Demon's "Free Trial" Con Trick (demon.net)

Member Name: rdobbie

Product:	demon.net
Date:	14/05/02 (87 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: They're ok as long as they get your money

Disadvantages: 30 Day "Free" Trial is a con trick, They steal your money, They waste your time

I'm sure my groan is one of the most common complaints about ISPs in recent years. It's a scam I was well aware of before they conned me, and I should have been smarter.

But here we go with another warning about what I think is a disgraceful con trick which basically amounts to common theft.... Demon Internet's "30 Day Free Trial"

I decided to give Demon a go, after using the Freeserve pay-as-you-go tariff for a few years. Demon's offer of £11.75 a month sounded good. But first I wanted to use their "free" trial to see what the connection speeds and reliability were like.

The sign-up process was quite easy. They asked for my Visa card number with a "cast iron guarantee" that it would NOT be charged if I chose to cancel "within the first 30 days" (quote).

After using Demon for a mere 16 days, I discovered that Freeserve HomeTime would be a better option for me, so I decided to cancel the Demon "Free" Trial. Or at least try to cancel.

And this is where it gets tricky. They don't like you cancelling. In fact, they make it virtually impossible.

I should point out that during the sign-up procedure, Demon do not explain how to cancel. But as you later find out the hard way, cancellation has to be on their terms, and not yours.

So I told Demon I wanted to cancel. You would think that a simple e-mail to Demon's helpdesk would suffice. After all, they are an internet company. Cancelling an account is hardly rocket science.

They sent me an automated reply stating: "your mail has been placed into a queueing system which will be handled by the helpdesk team as soon as possible". This is actually a delaying tactic which brings you closer to the 30 day deadline.

Three days later, I got an e-mail stating: "you can not cancel your account online" and giving me a phone number to call.

Extraordinary. An
internet company that hasn't got the technology to let me cancel online. Well, of course, they have really got the technology, but they are just being deliberately obstructive here. It's all part of the con trick.

I tried the phone number three times. Each time I was waiting, listening to music, for over ten minutes until I just gave up and put the phone down. Why should I have to waste my time and money on these phonecalls?

So I wrote a letter to their head office, stating my wish to cancel. I got no reply.

By now you will have probably guessed what happened next. My credit card bill arrived and Demon had charged me £11.75. Interestingly, this charge was made eight days BEFORE the end of the "30 Day Free Trial Period". So I actually got 22 "free" days.

Demon are thieves. I have heard about AOL using exactly the same con trick.

If you or I were to obtain somebody's bank card number by deceitful means, and then transfer money out of their account into our own, we would be comitting a criminal act. No two ways about it.

But when a large company does this, a different set of rules seems to apply. This is corporate theft, plain and simple. Companies like Demon are obtaining peoples' credit card number by deception and then STEALING money from accounts.

If it was a true, genuine FREE trial, they would have no legitimate reason to demand your credit card number.

In America, AOL have stopped imposing this condition as part of their free trial, after a consumer backlash and a governemt probe into their dodgy behaviour with people's credit card details.

But it would seem that AOL and Demon are still happily operating the great Free Trial Con Trick in good old Rip-off Britain.

Trading Standards need to put an end to this daylight robbery.

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