The 123 Reg Fail Blog

When someone decided to invent 0845 numbers their initial intentions were good, but then mobiles came along and screwed up the whole arrangement. Mobile providers decided to not allow 0845 umbers in their call allowance, so you would get charged a fortune to ring them.

Well sitting on hold for 3 hours can now fall within your allocated call allowance thanks to SayNoto 8070!

Here we are folks, the number for 123-reg – 020 858 77 558

It works as of 16/02/09 as i just called it to check

Companies such as 123-reg get to a stage where they start to think they can do whatever they like. They dictate rules and change things whenever they want. The following story is a situation that arose a while back for me that i am sharing for everyone here. Remember – always check through how your 123-reg control panel is configured else you may encounter something like this happening to you.

We have around 40 domain names in our account, and we probably have at least one come up for renewal every month. Normal procedure for me is to leave it until we have spare cash – and then log in and renew it.

We store our credit card details on there site, so every time we do this or every time we buy a domain name, we do not have to write in all the numbers every time – Its to save US time basically.

Now, we had a .CC domain name that had come up for renewal a month or two ago, and it was gonna cost us over £30 to renew it for one year! So as we were not using it, we decided to leave it and let it expire.

3 days ago we received an email invoice from 123-reg for the .CC domain name?? We logged in, and the .CC domain name was not in our renewal list any more? I checked, and the amount had been taken from our bank and the domain name had been re-registered without us authorising it.

What the hell?

I rang 123-reg and they fobbed me off with some rubbish about auto renewal and how i had stored the credit card details in my account, so in doing so had given them permission to take my money whenever they wanted to? I was under the impression that was for my benefit, not theirs.

English contract law states (basically) that if I don’t say i want something, then i don’t want it!

Why do they send emails out every few days reminding you to renew if they are going to do it for you anyway?  I had even renewed some other domain names and left that one out on purpose! Yet they STILL renewed it and stole my money to pay for it!

I read all the way through their terms and conditions, and there was no mention of this credit card auto renewal thing – no where did it say “if you put your details in, we’ll use them when we want” so in my books that means they cant.

I rang them up again to see if I could speak to someone who wasn’t a total moron, but surprise surprise another moron on the end of the phone saying something that is blatantly written on a bit of paper in front of him. I had enough of them eventually and contacted our bank to make them retract the payment. It basically went on and on but in the end we got locked out of our account and had to pay them to get unlocked. As we have important domain names we didnt want to lose.

In the end they got what they want. Typical!

Send us your 123-Reg stories and maybe together we can get our voice heard!

Oh, if you want to call 123-reg and dont want to pay 10p a minute, then call 02085877558 as this alternative number replaces the old alternative 01782 605 399 number that seems to no longer go anywhere.