If you cancel your Tivo subscription it may be vital to do it inwriting and by certified mail.
Doing it by telephone willnot give you proof of cancellation, not even if Tivo sends an emailconfirmation, and if you cannot prove cancellation, the Tivo corporationmay keep billing you for months.
Once Tivo has your credit cardauthorization, getting them to stop billing has been next to impossiblefor some consumers, costing them hundreds of dollars and destroying theircredit.
It makes no difference to Tivo whether or not you are actuallyhooked up to their service. If they have your credit card number andyou cannot PROVE cancellation, Tivo will charge your credit card againand again, in some cases for years.
If someone had told me that, I wouldn't have believed it but I've just spent several hours searchingthe web and I'm telling you not to take my word for it, do some websearches yourself on keywords like Tivo billing problem and you'll soonsee a pattern emerging. Clearly something is amiss in Tivo's corporateethics.
If I had stock in Tivo I'd be selling it because any companythat treats its customers so dishonestly is too apt to be playing fastand loose with its accounting methods too.
When I'm donewriting here I'm going to follow my own advice and send off a certifiedletter to the Tivo corporation, copying my attorney while I'm at it. They didn't get me for much, under $50, but no one should be a Tivovictim.
I was given a 3-month Tivo gift subscription. The Tivo box and ourcable box were not compatible and after a few weeks I disconnected theTivo equipment.
In order to avoid charges I made a point of telephoningTivo to cancel the subscription before the 3 month gift sub ended. Todo so required talking with an aggressive Tivo sales representative whodid not want me to cancel the subscription and did not want to take nofor an answer. I held fast, however, and thought it was taken care of.
The following month I replaced my computer and in theprocess lost archival email, including correspondence with Tivo. WhenTivo charged my credit card this month I was not overly concerned, however, because the Tivo equipment had not been hooked up and I assumedTivo records would reflect the cancellation.
Wrong.
After an hour and 4 telephone calls, including two times on indefinite hold, I learned:
1.) Tivo claimed they had no record of my canceling the subscription. Either the Attitude-strutting Tivo sales rep I talked to 2 months agofailed to complete the process or, when contacted now, Tivo's billingdepartment chose not to investigate thoroughly enough to find record ofmy cancellation. I think it is possible that my canceling a giftsubscription before it ended ran counter to Tivo's normal methods, thusdropping the cancellation into digital oblivion, but the Tivo billingdepartment was unwilling or incapable of further research into myaccount.
2.) Proving subscription cancellation is entirely up to the customer. The rigmarole about Tivo recording phone conversations is hooey; theycannot or will not use those recorded conversations, if they even exist, for the customer's benefit. The Tivo Corporation pays salesrepresentatives commissions to dissuade customers from canceling theirsubscriptions, then, if the Tivo rep's pitch fails, it's up to him/herto process the cancellation. A Tivo rep has a choice whether to takeanother phone call — which might lead to a sales commission — or followthrough on the one he just had that was a failure and will net himnothing but a black mark on his turnover record. It's like leaving itup to the fox to take inventory in the hen house. Little wonder ifthose fox sometimes neglect to follow through. No company the size ofTivo can claim disingenuity about such a glaring managerial failure; theonly explanation is that Tivo CHOOSES to disregard the problem becausedoing so means big dollars for their bottom line.
3.) Whether or not a subscriber actually receives the Tivoservice they're being billed for makes no difference to the Tivocorporation. The Tivo billing department acknowledged that theirrecords verified I had not been hooked up to their service for over 2months but they nevertheless refused to issue a credit for the chargesto my credit card made after cancellation, standing by their claim that Ihad not canceled the subscription.
I did some web investigation and learned that claiming non receipt ofsubscription cancellation is an old trick of the Tivo corporation, onethat likely produces many millions in revenue. At first I was inclinedto believe such shoddy behavior could not be deliberate but the volumeof complaints on the web suggests it is a problem Tivo chooses not tocorrect.
There are probably too few dollars involved to interest a classaction lawyer which is a shame. Clearly Tivo's corporate ethics needthe kind of cleansing best done by a large financial penalty.
For shame, Tivo, for shame!
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