To AOL: "No means no"

What's even worse than this is what AOL recently did to my girlfriend.

She had AOL when she lived in a college dorm. Each month, she had her AOL fees automatically deducted from her checking account. Upon each billing statement, there would be a notation that $XX.xx was taken out in AOL's name and everything was hunky dory. She would cross-check the billing statement AOL sent to her place to make sure everything was on the level. She never encountered a problem.

When she graduated and left the apartment, she cancelled the account. It took a little pressure but AOL relented. The monthly deductions no longer appeared on her bank statements, indicating that the agreement had indeed ended.

Last month, she received a bill from AOL, in the amount of over $550. AOL claims that she had neglected to pay her basic fees for three years and that they would submit her cumulative debts to a collection agency if she didn't pay up.

Now, in all the time between the day she terminated the account and now, my girlfriend never received a single bill from AOL. The account was in her name and she had left proper address forwards with the federal post office. Other mail that had been sent to her dorm managed to arrive at her place back home. But nothing from AOL. Nor were there any AOL-related sections on her bank statements for the past three years.

This issue remains unresolved, although she refuses to pay, and I don't blame her. Neither of us can think of a legitimate scenario that would explain this bill. It honestly appears as though AOL is trying to scrape extra money from current and former customers in the hopes that they're all too timid to fight back.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

All she has is bank records showing the last date upon which money was deducted from her account for AOL. That and the post office records documenting that she left a proper forwarding address.

She's already had a nice chat with a lawyer. I'm not really worried. Based upon the Vincent Ferrari story, AOL's getting a lot of bad exposure.

Incidentally, is anyone else bothered by that guy's name: "Vince Ferrari"?

"Vic Ferrari" was an alias of "Latka Gravas" on television's Taxi. Andy Kaufman, who played both, was notorious for pulling high profile hoaxes. This seems like a weird coincidence and I wonder if it's a very subtle clue that this whole thing is a prank against AOL.

There's nowhere I can't reach.