News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

July 14, 2008

troubleshooting

MobileMe free trials quite costly for some

Posted Jul. 14, ’08, 3:18 PM PT by Thomas Gagnon-van Leeuwen
Category | Troubleshooting

MobileMe’s rollout has been bumpy, to say the least, due to many outages and sporadic slowness. What else could go wrong? How about charging users that sign up for free trial accounts?

Yeah, not so good. See, anyone could sign up for a .Mac trial, but MobileMe requires valid credit card information. If you fail to cancel your account before the 60 days is up, Apple will charge your credit card and you’ll have a 1-year subscription. In theory, nothing to worry about.

But TG Daily is reporting that many users, especially in Europe, are getting their credit cards charged right when they sign up for a free trial, and often even more that the price of a MobileMe subscription. In this Apple support thread, most users in the UK report getting charged £121 (MobileMe costs £59) and elsewhere in Europe, that number is €99 (MobileMe costs €79 there). They also claim the amount is not simply reserved, but indeed charged.

Have you been affected by this? If you have, it seems the only solution is to email Apple from the MobileMe support page (using your local Apple.com), as the problem apparently can’t be fixed by phone. We can only hope Apple fixes this very soon.


4 Comments

PT said:

Always watch out for "free", even if you are a hardcore Apple fanboy.

July 14, 2008 4:40 PM
Giotto said:

If that turns out to be true, it's a deep black week in Apple's history.

So many desasters in one week aren't acceptable.

Imagine, this happened to MS...

July 15, 2008 1:31 PM
Richard Harvey said:

I tried to sign up for a free trial as well with my "credit" card ("credit" as in that it doesn't actually have credit but it directly linked to my bank account), thinking that I'll sign up for the trial and then pay the €79 when I can afford it, since my account had around €50 on it. No go, signup failed, card not accepted.

I knew there was something fishy about the process, this just confirms it...

July 15, 2008 11:58 PM
Richard Harvey said:

The signup seems to work now, though.

July 16, 2008 12:01 AM

Leave a comment

 



Visit other IDG sites: