AOL Customer Disservice and Outright Theft

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AOL is one of the crookedest companies on this planet. Years ago I had cancelled my account but was still charged for nearly a year before I realized it. It took three tries to finally get the account actually cancelled, but then they STILL kept billing my checking account. I finally had to cancel the credit card number they were using. Apparently the idiots are still up to their dirty tricks. Check out the following experiences of one Vincent Farrari when he tried cancelling his AOL account: http://insignificantthoughts.com/2006/06/13/cancelling-aol/ Let all your friends know about this. Share the link with other bloggers. Spread the word. This kind of outright theft would never be tolerated if it came from individuals like you or I but big corporations like AOL get away with this kind of crap all the time. The little bit that we can do is to warn other people against dealing with morons like AOL in the first place. In my case I learned a valuable lesson. NEVER let a company autobill your checking account. The modern corporation is a legal fiction, the pretense that a group of people bound only by profit and limited liability can be thought of as a single person that actually has ethics. But it is a lie, and will always remain a lie, because a collective (like a corporation, a communist enclave or other type of totalitarian grouping) is a collection of different people all with different goals than that of the customer. The only link between the customer and the individuals in the collective is the money paid by the customer. That is a rather tenuous link that surely does not imply any ethical behavior. It is simply quite silly to expect ethical behavior from a corporation, because there is no incentive for ethical behavior. It is simple economics.