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Sportingnews ripoff dishonest practices false contact e-mail addresses poor customer service Internet
I signed up for sportingnews.com's "$4.99 for one month membership" on 09/10/2004 to try out the Fantasy Football section. I attempted to access the members' section of the website several times.
When I logged in with my userid and password, I was redirected to the page where you select which membership you want to purchase. I e-mailed customerservice@sportingnews.com 3 times about this problem and only received automated responses stating that they would look at the problem and contact me as soon as possible.
I received no response and was billed again on 10/12/2004 and 11/09/2004. I went to the terms of agreement page and clicked on the cancellation policy link to find out how to cancel my non-existent "service". However, it redirects to the sportingnews.com home page.
I sent 2 more e-mails to customerservice@sportingnews.com requesting that they cancel my service and received the automated response only.
The automated response e-mails that you receive from customerservice@sportingnews.com have an address that you can contact if you have not gotten a response in 3-4 days. There is no contact phone number. This address, escalation@sportingnews.com, does not exist. Each time that you send an e-mail to this address, you receive the following error:
From: MAILER-DAEMON@sportingnews.com (Mail Delivery System)
To: jeffmrob@hotmail.com
Subject: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 09:15:39 -0500 (CDT)
This is the Postfix program at host stlmail.sportingnews.com.
I'm sorry to have to inform you that the message returned below could not be delivered to one or more destinations.
For further assistance, please send mail to
If you do so, please include this problem report. You can delete your own text from the message returned below.
The Postfix program
: host public/lmtp[public/lmtp] said:
550-Mailbox unknown. Either there is no mailbox associated with this
550-name or you do not have authorization to see it. 550 5.1.1 User unknown
They have found a way to nickel-and-dime you and made it virtually impossible to cancel your membership. Your only option is to call the credit card company and report them. But then you have to get a new credit card. Many people would not do this to eliminate a $4.99 monthly charge and they know it.
JR
Orlando area, Florida
U.S.A.
1 Updates & Rebuttals
Jeff
Oviedo,Florida,
U.S.A.
Update it was not very user-friendly.
#2Author of original report
Wed, January 05, 2005
I was finally able to cancel my subscription. It required extensive searching of my account information on the website in order to do it. Even for a Senior Software Analyst, it was not very user-friendly.
Also, I never received a response from Customer Service.