Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Datapacket credit card disputes

[Mivo]

Belatedly I would like to report my experience with Datapacket.net (DPN / Brinet).

July 2, 2001 -- DPN advertised for an NT reseller package $39.95 per month. Part of the offer was a 30 day money back guarantee

July 3, 2001 -- I ordered the package by filling up their online order form.
July 4, 2001 -- My credit card was charged for $38.95.
July 15, 2001 -- My credit card was charged again for $39.95 (I knew of this only in August when my credit card billing arrived)

July 31, 2001 -- I sent e-mail to cancel my account.

Sometime in August I requested a chargeback for both charges. The July 15th charge was unauthorized and the July 4th charge was covered by a 30 day money back guarantee.

Now it's last week of October and I received a copy Datapacket's letter to the CC company requesting to honor their charges for the following reason:

For the July 4th charge, they claim that it was not covered by the guarantee:

"We only offer customers their money back if we fail to provide the service to our best abilities and 'not' for buyer's remorse or for any other reason."

Really? Their server was down and up down and up the whole time I was with them and they've been doing to the "best of their abilities"?

For the July 15th charge, they claim that it was covered by the Service Agreement I "signed" and they sent a copy of a Service Agreement signed by someone else and dated June 27, 2001, one week before they ran their ad on WHT and one week before I placed my order. I never signed a contract with Datapacket. Also on the Service Agreement, even if it was valid, it never say that they can charge credit cards at will and at anytime so the July 15th charge was not covered at all even by that contract.

For them (Brian Bennett) to contest their charges of July 15th is really out of this world.

There have been so many people on WHT that took a ride with DPN. Those who still remain with them need to be very careful.

[kaz]

DPN shouldn't be on this board. They are a company that only cheat your money and make you pay advance one month billing for their service. Stay away from DPN!

[choon]

It is so sad to hear such a hosting company like this

Choon

[Ericwenlong]

Is DPN still on this board?


Regarding the illegal charge to your CC , you can always request a chargeback for something you are not consuming or have not agreed to pay to. That's illegal billing. No doubt you will win the chargeback.

[Aristo]

Man.... I almost signed up with them.

[Mivo]

If you search "DPN + fraud" you'll get 5 threads on this board that both contain those words (maybe six now including this one).

There is one more thing I haven't mentioned above. On his letter to my CC company on why his charge on July 15th should be honored, Brian Bennett said:

"I hope the card-issuing bank will monitor their cardholder more carefully in the future. Fraud is a crime".

Funny.

[Aristo]

Would you recommend some ISP that offers the similiar feature as DPN? Thanks!

[checkall]

Datapacket.net is run by a person who is very unhonest. Unlimited domains, unmitered disk space and bandwidth, whatever claimed unlimited or unmetered... all are lies.

The purpose of the reseller hosting plan he has designed is to force you purchase his very expensive dedicated server. How? When you get a few ten resold accounts, he'll cancel your account for sure. If you have charged your customer annual fee and receive cancellation, what's your choices? 1) Run out of business in just a few months and refund all money back to your customers; 2) order his server - $750 setup fee and $650 monthly fee.

Here is the email we received on Oct. 5, 2001: "Due to a recent company re-structure and account review we regret to inform
you that at the end of your billing cycle approximately Oct 30, 2001 your
account is scheduled for cancellation. Your subscription for payment has
already been canceled.

We urge you to take the proper steps to move your web sites away from our
network during this time frame."

Here is his offer to solve our problem: "We currently offer managed servers that are at least 950MHZ, 384Mb of ram,
30Gb hard drive. You receive our control panel free with the administration
options which will allow you to offer reseller options like the plan you are
currently under to your customers as well as the regular hosting options
like what you offer to your users.

Basically everything is the same as what you currently have except for the
master control panel server controls and of course you have the server all
to yourself. There are no limitations on the amount of domains you can host
on it as it would be your server so you can do as you wish.

The price is $650 per month with 100GB of bandwidth. One time setup fee of
$750. The server is setup to cater to clients that are web hosts which is a
major advantage.


Brian"

We chose to colo our own servers with another datacenter and planed to move all customers to them before the end of October, 2001. You know what? Read on...

We received his email on Oct. 16, 2001: "Your user "moncredo" has been removed from our network for violating our
acceptable usage policy. All network users are bound to our acceptable usage
policy which can be found here. http://www.datapacket.net/wterms.htm.

Continued abuse of our network may result in full account termination."

Did moncredo.com violate the policy? No! DPN could not give out any fact when we requested evidence. Brain Brinet then removed all accounts (around 50 accounts and less than 80 domains and subdomains hosted, total disk space less than 300 MB) on Oct. 18, 2001.

Here is how we were charged:
July 15, 2001 signup, $49.95
July 18, 2001, we received account activation email from DPN
Aug. 8, 2001, our credit card was charged $49.95
Sept. 1, 2001, DPN charged us $49.95
Sept. 24, 2001, we were forced to pay DPN $49.95 through
PayPal
Oct. 5, 2001, DPN refunded $24.95 through PayPal

So when we were removed off the server on Oct.18, DPN over charged us some money.

If you don't want to be burned like us, you'd better stay away from DPN.

If you have been burned by DPN, please report your complaints against DPN to PayPal, because PayPal continuously supports this lier and allows him to stay and to keep cheating people, and also refuses to give us any refund. You need to do something to help PayPal know his real face.

We feel sorry we used to give DPN one positive comment on this forum, misleading some readers to order DPN's " service". Soon or later they'll ge burned for sure.