Earthlink

About a year ago, a little more, my step-daughter was signed up by Earthlink for an internet account. She was, and is, a minor. Her version is that they cold-called her, she told them she was a minor, and they STILL signed her up. We suspect something slightly different. She tried signing up for an advertised freebie and they didn't bother checking.

We found out because they called us for a credit card number. We discovered this thanks to a message on an answering machine. Naturally, we were pretty angry that they were trying to sign up our underage daughter.

My wife spend hours over several days trying to convey to them that they were breaking the law and needed to take our address and, particularly, our daughter's name, off their list. We specifically told them to delete the account they had created for our underage daughter. Thet promised that they would. We never were sure whether they cold called or if our daughter initiated the situation, but the fact of the matter was they wanted to sign someone up who was not legally able to do so. And they were reluctant to understand that we might be upset at this. By contrast, Time Warner Cable, who was also a part of the offer that was in question, was HORRIFIED that Earthlink was trying to sign up a minor. They said it was completely against all Time Warner policy to do this or to cold call. Earthlink seemed less understanding of the situation, but in the end we conveyed that we wanted to be removed from their list and that our daughter was a minor who should NEVER have been on their list. We thought that was the end of it.