It's because they (and EVERY OTHER COMPANY EVER THAT HAS THIS PROBLEM) based either bonuses, raises, or continued employment on CSRs keeping people from cancelling.

when my friends came over it wasn't even worth trying to explain what that mass of wires and circuitry was on the table and why the phone was on top of it. back in the days when almost no one thought a server was anything besides the person who brought you food at a restaurant.

I've looked the company up on Google, found a couple of addresses, and sent just such a package to one of them. It was returned, unopened, and marked "Refused delivery." I suspect their corporate policy is to never accept delivery of certified mail.

Wonderfully shady operation. I've attempted to lodge a complain with the feds, but that went nowhere and I suspect nothing will ever happen to them.

They didn't steal your CC, they used a seed to generate the number and filled out the rest of the info with bs because AOL used to have very minimal security for those types of things for a very, very long time. It used to be an easy way for "hackers" to get free internet access.

I was like 7...such a good game...and sometimes I play it today...you can download it for free now...thank god since my disc broke

@JGKojak: About 10 years ago my (now ex) wife and I bought my parents a full year of dial up Mindspring when my sister and her boyfriend bought them their first home computer.

So what is the first thing my father does? Signs up for the crap AOL trial period that was on the computer "Because it was free." I told him to cancel whatever credit card he might have used for it and get the f- off of aol. As I remember he did have to cancel the card when they started charging him like $24.95 or something for a couple of months.

I later got him into free yahoo email accounts because the Mindspring email concept was too much for him to handle.

@PsiCop: Probably it is a completely bogus debt. You should send all the appropriate "prove it to me or shut up and go away before I sue you" documents to them to stop it.

@Fist-oâ„¢: We used the tins for metal repair and making shims for machine leveling...

@BZMedia: There are actually still people who think that AOL is the internet...

Tell the collection agency it can either produce proof of the debt, or take a flying one at a rolling doughnut.

This isn't about being billed erroneously to a credit card; it's about being billed erroneously at all - and then being sent to collections for it.

I'd recommend you just send them a notice of cancellation in writing, via certified mail, and be done with it. If you get sent to collections because you failed to properly close your account, you've got no one to blame but yourself.

When I was much younger, we had AOL, when suddenly our password wasn't working. Attempts to change the password failed, as we could login to the email accounts associated. Calls to AOL didn't resolve the situation, as they said that they couldn't verify his identity to reset the password. That's when we realized that somebody else had stolen the account, changed the password and contact info, and AOL was none the wiser. They continued to bill for a few months of service, until my father had to take them to small claims court to get the issue resolved. AOL folded and paid back, in full, the charges.

You might've gotten duped here, so don't allow them to walk all over you. Keep the pressure on and demand that they cancel your account. They need to own up to their mistakes.

The real oddity was, whenever we tried to uninstall the program, it would come back. There were always some files left in the darker reaches of the computer, and it would quietly restore itself upon connection to the internet. Eventually we had to print out a tutorial, boot into safe mode, and delete every last file -- couldn't get rid of them otherwise. Like killing a virus, or Outlook Express.

Oh, 1998.

@SgtMajorFragg: You were probably talking with someone in Spokane at the time. They tend to do that because the outsourced call center i worked at. the saves department would just give people a whole bunch of free months because the longer you stayed the more commission they make. but they wouldnt tell you that you had to call back in to re cancel your account after the free months.

It's sad when someone else has more control over your bank account than you do.

It sounds like OP got free AOL while working for TW, but never manually altered the account to be the newer "Free" version.

MY mother in law uses AOL... and I can't tell you the number of hours I've spend re-installing it for her, because it continually f's up her computer. I think I have finally convinced her to at least use IE for netsurfing instead of the aol interface (please no lectures on using mozilla instead, I'm lucky to convince her to use IE). But she still does email through AOL.

I have never had an AOL account, and I never would. I was on the internet before AOL was, so not only was there no need, but, like many others who were on Usenet at the time, I have always associated AOL with the Eternal September's first influx of idiots.

Anyway, I called them, and they initially insisted it must have been me and I just forgot or something. Then, they said it was probably 'one of my kids.'

When I impressed upon them that that was not the case, they refused to tell me anything at all about the account, except that it was closed and there were no outstanding charges for it. I realize that it's probably not actual provable fraud because whoever did it actually paid their bills, but AOL seemed pretty cavalier about the fact that some asshole was using someone else's personal information on their account.

What's worse, the phone number and address they have for me, date to around 2003. I was not living at that address when I still had the AOL account, and was no longer living there in 2006 when they started trying to wring the money from me.

Usually when Allied calls for this, I tell them that I dispute the debt, ask them to send me documentation of it (to date they have utterly REFUSED to do this ... they always say they NEVER mail ANYTHING to ANYONE), and further inform them that the statute of limitations has expired, so the debt is unenforceable even if it existed, which it doesn't.

The person on the phone inevitably threatens me with "taking it to collection" (whatever that means, given they're debt collectors themselves!), or reporting it to a credit bureau (they have never done so, I've checked my credit reports), or even a couple of times they've threatened to "send it to the legal department," at which time I say, "Please do that, immediately. And let me know which staff attorney I need to discuss this so-called 'debt' with." They never give me a name, of course.

It never goes beyond that, though. After this, they usually leave me alone for a few months, then there's another spurt of "robo-calls" from them telling me to contact them. Last time they called me about this was about 6 months ago, so I think I'm due for another.

BTW the amount of the debt they think I owe, is something like $35. I have no idea how much they've spent trying to get this from me, but I don't see how this is worth their time or effort. What I think is that they're expecting I will be frightened into just paying it without realizing the "debt" is not enforceable, even if it were valid. However, even if I were to suddenly turn stupid the next time they call, and just pay it over the phone immediately, they still likely have spent more than that already and therefore can never recoup that expense completely.

I still have my AOL account/e-mail address from 1996. It's my only (non-work) e-mail account. It's been "free" since 2002 or so when I started using broadband.

Remember the days when AOL didn't even have the "WWW"? The "Internet" as we know it was an added feature to AOL in '95/'96. Also: 2,400 baud FTW!

@kabuk1: Having AOL was like having a wart on your dick.

@William T. Sprague Jr.:

I laughed. Those were certainly the "good ol' days"

I personally miss instant messaging in crazy wavy rainbow font. Good times.

OMG, i almost spit my water at the screen. oh god the days in junior high when someone pissed you off and you could just punt them offline . . .ah the memories.

Ah, Packard Bell. We put a *1 gb* hard drive in there a couple of years later when the prices dropped enough that it could be a family Christmas present. That and a 33.6 modem. Good times. I have never in my life opened up a less-upgradeable computer than that horizontal Packard Bell. The mini-tower we got 3 1/2 years later was like a chorus of angels to my battered hands.

Fast forward to almost 10 years later; I called to cancel my account (probably a Mumbai call center) and was told that it would be done. About three months later I logged in and found that the account was still valid. By logging in, I automatically re-initiated the account and started the whole billing cycle.

I started receiving letters from bill collectors; called AOL and paid - telling them that if they billed me again I would file a complaint with the State Attorneys office for billing fraud. Never heard from them again.

AOL sucks. They know it. So does every unhappy AOL subscriber. There used to be an aolsucks.com website, but if you go there now it redirects to aol.com.

@Fist-oâ„¢: I thought it was just kinda like "Time/Life". Life doesn't anymore.

Um, yeah, they *Bought* Time-Warner.

'Twas a dark day indeed. How soon we forget.

i would have contacted tw/aol and said, "what's there to update? this account is closed! free account? awesome, except no, i don't want it. please close it and do not contact me. EVER. not for a free car, not for a free burial plot. what's your customer service id#? is there a case number for this? gimme that too. lemme talk to your supervisor after this." just make a big stink about how much i don't want it.

it sounds like someone's records got mixed up with yours, like some fields were entered in the wrong place. that would be a good time to bring that up.

@BZMedia: You beat me to it with the blurb about upgrading the modem. Back in the '90s the big news was when you could put in the faster modem. Now those were worthy upgrades! :-)

@BZMedia: My thought too. I guess you and I are living under a rock.

...on my Packard Bell. It had a 200 mb (compressed and doubled to achieve that) hard drive and a 33mhz processor with "Turbo" button running Win 3.1 and a 5 inch floppy (literally floppy) drive. Thing was a $1200 boat anchor brand new. But hey, it had MS Paint which got me on the path to where I am today.

Oh, how i hate AOL. they are one of the true evils incarnate. i have dealt with few worse companies than AOL. took me 20 minutes to convince them to cancel my account back in 2000. they offered me 2 more free months, this & that, that & this, blah blah blah till i finally just YELLED at them to cancel my account of id file a complaint with the BBB. then months later i found out they sold my info to other companies, who started randomly debiting my visa for "services" i never recieved, asked for, or was even told about. basically just took my money. i had to close my bank account because of these SOBs. i shouldve sued their asses.

Why would you update an account that you stopped using years ago? Especially when the notice said they are having problems BILLING you? I would be afraid that they would try to fraudulently bill me, even if after updating it said the account was still a free account.

I would put a fraud alert on your credit report in case this is a case of identity theft, find out the last 4 digits of the billing card as another commenter said, and contact the Attorney General. Provide them any and all information you can to prove this account was supposed to remain a free use account.

Who knows, you should contact Time Warner and ask them if their free AOL use changed or if it's still free. Maybe it's not anymore...

Once you have all of those reports in the que, call up AOHell and let them know that they'll be recieving a subpoena regarding any and all account information. So this can be resolved. In a friendly manner, yeah, that's it.

But in all seriousness: See if they can provide you with the last four digits of the CC#. I work in a customer service call center and it's not all that uncommon to see "VISA" or "MC" thrown in where it should say "AMEX". Sometimes it IS user error. Maybe then you can find something that matches up?

Get some WaReZ and punt them offline.

Do I have an AOL story... They can't do this to me because I cancelled the credit card that automatically paid them. When I contacted them to change the payment method to a newer (better less criminally high in interest rate) card they asked for my address - when I gave it I was told it was the wrong address - I'd moved. This was the only method they had at the time to ID me - an old address. I moved a lot in those early to middle days of my career. The only way... i told them to cancel my account if there was no way to update the address and payment method. I've never looked back. Businesses get what they deserve.

Did she recently stop working for Time Warner? She never explicitly said she canceled (which I wouldn't either with a free account), so if she stopped working for TWC or they dropped this benefit, that could explain the charges. It does not explain the phantom credit card, however.