usenet.nl Very Sneaky and deceptive business practices - Stay away Internet

I also signed up for 14-day trial. It's always off-putting when they ask your credit card number for free trials. And i don't buy that "because we don't want your service to be interrupted" excuse. This can be solved buy a few warning emails. And if my service is interrupted, i'm the one to suffer. So let me worry about that.

Anyway, I saw this company's name as a TrialPay campaign. So i considered them to be respectable. After i signed-up i checked my bank account, and i saw that a charge of about 4-5 USD was made. I sent an email and asked the reason of this fee in a "free trial". Here's their reply:

"You would like to know the reason your credit card was charged even though you have signed up for a free trial.

We would like to assure you that our trial is indeed free and we have not charged your credit card.

The above-mentioned charge is based on a security check by your credit card issuer. Various banks perform this kind of verification shown as "pending" charge on your credit card at random. After a short amount of time, the charge will disappear again.

For further information, please contact your credit card issuer."

Well, i hope they are right and the charge disappears. Just wanted to mention this as i saw other people had similar fees too. I will send an update here if the charge is actually approved. 

I cancelled my account now. And they sent me a confirmation mail right away. So my experience with them wasn't bad so far. The small fee was the only unexpected thing but even if it doesn't drop, it's not a very big deal.

I guess as a rule of thumb it is safe to say that if some company asks your credit card, be extremely careful about auto-renewals. Especially in free trials.

Naturally, I was pretty apprehensive of doing business with such a sketch company, but was rather relieved to find out that nothing unexpected happened.When you register for the site, you see the Terms of Service right up front, and it says rather clearly that if you don't cancel your contract within the 14 trial days, you sign up for a year.

I'll admit, I was a little scared when the site's server was down so I couldn't access my account and cancel the subscription, but, as said in the email they sent me when I made the account, I could cancel both through the site and through their support form, so I did the latter. They responded very quickly and I am in the process of canceling the subscription as I speak.

A couple things to note:

Yes, the whole "We'll automatically fill your subscription right up for you!" thing isn't exactly honest business practice, but they don't exactly go out of their way to hide this, and this kind of behavior should be expected from businesses on the internet; even Netflix does it.

As I said before, a while after I subscribed, it told me the server was down when I tried to log in. This could be something malicious, but it's probably just a coincidence. I got charged ~$4 for using a check card to pay for my "free trial". I'm not sure why as I haven't read any fee like this, but I'm not going to wage war over four dollars. Just giving you guys a warning that small fees like this may occur.

Overall, given the choice, I probably wouldn't do any business with these guys again, but they aren't all-out scammers. Their program works, etc. I just find it a little risky and sketchy.

He was expecting more reasonableness.

Your points are legitimate but a $150 penalty for being a day late? That's extremely poor customer service and I appreciate his mentioning that they wouldn't cooperate with him.

What if he'd had his day's right and developed a computer problem on the last day or had an accident and couldn't get home before midnight?

I think companies like this suck and I say again that I'm glad he reported the incident.

I will avoid them.

Firs of all, it's obvious that the usenet.nl is a shady business from appearing at any search, any keyword, related and unrelated. Internet is full of crap, and people waiting to exploit even the slightest carelessness of people. So your alarm bells should ring even at the slightest suspicious content.

Even if it is a 100% legit, honest business, everybody knows that trial accounts renew or upgrade automatically if not cancelled. If a company clearly indicates that the trial account will renew, that's their good will. If they don't, it's common sense to check the user agreement, account settings or whatever to see what happens after the trial account ends.

Therefore, this is not a scam or rip off. This is your carelessness.If it's in the user agreement that the trial account upgrades automatically when it ends, the company has every right to keep your money.

And of course every internet business, or any kind of business for that matter, is out for your money. What were you expecting?

same thing happened to me usenet.nl is a ripped off

To zorro111: