Like scores of others, I have fallen victim to the deceitful practices of a music over the web company, called www.emusic.com
I don't doubt that the company also does legitimate business, but according to a quick research on GOOGLE, the combination of the words emusic and fraud immediately results in 29.000 direct hits!
My personal story with them is as follows:
I have agreed to become their subscriber in November 2007 and after a month cancelled the subscription. I checked and saw that the subscription has, in fact, been discontinued.
What I did not know, and haven't realized until lately, was that they offered the option of a free one month trial, if their services are recommended to a friend so I sent this invitation to my wife. After the free trial expired, they continued billing my credit card until I realized a few days ago that I have been charged over 16 months with a sum of $11.99 each month. Needless to say, that my wife being totally unaware that she is a subscriber has never downloaded one single item during these 16 months!
When I realized what was going on, I immediately contacted them and asked for a full refund, which they flatly denied, having cited their no refund policy. They say that I had pre-agreed to their terms, and that my wife has received a welcome e-mail which explained it all. My wife has, in fact, never received their welcome e-mail, which, (as the company also knows and nowadays even warns about it) usually ends up in the junk folder of spam filters. (By the way, knowing that their mail is seldom delivered, and seeing that not one single piece of music has ever been downloaded by the new subscriber, any company with prudent business practices, would have inquired whether the subscriber knew at all he/she was a subscriber!)
As a proof of their admission of guilt, when I threatened to expose their practices on the internet, they offered a gesture of refunding me one month's charge. When I wrote again and said it was unacceptable even insulting, they made another gesture and offered another month of refund.
I should like to have their deceitful activity stopped, which to me, and to the above quoted victims and to scores of others, seems like an elaborate scam, with malevolent intent aforethought. I have been defrauded for $180, but one has to multiply this sum with the number of customers who have likewise been cheated. Of course, I use the term loosely, because they have, of course, explained everything, and all they do is probably perfectly legal but it does not change the fact that they use legal cover for premeditated deceit.
Janos
Tel Aviv
Israel