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Cryptic Taking money without my consent .
summitus
Member UncommonPosts: 1,414
Hey guys just after a little advice, not sure how to proceed with this ...
I cancelled my STO Account towards the end of the first month because of personal reasons. I recieved an email confirmation of the cancellation and thought nothing more of it.
Just yesterday I was thinking of resubbing for a while to make some more youtube videos and when I looked on my account page, I noticed that the account was still open and they had taken money from my account using the stored card details.
So I thought they had made a mistake and just emailed them saying what had happened and here is their response.
Greetings,
After careful review of your account, we are unable to grant your refund
request.
For further information, please review the terms of service located at
http://www.startrekonline.com/terms_of_service in section 7 and
http://startrekonline.com/terms_of_use section v.
For more information regarding our terms of service please see either
http://champions-online.com/terms_of_use or
http://startrekonline.com/terms_of_service.
If you have any additional questions, please feel free to let us know.
Regards,
Cryptic Studios Billing Support
Anyone have an idea what I can do about this ? Basically they took the the 2 months subs without consent , plus I have the email confirming that I cancelled at the end of Febuary.
Downside is I only used a debit card and not a credit card.
Comments
Did you initially sign up for a 3 month sub? If so they may have verbage in that sub that states once you sign up for it, basically, you paid for it (meaning they are going to charge you for it even if the service is cancelled before the 3 month period expires). It's that whole service contract thingy. Probably should read up on that sub package if indeed you signed up for the 3 month.
If not, I don't know what to tell you. If you signed up for a 1 month (which is what I always do to avoid billing issues) and canceled before the the renew date (and have proof of it printed out), well, yeah, I'd go to your bank and dispute it.
Edit: According to this passage if you did indeed do multiple months and then canceled early then yeah, they are going to keep it.
Cryptic reserves the right to collect fees, surcharges or costs incurred before you cancel your Account(s). In the event that your Account is terminated, suspended or canceled, no refund will be granted; no online time or other credits or in-game items (e.g., points in an online game) will be credited to you or converted to cash or other form of reimbursement, and you will have no further access to your Account or anything associated with it (such as points, tokens or in-game items).
"Many nights, my friend... Many nights I've put a blade to your throat while you were sleeping. Glad I never killed you, Steve. You're alright..."
Chavez y Chavez
I did only sign up for 1 month and I cancelled just before the end of the first month, do you think the bank will be able to help me if I only used a Visa Debit card instead of a Credit Card ?
Call your bank and dispute the charge if you're sure you've been wrongfully charged that money.
Do you have a cancellation e-mail? If so, then they cannot bill you if they confirmed the account was cancelled. If they did bill you in error and will not refund you, the bank will be able to charge it back. If the cancellation did not go through because you didn't confirm the cancellation, then the bank will not be able to do anything, and you owe the charge.
Best thing to do is talk to you bank and see what needs to be done to prevent further billing since it may take a long time to sort this out with Cryptic customer support.
Yeah, what masked said. Just make sure you have a print out showing you canceled in time and you should get your money back no problem.
"Many nights, my friend... Many nights I've put a blade to your throat while you were sleeping. Glad I never killed you, Steve. You're alright..."
Chavez y Chavez
Okies thanks guys for the help , will go to my bank asap .
I guess you can keep trying to work with their customer support (hahahaha!) with trying to fix this. I hope you kept your cancellation e-mail, tell them you have it and you can provide it as proof you cancelled.
Maybe try printing out the cancellation e-mail and going down to your bank and telling them about it. You can't expect to get your money returned, but at least your bank will know Cryptic is committing fraud. You can also try filing a complaint with the BBB.
As long as you have that e-mail that confirms your cancellation, Cryptic is committing fraud. Unfortunately, this type of thing is all too common in the MMO industry. They can try to claim it's a bug or whatnot, but I personally see it as a form of organized scam, they keep a certain percentage of cancelled accounts open and hope people won't notice a small charge every month, I bet they can get quite a bit of money doing this.
To be honest, I'd recommend resending your refund request again, but this time attach a screenshot of the cancellation e-mail with visible date (like this) , also attach a screenie of either your statement or the account page showing the charge/date. Maybe the service rep dealing with your problem didn't bother reading/understanding your original request and sent you the "default" canned response.
May not hurt to post it on their forums either (in a civil manner and w/o private data of course). If all that fails, call your financial institution and have them deal with it.
Regardless of the outcome, PLEASE (!) make sure to completely erase your billing info from your account profile once the issue is resolved. It's a really good idea to get into that habit for all MMOs... too many billing screw ups happening on inactive accounts recently.
Good luck, I hope you get it straightened out!
Tbh It did'nt really enter my head that they might be doing it on purpose ... you dont think a reputable company like Cryptic would do that do you ? Anyway I have already deleted all my payment information just in case.
Thanks for the response , I have already deleted my payment info from my account , just in case .. TBH I did'nt really want to have to do that , guess its better to be safe than sorry tho . Als o I must say I'm quite shocked that alot of people seem to think that they do this fraudulently or on purpose ! Shocking
I've never had this happen to me personally with a MMO, but I've seen this happen with other MMOs and not just Cryptic. I ALWAYS delete my CC info when I cancel.
Anyway, you already dealt with Cryptic, why go through the hassle of dealing with them again? Contact your bank and get your money. My wife had her debit card number stolen by some clerk somewhere and withdrew money from our account and we got our money restored in two business days.
I don't know that you could claim it's intentional but I don't know what's up with mmo billing companies lately as most of them seem to have caught a case of incompetence. Early on people were getting charged before their 30 days were up, sometimes as soon as a day or two after they opened accounts. Being billed after your account has been closed has been going on for a couple months as well. You think they would have fixed the problem by now. Between this and the war fiasco, Ive made sure my card info is deleted when I close my accounts.
Change your billing intel immediately as well
Thanks thats comforting to know
.... I know its only about 20 pounds but its the principal of the whole thing I guess.
Yeah I've kind of been looking through some other threads and forums and it does seem to be a problems happening alot more over a whole host of different Mmo's .... first time its happened to me tho .
Its quite shocking how many peeps instantly cry foul or call the companys involved theives and other unsavory names !
Assuming you have cancelation confirmation they should be refunding your money since you can prove that you requested the cancelation. If they refuse to refund it then thats when you need to take it up with your bank. And yes it might not be that much money but they're basically stealing the money unless you stand up for yourself. You said pounds so I'm not sure what rights you have over there in the U.K. but in the U.S. this case is one of the legitimate uses of a chargeback. (Versus you just didn't like it)
This looks like a form email to me. They likely send it out to anyone that asks for a refund assuming that either they are not entitled to one. . or they will just not bother after this. chances are someone only read your request to see what you wanted and replied with this auto response. Sorry no refund read the TOS. I have had this happen to me before. Send them a second one in reply with the info.
Wa min God! Se æx on min heafod is!
Wtf ? I've just recieved this now and I hav'nt even responded to the first email they sent yet !!!
Thank you for contacting us about this issue. It appears that your issue has
been addressed previously.
Remember that in the future you may close or edit tickets which have been
placed into the report system via the "View My Tickets" option located in the
Help window.
We appreciate your feedback and thank you for playing!
..... I'm stuck for words.
I can look on the bright side .. at least I'm getting quick responses !
Check out this Video of the Cryptic Billing Email department ....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ravykEih1rE&feature=related
I'd suggest going direct to your bank. Cryptic appear not to be willing to actuall talk to their customers at the moment, and posting any questions about it on the official forums will just get you flamed and declared a liar. Even if its a debit card, if the money was taken out of your account without your permission then you can dispute it. Let your bank handle it, Cryptic may actually reply to their legal department rather than send them a form email.
Your friendly neighbourhood Spider-pope.
Reputable? Hahahahahahaha!
I think it's more of the cryptic "right hand not know what the left hand is doing" management philosophy. Apparently they saw you had already received a response. You should get an "issue resolved" email soon even though it won't have been resolved.
Surely the thieving muppets can look at your STO account and see you've not logged in any time during the period involved. Don't let them get away with it, complain to your bank and get a chargeback for both months. It was a well known problem with STO billing that some cancelled accounts were being flipped back to active in March 2010 and billed again.
My account was flipped from cancelled too. Fortunately, I noticed but I still think they'll try to bill me. I had a 90 day pre-order box, had to petition that I only got 60 days, cancelled my account during the 4 weeks it took them to reply and they flipped my account to active! lol
Anyway, I hope your bank gives Cryptic a good owning.
I know someone that played Champions Online and Cryptic pulled the same thing on him after he canceled. He simply contacted his bank and told Cryptic about the issue.
It's not very common for this to happen but seems more common from Cryptic (also happened in City of Heroes before NCSoft took over).
I wish I could offer better advise for you, but have you completley removed your Credit Card info from your account on top of cancelling? I made darn sure that info was gone. I only suggest this as I know some people may think to only hit the cancel button, and not actually go into their account and remove the credit card info.