You Got Spam! and AOL Sucks
An ex-AOL engineer got arrested today for selling 92M AOL email addresses to spammers. The list was then sold again for $52,000 by another spammer. Both men face up to 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. This is another reason to ditch America Online.
I actually canceled AOL couple weeks ago after being a hostage for over 9 years because I didn't want to lose my AOL IM screen-name (it was connected to my dial-up account). The operator tried persistently to keep me from canceling offering me lower rates, repeatedly saying I will lose my screen-name and my email address forever, and then saying if anyone ever logged on my account accidentally in the future, they would automatically renew my account.
Suffice it to say I was not happy, since the AOL software was installed on a number of family members' PCs and could easily be logged on again by accident. After 15 minutes of arguing with the operator, as he kept saying that they couldn't technically completely shut it off, they finally relented and said it was possible to turn off my account permanently.
I am sick of large corporations threatening their customers and trying to strong-arm them with practices such as these. AOL deserves to die a painful death.
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