Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Good guys or bad guys?

A year ago, I renewed my subscription for the internet security suite sold by a leading antivirus company. In the weeks before renewal, I was bombarded with emails reminding me that my current subscription was 'about to' expire. The only problem with responding to these emails, which I did the year before, was that if, say, you renewed with a month to go, your new year's subscription would start from the day you renewed. Clever, eh? Eleven months for the price of twelve!

In the event, I only persevered with the software for a few weeks. The latest upgrade was just too much for my poor old computer to cope with. Not much point in being fully protected if you can't use your computer because all of its processing power is being consumed by the security suite. I started using a different antivirus program.

Imagine my horror when I received an email from the first antivirus company to say that they had automatically renewed my subscription, charging me £49.99 for the privilege. They still had my credit card details on file, and had, without warning, taken the money. Apparently their change of policy was in response to what customers wanted. A shame that they hadn't bothered to tell this particular customer.

Bottom line - the people who are supposed to be defending us against the bad guys are themselves, not to put to fine a point on it, crooks. By the way, I wouldn't be writing this if they had responded to my emails. I suspect that they deliberately make it difficult for people either to contact them or directly to change aspects of their account.

1 comment:

ragaMuffin said...

Just to say that this matter has now been sorted. The company have said that the delay was "due to the maintenance of our messaging system". Surely they could have put something into their automated reply to warn me that I would have to wait longer than had been indicated?