multiple years of use of their slow, cumbersome system. Then if you see your mistake and attempt to cancel, they will lie that you cannot without paying huge fees for every piece of equipment. The fees are buried in the fine print of the agreement you are forced to accept in order to try their "service."

They have several little tricks to cheat the public. One is that you cannot cancel without a special number they provide on your first bill. You must cancel immediately in order to even have that option, but they do not send that bill for a week or two. They place additional and similarly disingenuous procedures online.

Once you state you are cancelling, they drop your ability to communicate online, but state you must do so to complete the cancellation. Their people and supervisors are trained to lie to consumers when you want to cancel. They state you must do so within 24 hours of getting the equipment, even though none of their materials state that. They claim they cannot deviate from this policy. Yet federal law gives you 3 days to do so with this type of contract.

They will claim you will be charged cancellation fees and fees for returned equipment if you cancel anyway and that your credit will be damaged (and they do this). In my case that amounted to over $1,000. I demanded they stop the poor service in any case. After a couple of weeks they sent 6 boxes. They require those boxes and nothing else to accept the return of the equipment. You must disconnect everything yourself. They will not come back to retrieve their satellite dish. Then you start getting more mail solicitations to use their poor service.

Save yourself a major headache and do not use Direct TV or get sucked into their venomous spiderweb. Their service is worse than whatever you may have, they do not have as many stations as they clearly promise in their ads, and they will lie to you and attempt to extort large fees from you. I suspect a great many people who use this service would not if they thought they had a choice that would not cost them a small fortune. So they get stuck with substandard service for at least 2 years. Unfortunately, Dish operates in the same manner. Cable may not be perfect, but if you can get it, most offer you the ability to cancel at any time without extortion charges.

Company: Direct TV
Country: USA
State: Texas
City: Austin

  <     >