It was the hot days of August 2016 and I really wanted to do some cable cord cutting. Cox Communications has a stranglehold on our city for cable and internet, they have managed to successfully stop both Verizon and AT&T from rolling out fiber in our town, but I figured I could at least get away from them for cable TV. I checked out Layer 3 before t-mobile bought them, but the price was high and required internet connection and not the channels I wanted. I looked at YouTube TV, but had the same issue with channels, I even borrowed a Blue Box from a friend, but found the device to be pretty useless. Then I noticed a Sling channel on my Roku (love my Roku by the way, have 3 in my house), so decided to check it out.
Sling has two different channel packages, Orange and Blue, they are $25 per month each (Orange use to be $20, but the price has gone up) or $40 for both, but also require an internet connection to deliver content. It kind of seemed to have what I wanted channel wise and they had a 2 week free trial, so I signed up to try it out. The first problem I had was that the account I signed up with was different than the account my Roku is registered with, so I somehow ended up with two accounts on their system. Like most systems with a free trial, they make you enter your credit card information so they can sign you up. What they don’t do however, is confirm your email address. As a matter of fact, for a system that is collecting payment information, they do virtually nothing to confirm your identity. This might have changed after the stink I made, but it is surely setting themselves up for a lawsuit.
So anyway, we use the system for a few days and basically it doesn’t satisfy our needs. I go in their system and I don’t see any way to actually removing my billing information, but I stop my subscription and you can see that in these screenshots:
So I figure I’m done, and I forget all about it. Skip ahead to 10 months later and I’m looking at my credit card bills because I’d had a fraudulent charge alert and so I went to check it out. Between paperless billing and auto payments it’s easy to miss activity on your card. So guess what I see? 10 months of Sling billing me at $24.99 per months.
So I contact their support, who just argues with me for a while and then says they can refund one, and only one month. It also requires talking to their support people to get them to remove your credit card from their system, once you put it in, you cannot take it out yourself. At no point in that 10 months had they ever sent a bill or a receipt for the charges. All of this sounds pretty damn scammy to me, bordering on illegal. So I escalate it and their escalations team says they can only refund the 1 month. Then I see them advertising on facebook, so I raise a stink on Facebook and they “graciously” refund another 3 months, so now I’m only out $150 for something I didn’t use and I cancelled, instead of $250.
The point of this article is to warn people about the shady setup that Sling has and to convince people not to use their service. Like I said, I raised quite a stink, so it could be that they have modified their system a bit to deal with the glaring flaws in their setup and billing and notification systems. I’ve written a lot of eCommerce systems, and I’m actually shocked their merchant processor even signed them up with the total lack of customer confirmation and notification that is in their system. Beware!