Hi Everyone,
I need help how to take this further, please, because what this big company does is plain wrong. This would affect lots of people, I’m sure.
The scenario: I had auto renew turned off (acknowledged by Crazy Domains) but they auto renewed 2 domains anyway. Here is their reason: I should have gone to a second page to unclick the assigned credit card, only then would auto renew not have happened.
On the main page, where one makes the selection of renew or not it says “Enable/disable auto-renewal for future purchases. Auto-renewal is highly recommended to ensure that your domain, website or service is protected against expiration, deletion, or falling into redemption. If you choose to disable auto-renewal, you will be responsible for manually renewing your services before they expire.”
The Domain person I spoke to acknowledged that it’s not right the way it’s set up. When I click disable and it says disabled, that’s all it should need. But that is not how they are doing it.
Any suggestions to where can I take this, please?
PS When I checked that auto renew was turned off, it showed 3 active domains, which I thought was weird. So I went into the credit card details, and because I couldn’t delete the card, put a wrong expiration date and code in, just to make sure. They charged me anyway. That too is wrong.
Hi @sbollnow, welcome to the community.
I interpret what you have written is you didn’t want to renew the domains, and the way the Crazy Domains website is constructed it is confusing or potentially misleading in relation to how to turn off auto-renewals. As a result you have paid for something (domain renewal) which you didn’t want.
If this is the case, you would have grounds to ask for a refund. This will however mean your domains won’t be renewed with Crazy Domains and will expire - unless you register them elsewhere and pay relevant fees and charges.
In relation to confusing and potentially misleading website, it appears that you have done all that you reasonably can, that being yiu have notified the website owner of the problem which they seem to acknowledge exists. Hopefully they will resolve in the future. Posting in the Choice Community also makes others aware of the problem you encountered. If they don’t resolve the problem, it could impact on their reputation and future success with new customers.
In relation to a credit card with wrong expiry and CVV, a transaction won’t be processed unless they are correct - this is a basic first step security measure. If you had entered them correctly, it may have been verified by Crazy Domains as a valid credit card and though you tried to amend the details, since the card details had been verified these would be locked in until other credit card details are used and can be verified to replace the existing ones. If the wrong credit card details were deliberately entered, this isn’t possible.
Thank you for your reply.
I did ask for a refund and they denied that. They have also made clear they are not changing what they are doing. They see no wrong in that. The misleading must make them a lot of money.
Try putting it in writing and quote the Australian Consumer Law in relation to misleading…
In particular the section on ‘What claims are illegal?’.
If you had enjoyed the benefits of auto-renewing your domains, such as tried to ask for a refund after many months from the renewal and the domains had been used, you may struggle in getting a refund as they will argue you have enjoyed/used the service subject of the auto-renewal. This would be considered potentially similar to a change in mind.
If it was immediately after an auto-renewal (say within a month which is a standard credit card statement period), since they have acknowledged they are aware of the problem they should refund the renewal fees as the domain renewal isn’t required. If you need the domains and it is auto-renewal which is the issue (you need to renew the domains but prefer to do it manually), then this is more challenging as you will be trying to argue you don’t need something which in fact you do, and it is the auto-renewal, not the renewal per say which is the issue.
Have you also terminated the auto-renewal? Doing so shows you have no interest in dealing with them in the future and you no longer wish to renew with them.
I should also say that many domain registries offer auto-renewals as it can be catastrophic for a business to lose their domain due to expiry taking place. Our own domain registry strongly recommends auto-renewals as a result to reduce likelihood of unintended expiries occurring.
The downside is one needs to terminate the auto-renewals should circumstances relating to the domain change (selling domain related business, changing business name/domain, ceasing need for domain etc).
I alerted them within 1 hour of receiving the successful renewal notice in my inbox. They still refused and stand by a no refund policy, not acknowledging that a non automatic renewal should be just that.
They have made it very clear in their last email that the matter is closed for them. As they have millions of customers, I wonder how often this happens.
And yes, I agree with you, generally it’s a wonderful thing that auto renewal exists.
I stopped auto renewal by using an old card number. Crazy domains also have a bad habit of renewing hosting long before it expires and will repeatedly send emails with ever more urgent messages. I’m delighted to be rid of them.
You get what you pay for - low prices and high volume and poor customer service and, apparently, a poorly designed web site. The internet seems to suggest that it is called Crazy Domains because the poor customer service drives you crazy. 
Looking at ProductReview, it seems that Crazy Domains is very polarising. A large number of customers are completely satisfied - because nothing went wrong - and a large number of customers are sh*tting bricks - because something went wrong and Crazy Domains did not fix the problem. And nothing in between.
To err is human - things will go wrong. The measure of good customer service is owning the problem and fixing it in a timely fashion. (As a case in point, I had a similar problem with a completely different company where something renewed that was not supposed to renew. I rang them up and pointed out their error and within a few hours the transaction was reversed on my credit card. That’s what good customer service looks like.)
One thing to bear in mind … if you are leaving Crazy Domains then they don’t have as much incentive to keep you personally happy. There’s just not enough dollars involved here for them to bother to attempt to win you back.
However you haven’t made it exactly clear in your post what you are actually doing - moving all domains? moving some domains? letting all domains lapse? letting some domains lapse?
As @phb says, your next option is quoting the ACL at them.
We are probably talking a relatively small sum of money so there is only so much that it is worthwhile doing.
Assuming no satisfactory resolution, I would make a point of complaining to the Fair Trading body in your state or territory so that they at least have visibility of the extent of complaints i.e. to highlight the problematic companies and the problematic industries.
