🚀 go-pugleaf

Tigra wrote:

> Hi there!
>
> Sorry if you haven't heard from me in a while but
> I've been extremely busy and pissed off!!!  I
> received my credit card bill today to see a charge
> from "Internet America, Inc" on 6/30/99 for
> $216.45!!!!!
>
> Here's the scariest thing about the whole
> situation:  I NEVER GAVE THE COMPANY MY CREDIT
> CARD NUMBER!!!!!!!!!
>
> I was a member of Cyberramp when Internet America
> unfortunately bought them out.

<rest of venting snipped>

As a fellow former Cyberramper, I offer my sympathy.  When I was
discussing my contract with IA back in May (my contract expired July 1
like yours), I was somewhat surprised to hear the billing rep I spoke
with say "well, since you don't want to renew when your contract
expires, I'll switch you over to where we send you an invoice, and then
you can just not pay it."  It was not rocket science to deduce that IA
has a different billing policy than Cyberramp had.  Apparently, if you
used a credit card to pay Cyberramp, you were set up to use that card to
"automagically" renew with IA when your contract expired.  It may be
true that you never expressly called up IA and gave them your card
number; they just used the one on your records from Cyberramp.  Nice of
them to tell us former Cyberrampers about that little billing policy,
eh?

Call up your credit card company and tell them that you were billed
without authorization for services you did not request.  They should
chargeback IA for the full amount, though you may have to pay some sort
of fee depending on the card company (I've seen some of them do this
sort of scam).

Crossposted to dfw.internet.providers since it's really more appropriate
over there...hope that's OK.