123-reg Stole My Money! Auto Renewal Nightmare!
How come people like 123-reg can break the law, and get away with it? We have used them for years and years and we have never had a problem with them (ok, we have had some related problems when they fucked up a domain name registration and it got stole from under us) until now!
We have around 40 domain names in our account, and we probably have at least one come up for renewal every month. Normal procedure for me is to leave it as long as comfortably possible (LOL) and then log in and renew it.
We store our credit card details on there site, so every time we do this or every time we buy a domain name, we dont have to write in the long number etc. Its to save US time basically.
Now, we had a .CC domain name that had come up for renewal last month, and it was gonna cost us over £30 to renew it for one year! So as we were not using it, we decided to leave it and let it expire.
3 days ago we received an email invoice from 123-reg for the .CC domain name.
What the fuck?
We logged in, and the .CC domain name was not in our renewal list any more?
I checked, and the amount had been taken from our bank, without our say so?
Ok. So they stole money from my account, to renew a domain name that i did not want.
I rang 123-reg and they fobbed me off with some bullshit about auto renewal and how i had stored the credit card details in my account, so in doing so had given them permission to take my money whenever they wanted to?
What utter bullshit!
English contract law states (basically) that if i dont say i want something, then i dont want it!
They KNOW they send emails out every few days reminding you to renew, i even renewed some other domain names and left that one out on purpose! Yet they STILL renewed it and stole my money to pay for it!
I read all the way through their terms and conditions, and there was no mention of this credit card auto renewal shit – no where did it say “if you put your details in, we’ll use them when we want”
So what gives them the fucking right to do it?
I rang them up again to see if i could speak to someone who wasnt a fucking moron, but surprise surprise another moron on the end of the phone saying something that is blatantly written on a bit of paper in front of him.
Oh, if you want to call 123-reg and dont want to pay 10p a minute, then call 02085877558 as this alternative number replaces the old alternative 01782 605 399 number number that seems to no longer go anywhere.
We have taken the matter up with our bank, and i have removed our credit card details from 123-reg so they cant steal more money.
You fucked with the wrong person you bitches – you WILL feel my wrath.
Grrrrrrrr!
Hi there
I just discovered 123reg thiefs they have taken 140 pounds of my account when I thought it would just expire.
THey said they had emailed me yet the email registered with them expired months ago and they never wrote.
Ive passed it onto my credit card company to look into.
Please could you let me know how you got on.
Thanks
[...] who has visited my blog before may remember the earlier entry about the 123-Reg auto renewal issue that we had. They basically automatically renewed a domain name we didn’t want [...]
Same thing just happend to me, they took £160 off me. Im also wondering how much more money they have been stealing over the years that i havent noticed! Very angry! Did you ever get your money back?
We got into a right mess with it.
We got our money back from the bank, but then they blocked access to our account.
My advise to you all, is to remove the AutoRenew from every domain in 123-reg.
The UI is PANTS but you should be able to figure it out!
I had a very similar experience. The upfront message you get is that ‘your hosting is due to expire’ but what that means is ‘is going to be renewed unless you work out how to stop that happening’. I have been looking for a way to make sure I don’t pay for renewals and/or hosting for most of this morning – and I design sites at code level, so techfear isn’t the issue. Also, the 123-reg site seems to auto recognise my PC, so I can’t set up accounts for my rather less tech-literate clients. I’m sure it is just about possible to do if you know where to look or spend ages waiting on the premium rate support line, but the point is that it is very difficult to find and this, coupled with extremely misleading information and muddled wording almost everywhere you look, makes 123-reg dangerous to use. I had to phone a client this morning to tell him 123-reg had debited his credit card to pay for someone else’s hosting – hosting the other client didn’t want to buy anyway. AVOID.
My wonderful little hosting company was taken over by these idiots.
Moved all my domains names out today, over 50 of them. Stuck with them for hosting for now until all the packages come up for renewal.
Their version of auto-renew is completely unworkable for me. But once they’ve got a hold of your card details you’ve had it.
Good news is they have removed my card details from their system and I will never purchase anything from them again, so they can’t enforce their auto-renew.
Most sneaky and devious company I have come across.
Control panel is abysmal. Not a company I will ever use again.