Highbeam Research - Highbeam.com $200 Auto-Renewal Scam More than Search It's a Ripoff Go to accessmylibrary.com for free instead Chicago Illinois

Highbeam Research is a site which allows you to search through news archives and pull up articles written years ago on a certain person, place or thing. Nothing terribly innovative, I believe there are dozens of sites offering this service...

Highbeam.com is your run-of-the-mill auto-renewing free-trial scam. You sign up for a free trial, neglect to cancel it, and subsequently get charged. In this case, I needed some research which I would have been happy to pay for, maybe 10 or 20 dollars, but these monkeys charge $30 per month, which is a rip-off by itself. What really irks me is that I was on the site for one day, will likely never use it again, had planned on cancelling it, and have recently been charged $200 for a full year subscription. Most auto-renewal scams only get you for one month if you forget or can't cancel in time.

This is non-refundable, period. I was charged for a full year subscrption and this cannot be changed. I asked to switch to a monthly account to try to recoup the other $170. The highbeam.com representative kindly informed me, after reading section 2.4 of the user agreement: You can change to monthly billing after the subscription expires... in February 2009.

Normally, I don't get upset by this sort of thing but $200 is a lot of money. If they can charge $200, why not $1,500? I guess $200 must be the right amount: You can steal it and people won't make quite enough noise or cause enough problems to force the you to give it back. It's about as close to fraud as you can get, if you ask me.

I truly hope the day will come when auto-renewal is something that you must expressly agree to apart from the user agreement. Companies like Highbeam Research make 99% of their money off this sort of thing and it drives me nuts.

I should have gone to 'ACCESSMYLIBRARY.COM' to get the exact same information for free.

Mike
Scottsdale, Arizona
U.S.A.