Match.com review: tricky "subscription" charge after 30 day purchase ( 1 comment)

IAC World Headquarter owns match.com .

Match is notorious for this. I signed up in May for a "30 day" subscription. Without asking me, match.com signed me up for an eternal subscription, charging my credit card an ongoing fee of $37.79. I caught on to this today after six months of unauthorized charges.

I called match.com and asked to cancel the subscription and asked them to refund my credit card for the six unauthorized payments of $37.79 (a total of $226.79).

They flatly refused and said that they "make it clear" while signing up that you're actually subscribing to an open-ended subscription.

The customer service people are not the culprits and they've been given a script. However, they had clearly been coached how to handle this situation and flatly budged to help me refund my money.

When I asked for the phone number of the next person up the food chain that I could contest this with, their canned answer was "fill out the email form." When I insisted on a phone number, their answer was "we're a dot com. We don't have phone numbers--only email."

This is not only criminal but laughable! What kind of idiot could have written that script and expected people to believe that!? Of course "dot com" companies use phones!

Net/net match.com refused to give me my money back. No matter what.

I have issued a statement of fraud with my credit card company for the amount they billed me without my consent. I'm going to write a formal letter to IAC though no one there will ever read it and I'll just be yet another complaint added to the legions of complaints that (I'm guessing) they probably receive about this practice of theirs.

Help! Who's looking out for the consumer here! How can this practice of signing people up for subscriptions without their consent be legal? What can we do?