2008-09-08

Alzheimer or a Skype mistake?

Yesterday i received the following e-mail from Skype:
Your credit balance has expired. 
=== What are the rules for credit expiry? ===
  1. credit expires 180 days after your last purchase or action that used credit.
  2. Each purchase, call or SMS message resets the expiry time to 180 days.
  3. Unfortunately, if you don't use your remaining credit the balance will expire to comply with normal business accounting rules.
  4. You will receive reminder emails 30 days, 7 days and 72 hours before your credit expires.
I don’t contest the rules, although I don’t think the “to comply with normal business accounting rules” is a mandatory rule, and it isn’t a very customer-friendly rule anyway. Lucky for me that my Bank hasn’t the same policy.
And it were only some €-cents left on a spare account that I only use for testing.

What is more disturbing is the “30 days, 7 days and 72 hours” reminders. I DON’T REMEMBER HAVING RECEIVED ANY REMINDERS! Alzheimer on my side or a Skype mistake? I any case there is a justified reason for concern!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

We’ve identified a bug in the system which deals with Skype Credits, which meant that some users didn’t receive their notification emails as normal.

It sounds like you’ve been affected by this, and I’ve asked the customer support team to take a look – I’ll let you know as soon as I have more information.

Jean Mercier said...

Thanks for the response Peter!

Anonymous said...

Had the same issue.
And I also thought of Alzheimer.
It was just around 2$ I think and I got it
for free. But it was nice to have it, just in case...

harry57575

Jean Mercier said...

Hello Harry,

on my side it seems the problem has been resolved, because some weeks ago i got notifications of credit cancellation on the same account where i had the problem (because Skype refunded me, with one month validity!).

Anonymous said...

What Peter Parkes didn't say is that the expired credits practice is illegal in several US States including the state of Washington which currently has a major class action lawsuit against the company for the practice. Another one is brewing in the state of California: http://www.kbklawfirm.com/skype/

Jean Mercier said...

Hello Anonymous (and why do so many people prefer to stay anonymous?),

Thanks for the information, very interesting and very "American".

If they win they will probably try to get 1 million times the value of the losses as a compensation, and perhaps they will get 100 times the lost money.

In Europe, we laugh with these insane American lawsuits, one of the most known ones being the "cat in the microwave" story.

Honestly, i hope Skype loses the lawsuit, but i hope the judge uses the "European" way of calculating: damage + interests for the period that the money should have been paid + the costs of the lawsuit! This would be honest!