Sony Auto-Renews My Membership Against My Will, Won't Budge

All Forrest wants to do is sign up for a year's worth of Sony's paid PlayStation Plus plan, which gives customers bonus features above and beyond the free service. He says customer service reps are forcing him to stick with a less cost-effective 3-month plan, which he accidentally bought due to an unintended auto-renewal.

He argued his case to the rep and threatened to ask his credit card company for a chargeback, and then things got ugly.

He writes:

Today I had a unsatisfactory encounter with a manager of one of Sony's customer service lines. I called up to request a refund for what I considered to be an unauthorized transaction with the automatic renewal of my PlayStation Plus account. As a very early adopter of the program, I had not selected automatic renewals as I was planning on leaving the country to travel at the time of signing up. Additionally, I received no notification of pending renewal, only a notification that the funds had been taken out of my account. After 10 minutes of searching the PSN website, I managed to find the setting for automatic renewals, the first time I had ever seen it, and disabled it.

This was the first day of renewal, and I had not used the service for weeks prior to the charge. I was considering signing up for a 1 year subscription prior to this incident, it costs close to $20 after tax for 3 months, and $50 for 15 months due to a special promotion. Clearly the longer subscription is a better deal, and it was my intention to switch after my subscription ran out.

I thought it would be a simple request to refund an erroneous charge, unfortunately after being escalated to a manager, he would not budge on the no refunds policy. When I said that I would issue a chargeback for this unauthorized charge, he threatened me with banning my account as well as my PlayStation 3 from the PlayStation Network claiming it was policy to send any charge disputes to collections and marking the account as delinquent. This would essentially make my PlayStation unable to use any of the online services. He suggested that I purchase a new system in order to restore my online capabilities.

I have called your tipline with possibly more details, written to the BBB, and did an Executive Email Carpet Bomb with the two email addresses provided in one of your many fine articles. I want this story to be published regardless of the outcome so your readers know that once PSN has your money, there is no way to get it back.

If you've suffered a similar problem with Sony, let us know how you handled it.

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Daily Candy Won't Sell Your E-mail To Advertisers, But They'll Charge Advertisers To Send You An E-mail

Consumerist reader Mel recently signed up to receive updates from DailyCandy.com with the hope of getting the scoop on sample sales and shopping in the San Francisco area. What Mel didn't expect was a paid political ad for a gubernatorial candidate.

Daily Candy describes itself as a "handpicked selection of all that's fun, fashionable, food related, and culturally stimulating in the city." Somehow, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman falls into one or more of those categories, because yesterday Mel received a "dedicated e-mail" from Daily Candy that was a long letter from the Republican gubernatorial candidate about why you should vote for her.

Says Mel:

For some reason they thought I'd be interested in the email... I emailed them to ask why the hell they were sending me political emails but they haven't responded yet. Maybe Meg Whitman's large sacks of cash were too much for them to resist? I find her loathsome but would have been irritated to get emails about her competitor too. Why potentially alienate half your mailing list for this unrelated ad?

Over on Daily Candy's "Editorial Policy" page, they state:

No one can pay to be featured on DailyCandy. That's what advertising is for, and it's always labeled as such. Selling ourselves (literally) would destroy the legitimacy, integrity, and fun of DailyCandy. Plus, we'd never earn your trust that way. So we'll never make a dime off your meal at a restaurant or a penny from the sale of the latest accessory we told you about.

That said, on occasion, we will send out Dedicated E-mails on behalf of sponsors. You'll recognize them from the subject line: Dedicated E-mail. Yes, these are paid for.

And no, we would never sell our subscriber list to anyone. Not for any amount of money.

Well, of course they don't have to actually sell their subscriber list to anyone when they can just charge the advertisers to use the subscriber list to blast out "dedicated e-mails."

View the original article here