don’t ever use Boingo if you can avoid it

I haven’t mentioned lately how much I despise Boingo wireless service, which has a wifi monopoly in London Heathrow, Chicago O’Hare, and some other airports. They don’t do honest business.

For one thing, their signup pages have such misleading wording that even a skeptical professor of philosophy can fall into the trap of accidentally signing up for perpetual monthly service.

What they do is give you the explicit option to sign up for either one day of service or the ongoing monthly plan. You click for today only and you think the issue is settled. Then, after you enter your credit card information, they send you a gently friendly message saying something like “we highly recommend that you sign up for our automatic Boingo server alert,” or something like that. The impression they give is that you’re just signing up for some sort of innocuous alert service. But then there’s fine print of the sort that most of us never read, and buried in that fine print is a notification that you’re about to sign up for the monthly service.

It’s a reprehensible modified bait-and-switch operation. You feel like you’ve already clearly expressed that you only want to buy service for today and after that you never wish to hear from them again. But once you’ve cleared that hurdle, they sneak you back into the fold after you’ve already declined their larger package.

By the time I checked my credit card bill carefully, they’d already charged me for something like 4 months. I asked them to erase all those charges since clearly I had never used the service again, but of course they wouldn’t.

And now I’m facing another possible stunt from them. During that long flight delay in Chicago in June I had no choice but to use those Boingo chumps again. This time I was careful to read all of the fine print and not sign up for anything. But I still can’t be sure of what they’re up to, those manipulating crooks. They never sent me my user name and password, and damned if I remember them from June, and thus I can’t check my account on their website. So they may yet sneak some more charges in on me this time.

At any rate, Boingo is a scummy, manipulative company, and I suppose Heathrow and O’Hare must be getting some sweet kickbacks from them. Congratulations on earning a dishonest living, Boingo.

Their address is listed as: “10960 Wilshire Blvd. Suite 800, Los Angeles, CA,” which sounds just like the address of a Raymond Chandler villain.

At moments like this I often fantasize about an alternative life as a vicious Attorney General tearing out the throats of gougers and misleaders. I’d be really tough. These scum-scraping Three-card Monte dealers would be obliterated in my world.

It’s not that difficult a principle: provide an honest service for a fair price.