America Online customers should be able to cancel their accounts more easily under a settlement announced Wednesday by Attorney General Roy Cooper. North Carolina will receive $45,000 of the $3 million total settlement to be paid by AOL. The agreement was signed by 48 states and the District of Columbia.
At issue were myriad roadblocks set up by AOL to deter customers from canceling the service, said Cooper. Last year, one consumer made national headlines when he recorded his almost-comical phone conversation with an AOL representative trying to convince him to retain the account. "Customers told us it was virtually impossible to cancel their Internet service, even when they followed the required steps," Cooper said in a statement.
"Now they can cancel without getting the run-around." Complaints from AOL customers about difficulties with canceling their service go back at least a decade. Amid a surge of new members in 1997, for example, it settled with 37 state attorneys general over similar consumer complaints.
The company faced probes from the New York attorney general in 2005, and the Ohio attorney general and Federal Trade Commission in 2003. The $45,000 from the most recent settlement will be split between attorneys' fees that Cooper's office will retain and the N.C.
In addition to the $3 million to the states, AOL will be responsible for providing refunds to consumers who complained about charges and unauthorized fees when they tried to cancel. A spokeswoman for the Attorney General's office, Jennifer Canada, said 137 N.C.
residents have filed complaints with the state in the past three years. Canada said the 137 residents should be contacted by AOL directly for full refunds. As part of the settlement, AOL must record all cancellation calls, and consumers may also end their service using the Web site cancel.
aol.com. AOL spokeswoman Amy Call said the settlement "codifies a number of changes that were already made.
" The company, the Internet division of Time Warner Inc., did not acknowledge any wrongdoing in the settlement. She noted that the investigation arose following consumer complaints from a tiny fraction of the company's customers.
But its overall subscriber numbers are dropping precipitously. AOL ended March with 12 million subscribers, down from 21 million less than two years ago. Customers have been defecting with greater frequency since last August, when AOL began giving away e-mail accounts and software that was previously available only to subscribers.
The decision, prompted by free services from Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.
, removed one of the main reasons many customers had been clinging to their AOL accounts, even if they lived in households with high-speed Internet access. Observer librarian Marion Paynter and The Associated Press contributed. America Online customers should be able to cancel their accounts more easily under a settlement announced Wednesday by Attorney General Roy Cooper.
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