Answers?

Here’s the scenario. We were trying to recover access to a Facebook account that hadn’t been used for some time. Normally this wouldn’t be that difficult — Facebook has a “recover password” process. However, we no longer had access to the original email address (an old work account) and as far as we knew there was no mobile phone number associated with the account.

After wading through numerous Facebook help pages we somehow ended up on a support chat allegedly at Facebook. After a few questions the Facebook agent referred us to a JustAnswers.com link which would cost us $5 to access with the assurance that this was fully refundable. Hopefully this would provide answers.

After following the link and signing up for a JustAnswers.com account we went through the process of explaining the problem again. JustAnswers response was to forward links to Facebooks help pages and regurgitate many of the same responses we received from Facebook. I’m pretty certain that through the entire process we were dealing with automated attendants. We didn’t get any useful information or answers to our questions — just canned responses.

To add further insult to the process, JustAnswers.com signed us up for a $66/month subscription without adequately informing us. We believe we were able to cancel the monthly subscription but will have to follow up. We didn’t see any mention of the “fully refundable” $5 payment.

The ethics of these sorts of services is murky. They provide an illusion of support and potentially entrap users into expensive services that are marginally useful. As consumers and customers we need to have ways to hold these companies to account but that seems too much to hope for.

Have you had experiences like these with Facebook or JustAnswers?