Evolution Of A Man

last night, when checking to see how little money is in my bank account, i noticed a ccbill transaction that i KNOW i did not make. i went directly to ccbill.com, entered my email address and credit card information into the form provided, the screen told me that there were no subscriptions for that card and email. immediately, i started screaming fraud!

this morning, i called my bank to inquire about the debit from my account. they really couldn’t do anything except put an investigation on the debit; however, they did suggest that i call ccbill to figure out who took the money. it wasn’t a large amount, but in these times… every dollar counts! i spoke to a lovely lady by the name of crystal over at ccbill. she took down my credit card and email information, and after about a minute of digging, she saw that there was in fact a debit made from my account yesterday, but it was from a different email address- my mac.com address. i never use my mac.com account, and i couldn’t imagine why or how it was connected to ccbill. crystal then told me two things that irked the hell out of me. 1) the debit transactions have been taking place montly since march, and 2) the payee was some random porn site that i haven’t been to in a long time. i was heated- at myself, mostly- but heated nonetheless.

basically, what had happened wuz: back in march, i did some browsing on the site, and signed up for a $5.00 3-day trial subscription. i was led to believe that the trial would end and disappear unless i contacted them to keep it going. after the second day, i became disinterested in the content and stopped visiting the site. unfortunately, they kept my membership going, and have been charging me for a full subscription since march. apparently, my mac.com email address auto-filled into the email field when i entered my transaction information; and so not only was i being charged for a subscription (which i don’t use), but all payment correspondence went to my mac.com inbox (which i don’t check). after hearing all of that, feeling a bit embarrassed when crystal noted, “yes, it was a subscription to a, um, chocolatecreamfactory.com…,” i instructed her to cancel the subscription and erase the mac.com address immediately.

needless to say, i want to beat somebody’s ass right now. but of course, i must take full responsibility for not paying attention to detail and fully cancelling the subscription when i decided i was no longer interested in the site. *sigh* i just had to suck it up, and add it to the increasingly long list of lessons learned in 2008. oy vey!

manage your online subscriptions, people! don’t let that “trial” bullshit get you, too!