I have just filed a report with the FBI's Internet Fraud Division. I did this onliine at
www.ic3.gov. I've also sent an indepth email to AOL's Network Operations Center.
Nothing will ever get corrected unless multiple people are complaining.
So, I'd like you to do the following steps. Be sure that you refer to
www.portraitartist.com even if you have your own domain so that parties that read various complaints can connect them. In fact, if you have your own domain and are a full client of SOG, it would be better to state that your url is
www.portraitartist.com/lastname instead of
www.yourdomain.com.
1. If you have made tech support calls to AOL regarding this matter, call 888-265-3733 and ask for the dates of your tech support calls. Write these down.
Yes, you'll likely get India and have to wait 15-20 minutes, but we need to make waves.
2. Send an email to:
AOL Network Operations Center at
[email protected] and
AOL Legal Department at
[email protected]
As I understand it, their service to you has something of a contractual nature and though they surely have a disclaimer saying they can not guarantee 100% up time, we are talking about a different situation here. Regardless, we want to make waves.
Extract what is relative from my email to NOC below. Add in data relevant to your situation, such as the dates of your tech support calls, if any. If you have never called tech support, you might want to try doing it at least one time.
Please copy me in your email. As well as referring to www.portraitartist.com also include my name. At the time I emailed them I had not yet filed a complaint with the FBI, so the complaint number is not in my email, but you might want to include it for greater clout - see number below. I would suggest that you keep in your email the information about the other sites that cannot be accesssed. Take each site, try it in AOL and then try it in Internet Explorer so that you can attest that they don't work in AOL and do in IE.
3. Go to
www.ic3.gov and file a complaint online with the FBI Internet Fraud Division. If you would like a copy of my complaint, please email me and I can send it to you.
Please refer to my complaint number I04113011135219. At the end of the submission, you will be given a complaint number also. Please keep a record of it. In fact, I printed out my complaint pages just before the submit button and then printed one page after that because it contained the complaint number.
4. I have two phone numbers that are apparently not to AOL's normal tech support. They were given to me by St. Louis Internet and at least one is probably to the Network Operations Center. In any conversation, you can count on AOL saying it is not their problem, so you must be very tough and you must demand that this problem be escalated if the person to whom you are speaking gives you no satisfaction. (703) 265-4662 and (703) 265-6942
The more people complaining about the same thing, the more chances they will listen.
Hey Steven, you're an attorney. Bet you could compose a killer communication to their legal department. Please?? I know you've had this problem also.
Anyway, here's the email I sent to NOC. You could also add the following in the list of sites you tried in AOL that did not work, but did in IE (after you've tried them in both, of course):
www.leonloard.com
www.johnhowardsanden.com,
www.asopa.com
www.portraitclubs.com
www.portraitinstitute.com:
Quote:
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
I am a former AOL customer (short term), a web designer of 8 years and I have all my websites hosted at St. Louis Internet (name servers: 65.127.236.2 & 65.127.236.3). I am writing to initiate the handling of an ongoing problem some of my clients using AOL are experiencing. However, I wanted to first explain the siituation since they are not as technically knowledgeable.
Though I have designed other sites, the focus of my business is www.portraitartist.com (ip address 199.217.241.56), where I have over 100 clients. For more than a year now, some clients on this website who also use AOL for internet connection complain about not being able to access my sites hosted at St. Louis Internet when using AOL. They are, however, able to access the sites when they use Internet Explorer.
I have focused on working with the most vocal of my clients to try and resolve the problem. Typically, he gets tech support in India on the phone, he is then told to reinstall the adapter and clear cache. This never works. Previously, he was able to access my site about 50% of the time thru AOL under his previous version. Recently, he upgraded to the most current version and he writes the following (SOG stands for the name of my website - A Stroke of Genius):
I've just upgraded(?) to the "AOL 9.0 Security" version. Before, the problem of accessing the SOG sites was intermittent. I could log off and back on again (it might take 2-4 times) and I could finally gain access.
Since my upgrade this morning I have not been able to gain access to any SOG sites through AOL, no matter how many times I log off and on.
As an experiment, I also had this same client, Mike McCarty (AOL name: Momccarty), try to access other sites hosted at St. Louis Internet using AOL. I gave him the following sites and none were accessible with AOL, but all are up and running and are accessible using Internet Explorer. Interestly, St. Louis Internet does not provide the DNS service for newground.com.
st-louis.net A 199.217.188.241
autotire.com A 199.217.241.94
newground.com A 65.127.236.132
meltonmachine.com A 207.150.154.139
leonloard.com
asopa.com
I have discussed this matter at length with my hosting company, St. Louis Internet (about 40 emails), and the bottom line is that these are all active sites that are accessible thru any method except using AOL software.
Considering that normal tech support has not assisted in this after many attempts from me and from my client Mike McCarty, I'd like to have this problem escalated to the highest level necessary to solve the problem.
Since I am no longer an AOL customer, I would be happy to have Mike McCarty contact you. Before that, can you issue a support ticket number which I will relay to him so when he calls, he can refer to that ticket number and not have to re-explain everything.
Also, in this case, what phone number should he call so he does not have to go thru the normal level of tech support, which never resolves anything?
You can read about this ongoing problem on the Forum on my website. Mike McCarty's comments and others are here: http://forum.portraitartist.com/show...?t=4010&page=1
I realize this might take a little time to plow through the information, however I look forward to hearing from someone in a timely manner.
Best regards,
Cynthia Daniel
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