Florida Puts The Squeeze On AOL

The Florida Attorney General’s Office has reached an agreement with America Online concerning the erroneous billing of 6,000 customers in Florida. Attorney General Charlie Crist’s Economic Crime Division began investigating AOL in September of 2005 after receiving over 1,000 complaints from consumers.

AOL was accused of ignoring customer’s requests to have services cancelled, reactivating accounts and billing customers for their services on phone bills. “Consumers should not have to keep looking over their shoulders to make sure mega-corporations aren’t trying to take advantage of them,” said Crist. “This agreement is an important step toward protecting our citizens from consumer fraud.”

AOL did cooperate with the Attorney General’s investigation but has admitted no wrongdoing in the settlement.

Any consumers who may have been victims of AOL’s tactics can receive a complaint form at www.myfloridalegal.com. The form should be mailed to AOL and they should resolve the complaint in 45 days.

According to the Attorney General’s Office AOL will pay around $300,000 to Floridians.

The Attorney General’s Office says that it has always been tough for consumers to cancel services with AOL. Their customer service agents were trained to convince customers not to cancel and received bonuses for each account they retained. This practice has since been abandoned.

The reaction on the blogs and posts has been strongly in favor of the Florida Attorney General’s actions. “Yup AOL sucks. Especially their customer service that refuses to cancel an account. It’s normal for a company to try to keep you but not to the extent AOL does it to where they almost dont allow you to quit them. AOL needs to go bankrupt and die!!” wrote prelude619.

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Mike is a staff writer for murdok. Visit murdok for the latest ebusiness news.