ECA is an online organization. They offered a free one-year membership coupled with some discounts on video games. Some people who signed up decided to cancel after some of those discounts disappeared. A few people found a cancel button online, but it was later removed. People were instructed to use snail mail to cancel their purely online service.
Now, the post I link to includes a letter from the president of the organization that attempts to explain this by placing the blame for the cancelled discounts and the need for snail mail cancellations on scammers. In part, he says:
We explained that we are working on ramping up infrastructure to become more automated going forward, but due to a small but active number of members who were repeatedly joining, leaving and re-joining the organization – in an effort to exploit our member benefits and unduly take advantage of our partners' generous offers – we would require a mailed letter, as per our membership agreement.The problem with this statement, in my mind, is that they require you to provide a credit card number, and therefore presumably a billing address and a real name, to join (yes, even with the free membership). It would be trivial, one would think, to prevent people from signing back up again if their name and billing address matched a recently-cancelled account, or to prevent them from getting any deals aimed only at new members. So I'm a little dubious about their reasoning.
Please note I have no dogs in this fight. I'd never heard of the ECA before today, in fact. But I was struck by the completely sense of dishonesty I felt behind the published statement, not simply in that passage, but overall. It had the distinct odor of CYA, with just a hint of the scent of Lying Corporate Bastards.
The moral of the story, if there is one, is this: don't piss off the intarwebz. Everyone, including people not even remotely connected to you, will find out.
No comments:
Post a Comment