Rogers Cable fraud

For anyone who lives in Canada, here is a head up on Rogers cable's latest scam.

Rogers Cable is defrauding their customers systematically through their online digital services updating. The result is that many customers, potentially hundreds of thousands of customers, may be paying for services they thought had been removed. In addition it seems to be their policy to lie to the customers who happen to notice they’re being over-billed. I imagine this results in many millions of dollars of profit for them each year, at the expense of their customers. Here’s how it works.

Several weeks ago I used the Rogers.com digital services updating service. Through the web-site, I removed 3 channels and added 2. Everything seemed to work. Several minutes later I received a confirmation e-mail, of which the applicable portion stated:

Services Ordered Today:
The Documentary Channel
National Geographic Channel
Showcase Action
Scream
Discovery Civilization Channel
MSNBC

This list included both the services I added and the services I removed. It didn’t seem right but the web session had gone smoothly so I decided to wait for my bill to see what had been processed rather that go through voice-mail hell to straighten it out.

When the bill arrived I saw that the channels I added had indeed been added, while still keeping the ones that had been removed. I figured there was a glitch, or that I had made a mistake so I tried again, this time making screen prints that I could compare to the confirmation email when it arrived.

Again, the process went smoothly. The screen prints clearly indicated the services ordered, and the services removed, and even gave me a summary of all the services I should have after the order was processed. I received an order confirmation number that I also printed, and was advised that a confirmation e-mail would be sent in the next few minutes. (Having worked in the I.T. business, I knew that this was an automatic computer-generated e-mail – no one is sitting at the other end madly typing out confirmation emails to everyone who uses the online service.)

Two days later I still had not received a confirmation e-mail. I called the toll-free Rogers ‘Customer Care’ line to see what their records showed. As I suspected, the services I removed, that my screen prints showed had been removed, were still listed as active. After straightening it out through Customer Care, I asked to be transferred to a department that I could talk to about the ‘bug’ in their online system that adds services but doesn’t remove them.

I explained the problem to the new ‘Customer Care’ representative. I wish now that I had recorded the conversation so I could count the lies I was told. First, she informed me that unless you have a particular package you cannot remove services. Unfortunately for her, that was the package I have. Then I was told that services can’t be removed online, period. I said ‘Ok, but then why does it seem to allow you to go through the process and indicates that they can be removed and indeed were removed?’ After several minutes of being treated like I was too dim to understand how it works, she let slip that they were aware of the problem. I asked ‘why didn’t you say that in the first place?’ She said something like ‘because we don’t like to advertise the fact that we have a problem with something’. So I guess they’d rather make their customers feel like idiots than admit there’s a mistake on their website. In fact I was told I wasn’t the first person to complain about it, and it had been going on for some time. She told me that when people get the confirmation e-mail they realize the change was made incorrectly, then phone and have it corrected. She couldn’t explain to me why I hadn’t received a confirmation e-mail, though she said it could take some time as it was a manual process and that someone types out each one – (total bs). She suggested that perhaps my request just hadn’t been processed yet. At this point I told her I had printed the page that contained my order confirmation number, indicating an e-mail receipt would be sent in a few minutes. After this she was very quiet for a good 30 seconds.

I asked ‘what about the people who went through the process and didn’t look at the confirmation email? Won’t they have extra charges on their bill for channels they thought were removed?’ She stated that she couldn’t control whether or not people look at the confirmation email – that’s not her problem. I pointed out that it only takes a few minutes to add a notice to a web-site indicating it doesn’t work, and that they shouldn’t be knowingly allowing people to think they’re removing services when they aren’t. At this point I was informed she could be of no more assistance to me.

So basically what we have is:
· Rogers website doesn’t allow you to remove services, only add services. (Reminiscent of their negative billing scandal a while back.)
· Rogers website lets you think you have removed services.
· When they’re confronted with the problem they use double-talk and obfuscation to get you off the phone.
· They allow their web site to continue to advertise that services can be removed.
· Many people don’t read confirmation emails closely, or look at their bills closely enough to notice they’re being billed for something they requested be cancelled.
· At an average of $2.50 per channel, Rogers is raking in a lot of extra profit from unsuspecting customers.
· Rogers policy is to lie about the existence of the problem.

I guarantee that if their web site were allowing removal of services but not addition of services, it would have been corrected a long time ago. Given the circumstances, it seems as though this is a deliberate ‘glitch’ in order to increase profits and defraud their customers. And it has been ongoing, even though they are aware of the problem.