RECENT AOL PROBLEMS

To Whom It May Concern:                    2/8/2003  

My wife and I have been subscribers to AOL for several years, always using our account in a wholesome manner.  Suddenly our account is suspended because you have deemed us porn spammers.  It is apparent to me that there was no compromise of our login credentials that caused hundreds of tawdry emails promising “Meet girls in your area for sex tonight” to be sent to annoy still more of your subscribers.  Apparently it is not a difficult task for the true spammers to infiltrate your software to “spoof” a user name and create embarrassing havoc for the innocent. This lapse is unacceptable when your proprietary programming control the interface and what goes in and out.  Certainly AOL should be investing sufficient programming resources to make your application as bulletproof as possible.  

Why do you quickly suspend the account of a longtime subscriber over a single incident which should have aroused an investigation into the circumstances rather than an automatic suspension?  It just took a simple ‘whois’ search to determine that these offensive emails emanated from the domain www.sex2go.com which is registered to:

Sobonito Investments Ltd.

10800 Biscayne Blvd.
Miami, FL 33161

(305) 981 4847  

Why are you not taking issue with this company, a well-known spammer according to this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine? Why is my mailbox inundated with the same obvious scam email and truly offensive porno spam over and over?  Are all those offending accounts suspended or do those too appear as emanating from innocent users like ourselves?  Why, in order to resolve this situation, did I have to spend an hour holding on the phone only to be connected to a shoddy voice over I/P line half a world away?  

Please try to imagine the shock to a longtime customer who first finds themselves locked out of AOL and told to call the “America Online Community Action Team” and after an hour of holding to be told that I “must have sent something to someone that offended them”.  How dare you allow our account which is used for professional correspondence to be hijacked at will by Internet spammers.  Especially when I can be certain that this AOL account has never been used to access “questionable” Internet sites.

 Though I am well aware of the challenges posed in securing as vast a network as AOL manages, if savvy users like us, with up-to-date virus protection and a hardware firewall in place cannot defend us from intrusion when using the AOL interface, what chance does the average user have in protecting themselves from this ugliness? Such nonsense simply shouldn’t overwhelm an organization with a presumably vast array of resources.  

This episode exposes just one more area where AOL’s onetime professionalism has eroded recently.  Over the past couple of years, I have witnessed AOL tech support and customer service continually diminish and fall far short of my expectations.  At one time, when I would call Tech Support, I always got a competent and helpful techie who invariably got the problem resolved, even if it involved talking the user through Windows Registry fixes.  Now we get what sound like canned answers to any question and if you approach a subject like the Windows Registry, you are told that the fix is “much too complicated to explain”.  

Though AOL must take in at least 400 million dollars monthly in subscriber revenue alone, I can’t help but wonder if AOL’s assets aren’t being plundered in some yet to be uncovered scandal.   

Given my experiences of late, it is quite unlikely that we will continue to be AOL subscribers for long.