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When “Do no evil” becomes “Hear no evil”March 18th, 2009 | by Toomas Römer | |
After 4 cancellation requests, 2 forum requests, 1 billing support request and 2 months of waiting I’m posting this blog post to let out some steam and hopefully one day get my money back. A story of what happens when the same company offers the service and the payment but no support.
It all started out as a cool infrastructure task. Migrating email to Google Apps. Its easy, quick and on top of that there is a 30 day FREE trial. Wow!
I started with the task in the beginning of January. I created an account at Google Apps, paid for the number of users and was off. 10 minutes later I noticed that I should have used a shorter URL for the domain, so I thought I’ll ditch the mail prefix from the domain.
FAQ says I have to create a new account. Bummer. I created a new account, paid for the number of users again, twiddled with settings and email was working! Easy. I told you so! All I had to do now was cancel the premium service for the longer domain version and I would be all done.
From this point on things got hairy. Firstly as I had tons of tabs open in my browser, I managed to cancel the premium service for the shorter domain. Ok, happens. I’ll just upgrade later on again. Then I cancelled the long URL. Two premium accounts downgraded, one deleted and other running in free edition now.
Of course Google Checkout can’t follow this kind of stuff in real time and I had been charged for both of the services. I contacted the seller from Google Checkout and sent them a message to make my fiddling clear.
Nothing happened. A week later as the funds were still charged I contacted them again via Google Checkout. No luck.
Maybe I’ll have to wait the 30 day for it to be paid back because the free period was also 30 days? Sure thing. Waited couple of more weeks, nothing changed.
Things are getting scary. There is no support if you don’t have a premium account and I’ve just cancelled my two premiums. It seems that the only way to get them talking to me is pay them money, but they already owe me money!
I write to their support forum, twice! Not a single answer during the months. Okay, this is weird already.
I’m able to find a link, that says that one can ask for real support if the question is concerned with billing. Weeehaah, I’m sure I’m saved now! Nope. I made my case using their web form and you know what? No answer!
Usually I would take a step back and talk to the payment mediator, either PayPal or Moneybookers but you know what, Google is handling my payment also (via Google Checkout) and I can’t find a way to report to Google that Google stole my money.