How to Deal w/ Dubious 'Contracts'? 589
phorm asks: "It seems that for almost every service out there nowadays businesses want to fix customers into a contract. Some are pretty obvious (cellphone service, etc), but others are downright sneaky. About a year ago, my grandparents signed up for internet service with one of the bigger ISP's (Telus). They were offered an lesser rate for the first year, followed by $10/month more for following years, as well as their DSL modem for free (to be returned when service ends). None of the documentation received with the modem indicated that any 'contract' was being entered, nor were any documents signed. However, when they recently tried to cancel their service, Telus has indicated they will be charged a fee due to being within the 'contract'." Similar to EULAs, sometimes companies will enter you into a "contract" without providing anything to sign and will hold you to terms you may not even know about simply by your use of the service. How can you deal with companies practices, especially if dealing with their representatives becomes...difficult?
"On first questioning of this, they believed that they had somehow been contracted by agreeing over the phone when initial service was setup (despite that they don't remember being told about such a thing). However, when I called the ISP to dispute this, they indicated that upon connecting the service they would have been presented with a dialog indicating the contract terms and had to click 'OK' online.
My assumption would be that this was done through their setup CD, which comes with the modem. However, the ISP's software is not installed on their machine (I don't trust it not to have snoop-ware), as I had their machine manually registered through a web-interface (which did not indicate contracts at that time, I am not sure about now).
Despite this, calls to their hotline have indicated that they will not rescind the cancellation fee. Moreover, the last operator from the 'Loyalty Department' I talked to refused to separate the internet bill from the phone bill despite being told they would no longer be authorized to bill the given VISA account (they said they will not change that billing process unless given another account, and refuse to just 'send a bill' in the mail). When I questioned the legality of this the operator told me to 'get a lawyer and have them contact the legal department.' Obviously, this is an option but seems rather to be a bit extreme and I'm sure the company realizes it. So what does one do when a big company is bilking pensioners with contracts they have no proof of? Certainly there are no signed documents, and whether a particular button was clicked or not seems to have no proof except in the ISP's say-so, as well as the dubiousness of button-click legality under local law. My next step will likely be to explain the situation to VISA but then things can definitely get ugly as the ISP is also the local telco.
By the way, this is in Canada, so Canadian law would apply, but I would definitely appreciate suggestions as such cases seem more and more common."
My assumption would be that this was done through their setup CD, which comes with the modem. However, the ISP's software is not installed on their machine (I don't trust it not to have snoop-ware), as I had their machine manually registered through a web-interface (which did not indicate contracts at that time, I am not sure about now).
Despite this, calls to their hotline have indicated that they will not rescind the cancellation fee. Moreover, the last operator from the 'Loyalty Department' I talked to refused to separate the internet bill from the phone bill despite being told they would no longer be authorized to bill the given VISA account (they said they will not change that billing process unless given another account, and refuse to just 'send a bill' in the mail). When I questioned the legality of this the operator told me to 'get a lawyer and have them contact the legal department.' Obviously, this is an option but seems rather to be a bit extreme and I'm sure the company realizes it. So what does one do when a big company is bilking pensioners with contracts they have no proof of? Certainly there are no signed documents, and whether a particular button was clicked or not seems to have no proof except in the ISP's say-so, as well as the dubiousness of button-click legality under local law. My next step will likely be to explain the situation to VISA but then things can definitely get ugly as the ISP is also the local telco.
By the way, this is in Canada, so Canadian law would apply, but I would definitely appreciate suggestions as such cases seem more and more common."
You already have the answer. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you really want to stick it to them, you might be able to get the local TV news to do a story on the practice (around here, Austin, TX, we have `[channel] 7 on your side' stories, where they go into detail about how somebody was being screwed and how the TV cameras made all the problems go away.
Stick it to 'em (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're out for justice, demand a supervisor.
In either case, point out that they cannot produce any record of signing the contract.
Many companies abuse the idea of contract.. (Score:3, Insightful)
people who sell hardware, music, videos insist that youre licensing it.. but licenses and contracts indicate that actual negotiations took place..
this is not the case with shrinkwrapped or 'clickwrapped' products.
Microsoft claims it's illegal to modify my xbox.. nowhere is there a contract on that box.. it's my hardware and they sold it to me.
How do you get rid of this?.. well there have been some court cases which have overturned them.. but the proliferation of ultra-right corporate owned judges has made that record spotty at best.
You need actual substantive law at this point effected through real reforms in the political system in order to rid the consumer universe of this corporate idea that they own everything they sell to you after you buy it... like some neo-serf.
At least talk to a lawyer... (Score:5, Insightful)
Again, IANAL, but since Canadian and American contract laws do differ in some very serious ways, I'd at least talk to a lawyer and/or hit the local library. One thing that I found works pretty well is if you know someone taking law at a colledge/university level. They generally know a lot, and can always ask their prof. Since profs have to teach it, I've found that the better ones are really good at answering off the wall topics...they've seen them come up in papers n such and have to determine the relevance of them.
As for the billing, you should not have any issues with cancelling any other services that you have with them (as long as they are not under contract). If it's a service that you actually want with them, but want the billing method changed, you still have the option of cancelling the service, then setting it up again. It's a pain in the ass, but it is an option.
Re:You already have the answer. (Score:2, Insightful)
But a telecom provider... it isn't even worth your time. Who is going to check the BBB before getting phone service? The BBB gets its pressure from one thing: Customers who check before they purchase. They have no real "power" over a company besides this.
Good luck, I got boned by AT&T Mobile after having the guy on the phone tell me 6 times that I was cancelling my service within the initial period, and would not be charged a termination fee. Chickenfuckers...
Re:You already have the answer. (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, what these companies are doing, when they pull out these bogus contracts, is bluffing you. They're blowing smoke up your ass, and hoping that you won't have the balls* to actually call them on it.
Your options are basically:
1) Call their bluff: get a lawyer, and sue them; or make them think that you're going to.
2) Bend over and take it, and whine a lot. Whining includes going to the BBB and other toothless organizations. (No large corporation gives a shit about the BBB.)
3) Bend over and take it, and like it.
Lawyers are how you get business done in civil society. They are in many ways even superior to violence, because they can be used to attack vaporous legal constructs that you can't well go out and shoot if you wanted to. They're like samurai: have enough of them, and you can do anything you want. Don't have any, and you're just a peasant.
It helps if you happen to have a lawyer who's willing to work for you cheap, or better yet for free. Lawyers willing to work for free are notoriously hard to find (your best bet is probably to marry one, and even than it's not guaranteed to work). Short of actually having a lawyer, the next best thing would be someone who's familiar enough with the language of law to write a nasty letter that makes them think you're a Force To Be Reckoned With; of course, there's always the risk that they'll call your bluff, and then hang your lawyer-less ass out to dry. Or you could try suing them in small-claims directly, where you don't need a lawyer and can represent yourself; if you really haven't signed any contracts or agreed to anything, then they can't force you into arbitration (which is a normal stipulation in many sleazy contracts), and you can sue them in your own jurisdiction and force them to show up and defend their conduct. If you act like a reasonable, rational, average person, you might do well this way. (Particularly if they just don't want to bother to show up in court.)
All in all, your best bet of success is probably going to involve either the reality or at least substantial threats of spending quality time inside a courtroom somewhere. This is life; in our world, the conflicts that aren't solved with a gun or a knife are usually solved by well-paid guys in suits shuffling paper. (And depending on where you live, possibly someone in a wig.)
* In Capitalist society, see 'wallet.'
Re:Cell Phone deals not one-sided as you think (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:NOt really true.. (Score:2, Insightful)
That may sound like two wrongs.. but keep in mind people who fight oil well fires will basically out-fire the fire by using explosives to consume all nearby oxygen.. thus depriving fire of air long enough for it to be squealched.
My extended family, who lives in detroit, hates unions because they think the unions are responsible for detroit's under-competitiveness.. the truth is theyre producing just enough "greed" and "corruption" to out-greed corporations when it comes to their worker's pay.. the corporations just refuse to trim the fat elsewhere (like their executives' multimillion dollar salaries) and therefore underperform.
I hope this kind-a-sort-a made sense ; )
Re:Further explenation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You already have the answer. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Many companies abuse the idea of contract.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't take NO for an answer (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a bit harder when you're dealing with offsite call centers, especially if they're not in your country and you have to deal with a cultural barrier as well (British Airways, for example, is a pain to deal with because they have different cultural protocol for complaints), or if there aren't multiple levels of supervisors in the same location, but given persistance, more often than not you'll succeed.
And, if all else fails, threatening negative publicity doesn't hurt. My mom had an issue where she paid a department store credit card bill but because of a cash register glitch the payment never posted to the main system. After months of unsuccessfully trying to resolve it with politeness, she sent off an e-mail through the corporate feedback site threatening to call up the TV stations and then walk into the store manager's office at the local store and cut up her card--the payment miraculously credited to her account within a matter of hours after she sent the e-mail.
Re:You already have the answer. (Score:3, Insightful)
Verbal Contracts not valid... (Score:1, Insightful)
This is where EULAs and verbal crap like this come unstuck. They claim there was a term in a contract somewhere that allows them to apply the cancellation clause and claim extra money. However the burden is on them to prove it. A claim that a verbal contract was entered into is worthless, since both sides don't agree on what was said. A claim that a click through EULA was entered into is likely equally worthless, 1) since nobody reads those, 2) they're sneaked in and 3) likely accepted by the person installing it for them, not the person with the Telus agreement.
The burden is on them to prove the contract.
I also don't like your tone. It is Telus that are trying to change normal contract law here, Telus who are refusing to prove how the contract is agreed, he has the perfect right to expect Telus to conform to their agreement as he sees it, or prove the terms if they are different.
It's bad enough that we have companies trying to shove after sale pseudo contracts on us, without people making excuses for them.
Re:You already have the answer. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No, it's how you do it in the USA (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You already have the answer. (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, if a company just doesn't care about negative PR - tiger direct comes to mind - yeah, filing a bbb report won't do shit.
Think about that again. When you tell someone to go and buy a new hard drive for their computer, where do they go? West coasters have Fry's (sorry don't know about all that hoopla). On the east, we have CompUsa and Best Buy. Best Buy only comes into mind because of their viral advertising campaign. Other than that, your average joe schmoe isn't going to research Pricewatch for the best price.. they will head to the brick-and-mortar store named CompUSA.
Sure, a tv news station could run a negative op-ed piece, but then CompUSA will sell insane amounts of RAM for $1. Damage control sustained. Why should they give a fuck about the BBB again?
No signature = no contract (Score:5, Insightful)
They're billing your Visa? (Score:3, Insightful)
Then when the ISP sends you a bill in the mail because your card is cancelled, you can return it to them with a threatening letter from your barrister. Something along the lines of "Please present evidence that our client signed a contract (ie. a copy of the signed contract) or stop harassing them."
I think you'll find they fold like a house of cards... There is a reason the Cell PHone companies force you to SIGN an ACTUAL contract in real life--so they can't get sued for trying to collect the "early termination" fees.
Re:So naive (Score:3, Insightful)
They're a business; they're on no one's side in particular other than their goal of staying in business. As long as you're careful to not carry a balance and to skim any terms of use changes (I read all of mine; for instance cashback gets paid off last and has the highest interest rate; not that I use cashback except in dire emergencies, but I know about that) and you make sure you don't get a card with an annual fee, and pay regularly, you should be fine.
But given that federal law, at least here in the US (the original story took place in Canada) severely limits your liability in fraud situations and you have the ability to reverse bad charges without any money leaving your real bank account, I'm going to keep right on using credit cards. Never had a problem; being informed is your friend.
You illustrate just my point (Score:3, Insightful)
The element you seem to be missing in your all-or-nothing argument is: control. Noone proposes to give the government _unchecked_ power. In fact, it's not even as much giving it power, it's making it do its duty: to serve the citizens that elected it.
The jaded American idea seems to be that that any government power is some kind of a toggle with only two possible (final) states: (A) complete unchecked self-serving power, or (B) not having the government involved at all. And that any good citizen should fight to keep anything into category (B). But at any rate, that there are inherently no shades of grey between the two.
The European idea is that the government is there to _serve_ us. Yes, we know that politicians have no morals, are easily corrupted, etc, and generally that governments are very dangerous things. It just means we have to be more careful about it, not that we should avoid involving it altogether.
If you will, let's use the metaphor of a big and dangerous pitbull for the government. The difference is basically like this: the American notion seems to be that you have a big dangerous pitbull in your back yard, and it could get rabies any day now, and your duty is to fight it off and keep it away from you and your family. The European notion is that since it _is_ your dog and you're feeding it anyway, you might as well get some use out of it. Get it trained to do _your_ bidding instead of fighting it off. And better be a responsible owner and make sure it doesn't get rabies in the first place.
In a nutshell, that's what gets some of us, you know, _wondering_ about _some_ Americans. (I do realize that blanket generalizations tend to be false, so I'm not extrapolating over everyone.) That black-and-white view, completely missing any shades of grey in between. E.g., missing the intermediate shade of a government that is under enough control so it _can't_ just bend over to the highest corporate bidder.
The view that the any government is, unavoidably, destined to be corrupt and whore itself to whoever pays the biggest bribe, is in fact something I consider _dangerous_. It's the kind of thing that, in a perverse way, _legitimizes_ it when it goes and does just that. It just gets people to shrug and go "well, what did you expect?" instead of doing something to stop it. Seeing some of the overt cattering to corporate/cartel interests instead of the interests of their own voters that seems to be the norm in the US Congress... I just have to wonder, basically, how much of that overt corruption (not to mention perversion of what "democracy" was supposed to mean) is the result of the mindset that it's normal and inevitable for a government to do that.
Had a similar problem myself (Score:3, Insightful)
To cut a long story short: we told BT to force the connection of our line so that Bulldog could take it over. Demon will probably try to recover the remaining 6 months payment from us in a small claims court. Good luck to them, I say. They have no proof of a contract, and we have details of many weeks of service that wasn't supplied but we were still charged for.
Re:No signature = no contract (Score:2, Insightful)
Why would you possibly be understanding? It was THEIR mistake, and not one you should have to pay for. Its attitudes like this that have lead to the horrid customers service of pretty much EVERY large company in existance today.
How much would lawyers cost, anyway? (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's a question I'd like to see answered:
Given that the "right" way to handle any contract is to seek professional legal advice,
and given that consumers are now seeing as many as 30 or 40 EULA's annually, my question
is: how much would a diligent legal review of all purchases (per consumer) cost if
consumers were to enter into these "agreements" with diligent review by a legal professional.
I think the answer to that question would be so eggregious that it would reveal the EULA
system to be as silly as it seems.
Any experienced purchasers of legal services care to make an estimate for what a
diligent review of a single EULA would cost?