We signed on to Pipeline Data in October of 2005. In July of 2006, my husband sustained an injury and could no longer operate his business. I called Pipeline to see how to cancel our account, I was told to fax a letter of cancellation. I did, and then never thought another thing about it. Bad move.
My husband began buying and selling items on eBay and decided to use his former business checking account for PayPal, because we had been warned not to tie PayPal to our personal account. We are very careful and diligent about our money, so this is the embarrasing part. We (actually my hubby :) did not notice that Pipeline continued to debit that account $34.00 a month. The debit is listed on the on the bank statement in similar wording to a PayPal transaction, so he didn't think anything of it.
There shoud be a law about this- other companies make their debit wording very generic as well. These debits continued until this past November, when my husband saw the charge on his statement and knew he did not recently make a $34 purchase on eBay. We did some checking with our bank and found out it was Pipeline! We were sick. He called their customer service and told them he had cancelled this 2 1/2 years ago. They (of course) had no record of this. They said they would send out more cancellation forms. They never arrived, it was almost Christmas and we put this on the back burner. Then, my husband noticed the infamous $150 "yearly fee" on his account two days before Christmas.
He called Pipeline AGAIN on 12/29 and asked for another set of forms. They claimed they sent them. He told them he did not want any more charges taken out of the account- he wanted his phone call to be noted that he intended to cancel. The CS rep said the service is not cancelled until they receive the forms and they are properly filled out. Isn't that convenient? You just keep getting charged until *they* decide to handle your cancellation request properly or handle it at all. They next day we closed the checking account to avoid more debits. What a pain in the a$$ that was. All because of these crooks.
As of mid-January we had not received the cancellation forms. On Jan. 22 we received an email from Gina Appuzo, stating we needed to give them our new checking account number, since we closed the one they had been using. We now owed them $56.
I wrote her back, telling her the entire story. Her reply?
"If you choose not to pay the balance owed that is your choice. But if the balance is not paid you may be sent to a third party collections and it will be reported to the credit agencies.
I was livid. I wrote back stating there wouldn't be ANY issues here if the account would have been cancelled as I requested in 2006. Or if we had received the forms we asked for in Nov. and Dec. I asked over & over again what we need to do to end this. I reiterated that it was not fair and probably not legal that they will not honor our request to cancel, but then want to keep charging us for their incompetence.
She wrote back giving me another phone number to call. We haven't called yet. My husband has a call into our Attorney.
Suposedly this company is almost out of business. Godd Riddance.
Sherry
Etters, Pennsylvania
U.S.A.