Karls Blog

I've just had an absolutely terrible experience with Hotkey, and to help other people avoid such an uncooperative ISP, I thought I would share my experience.

In late August 06, I decided to churn from Hotkey to Internode. Sept 5th I became part of the Internode family. Now, reading the churn FAQ on Internode, the idea behind churning is to easily switch from one provider to another, and (in most cases) removing the need to cancel with you old provider:

www.internode.on.net/adsl/faq/churn.htm#1 (see point 1 in the first section)

We are now in January, and I was doing some banking when I noticed that Hotkey was still charging my Visa $230 / month (I was on an unlimited plan). So yesterday I rang and kindly explained that I had churned almost 5 months ago, and given that I had paid almost $1200 for a service that was closed, what we could do to refund my money (I would have been happy with half of it back). The account guy said he would talk to his boss and call me back that afternoon.

No call yesterday so I rang back today. I spoke to another guy explained that apparently something had happened during the churn process and they hadn’t received the notification of the churn. I thought great, that explains why they continued to bill me even after I churned the account. He finished up by saying that ‘management’ was looking into it and would call me back.

I just got the following email:

“In response to your request, we are informing you that as a customer of Hotkey you are bound to our Terms and Conditions which were introduced to you at the time of take over from Dart. As a result, all account closures must be requested in writing with 30 days notice, therefore we will not refund any payments made prior to your call.”

Not even the courtesy of a phone call to explain what happened!!! No attempt at a mutually beneficial outcome. No money back what-so-ever!!! These thieves just brushed the issue under the rug even though (from what I was told) it was an issue at their end!!!!

Moral of the story is…

AVOID HOTKEY AT ALL COSTS!