Why just go when you can Boingo? Just be careful you don’t go when you don’t want to!

This morning, I was reading Bob Lawless’ post on Creditslips about his own tale of bad things that can happen with credit cards (see Unauthorized Charges Go Wild on Me). Bob’s tale reminded me of a nagging matter of my own that I’d found on my checking account statement this week for a $15.90 charge to my debit card for Boingo Wireless. Back in February, I created a Boingo Wireless account while travelling back from the AALS Contracts Conference so that I could use the Internet at the airport. Fortunately, I don’t travel too often because the Boingo service would log me on and charge my debit card whenever I visited anywhere with service. So, when I stayed at the Marriott Residence Inn in Pittsburgh recently, Boingo charged me for two days of service even though the wired Internet service I used was free at the Residence Inn.

Boingo does not send invoices, so unless you check your credit/debit card statements, you are not likely to notice the charges or any errors. Boingo uses another little trick that Bob mentioned . . . they keep the charges small. They never charged me more than $15.90 at one time and spread them out over time.

Inspired by Bob Lawless, I called the Boingo folks this morning (and removed the software from my computer). Knowing my travel history, I kindly explained that this must be a billing error. The first line representative I spoke with employed the “confuse the caller” tactic by discussing the initial set up of the account back in February. Then, she explained their method of billing whereby charges are not made at the time of usage, but later. I call this the “confuse the user” tactic to make it hard for customers to know what charges relate to what days you might have used the Boingo service. She finally agreed to send me an invoice. Then we arrived at the heart of the matter, the Residence Inn charges. I explained to her that the Residence Inn provides free Internet, there would be no reason to need the Boingo service.

Here’s where we arrive at the automatic login feature that Boingo has. Once installed on your computer, Boingo is always looking for service for you. And, it saves your sign-in information conveniently for you. Since the customer signs up for the service which enables the “easy” re-login on other dates, you have used the service and the charge is valid. The customer must pay. At that point, I requested a supervisor, who told me the same story. When I raised issues about whether this results in truly “authorized” charges to credit/debit cards, whether Boingo was misusing customer credit cards, and fraudulent charging of cards, the supervisor immediately agreed to refund my money (and close my account). Not sure how good my claims were, but the Boingo supervisor had surely heard them before. Next time, my desperation for Internet service will have to give way to my fear of others automatically hitting any of my accounts. "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The morality of some vendors surely lessens once we give them our card data.