28 October 2012

I am of the opinion that classmates.com is a criminal organization.

In 2008 my wife decided to give them a try with their paid service. Every year since then she has tried to cancel the paid service. Every year they renew it anyway, and continue to increase the price each time.

This year we tried disputing the credit card charge. They sent the credit card company (Discover) a bunch of screen shots of the ancient transaction from 2008, but none of the subsequent requests for cancelation. I strongly suspect they’ve “lost” all our requests to cancel their service (which we never found remotely useful in the first place).

Discover sided with classmates.com and insists that the transaction is legal.

As a merchant, I find that the credit card companies never side with me. <scarcasm>Apparently I need to create better screen shots to send in the case of disputes, because that seems to be the trick to screwing over your customers.</sarcasm>

At this point I think we’ll end up canceling the credit card completely. Not only because Discover is assisting what seems like criminal theft of our money, but also because 12 months from now when classmates.com tries to steal some more money, they won’t be able to complete the transaction against a long-canceled credit card.

What recourse do I have as an individual in this case? In terms of raw cost, it’ll take thousands of dollars to sue classmates.com to get my $40/year from them, so it makes more financial sense to allow their continued theft of my money. Certainly there’s no way to get back the latest $40 theft…