Leslie G.

My 92 y/o dad signed up for this online computer support service, I'm not sure how he found it but it was probably one of these ads that we all receive multiple times a day. I think he thought it would automatically fix his computer as he didn't know how it worked.

I pay all his bills and by the time I realized what he had done, almost a month had gone by. I called customer service to see how to cancel his subscription which was 224$ to sign up then a 25$ a month fee for a one-year contract.

I was told there was a 100$ cancellation fee. I asked if they could waive it since my dad was elderly and he hadn't used it nor did he know how it worked. They said it was an agreement he signed and it could not be broken without paying the fee. When I tried to argue that they had received 224$, he was elderly and they hadn't had to do anything and couldn't they be flexible, the agent got a little huffy with me and said that most of their customers were elderly and that he had signed it.
I wasn't asking for the initial sign-up fee back, just that he not have to pay a cancelation fee.

The cancellation policy online states that a refund could be received within 7 days if no technician had been sent out or the computer hadn't been remotely fixed. It had been almost a month.

So, 324$ for 10 minutes of phone time. Not a bad hourly wage.