January 4th, 2008
Beware Yahoo Personals' deceptive billing policy
You might be wondering what a post like this is doing on a blog largely about VoIP, but bear with me. To some extent, this post is about VoIP.
And athough I try not to air my consumer grievances here, I am writing this post to warn you about a practice that your knowledge of can save you some dollars.
OK, first let us go back a year. My love life, my dating life, was in a rough patch. (If you want details, you buy the next pitcher).
Not wanting to remain in the state I just referred to, I decided I would declare a jihad on loneliness. Being a creature of the Internet, I posted a profile on several dating sites including Yahoo! Personals.
My Match.com profile soon led to a happy result. That’s her photo on the top of my CPU tower.
As soon as the ultimately “happy result” became quantifiable, I let my Yahoo! Personals account lapse. I ignored Yahoo’s multiple emails begging me to continue as a member.
The charges stopped around February, 2007. And in May, I reported the Nordstrom Visa credit card I used for Yahoo! Personal’s automatic billing was lost.
A replacement soon came with a different number. There would have been no direct way for Y!P to have knowledge of ths new number. That’s the point of a replacement card, no?
Fast forward several months. In October, I signed up for 
Yahoo! Voice. Here’s where things got real dicey.
To enable Yahoo! Voice, I bought $10 of outbound minutes, as well as an inbound number. And because I like using that aforementioned Nordstrom Visa credit card rather than others available to me, I charged those minutes and the inbound number on my Nordstrom Visa.
Then hey guess what. Yesterday, I went on line to the Nordstrom Bank site, and looked at my Nordstrom Visa account. There was a $74.95 charge from Yahoo! Personals.
WTF?
My initial conclusion was that when I updated my credit card information to sign up for Yahoo!’s voice services, the new credit card number I just placed with Yahoo! Voice eventually found itself available to the folks at Yahoo! Personals.
Keep in mind that at no time had I authorized my dormant Yahoo! Personals account to be reopened, not the least, charged with a new credit card account number I had trusted Yahoo! to use only for Yahoo Voice!!
I called the dispute department @ Nordstrom Visa, and we concluded that this was an example of what the customer service rep called “forced authorization.”
Well, maybe that’s true, but “forced authorization” with my money, for a service I no longer wanted? A service reactivated on the imprimateur of a credit card number I trusted Yahoo! to use for Yahoo! Voice only!
If I sound p.o’d, you betcha.
I am fighting this, and will let you know how it turns out.
Have any of you had similar experiences?
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
