If you’ve bought a vehicle with SiriusXM satellite radio in recent years, you know how this deal was supposed to work: a customer who bought a new van had three months of the service for free to try it out, then the company offered her a 5-month trial subscription at $5 per month. Only something went terribly wrong, and SiriusXM charged her the seemingly random amount of $417. Five times.
There is a big difference between $2,085 and $25. How does that happen? Don’t ask SiriusXM, because they have no idea. They still have no idea even though CBS Sacramento’s consumer reporter, Kurtis Ming, gave them a call about the situation. Usually that prods companies into suddenly remembering what happened, but no such luck for SiriusXM or for their struggling customer.
Yes, struggling. Maybe you can afford to have more than two thousand dollars suddenly vanish from your checking account with no set return date, but she couldn’t. “I have to figure out how to survive until that money goes back into my account,” she told the TV station.
When a company won’t cooperate and repeatedly takes money out of your account that you didn’t agree to, one option is to dispute the charges through your bank if the company won’t listen.
Ultimately, SiriusXM refunded her money, and the satellite radio company and her bank together refunded the overdraft fees that they incurred by overcharging her by fifty times the amount of her subscription. That’s nice. Wouldn’t it be a lot less trouble to just not overcharge her fiftyfold to begin with?
Call Kurtis: SiriusXM Charges Customer 50 Times The Agreed Upon Price [CBS Sacramento]
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist