How Dare Neopets Freeze Me by Trish Brooks

I read your article today (Ziggy), I was frozen several days ago with the message attached. The message is clear that they do not feel I did anything to break the rules, but still says they will not return my account of five years to me even if I was scammed. I am a pay customer and I am beyond furious. I am in the process of creating a web site.

I have secured the domain frozenandfurious.web.com. I am mad enough now that I have already filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau covering Neopets and canceled my premium service and I have informed them that I plan on running a very aggressive campaign to change the way this site is run, the letter I faxed to them, their parent company Viacom, and plan on forwarding to every site sponsors is as follows:

Neopets/Customer Retention (If You Even Have This Department)
412 W. Broadway
Suite 303
Glendale, CA 91204
September 8, 2008

To Whom It May Concern,

I, and my children, have had accounts on the Neopets web site for five years and in the past six months have actively used our accounts. We have purchased products to redeem prize codes and I had even upgraded to a one year membership with the premium service to enhance my online experience.

Understand that I am not some illiterate woman on welfare with nothing better to do, I am a professional single mother of two kids that attend a private college prep school. We participate in Neopets because it has always seamed like inexpensive fun that allows us to escape from the stress of our everyday lives, but the actions taken by your website this weekend has totally changed the way all of us feel about this site and has ended all three of our participation forever.

I have cancelled the premium service and none of us will use this website again. Further more I will spend the extra time educating parents that the news programs that have already been aired claiming these sites encourage children to scam and cheat and hold no real valuable learning experiences for them, are absolutely true.

This weekend my account was frozen with a message that I may have fallen for a scam or a fake login page.

Now understand, I am a 39 year old professional woman managing a multi-million dollar company, not some college kid that is having some fun with programming, creating bots to play the game and figuring out how to create codes to cheat the game or taking any actions to capitalize on bugs in your system. In fact, if you review my account history, when you had a bug in your system that left consumed items in your inventory, I actually sent in a bug report to have it repaired instead of going out and buying expensive items that I could use but then keep to re-sell.

The fun of playing was to see what I could accomplish, not how much I could have if I cheated. I know for a fact that my account was not frozen for anything I did and that my account was compromised, but your lack of response has been nothing but disgusting.

This happened at 1:30 in the morning on a Sunday, but of course no one is available to speak to then. TNT has always claimed that these freezes are done by a person, not an automated system, but this person is not available, and in fact no-one has been available to answer any questions for two days now.

Not knowing what had happened and now still being concerned that this person now has my email address, home address, phone number, and my credit card information as I was required to provide these things when registering for Portal service, I had to cancel my credit card and replace all of my other personal and email accounts with new passwords. I expected to have an answer when the office for portal opened on Sunday morning, but that did not happen.

Your Portal staff member informed me that they had no real knowledge of anything on the Neopets system and that I was just paying them for an email account that only Neopets emailed me on, are you really kidding me? I informed Julio that Neopets had never required my real information, that only the portal system had required I provide this information and that I needed to know if my password and account had been compromised, but still was not given an answer. Apparently you have no real concern for anyone who has been scammed and feel no obligation to protect your customers personal information which really speaks volumes about Neopets, Inc.

Now as I have already explained to you, I am a business professional, not a welfare mother with nothing better to do, so this is simply not acceptable. I provided YOU with information that gave people access to my personal information and when your staffer chose to freeze a paid account, they should be required to notify the owner of that account that their information has been compromised.

I do happen to know that this happened to at least one other paid member in my guild, which means that this scam targeted those of us that had our personal information on your system. This same person got the same password scamming email, very first email I got to PAY for, the day they signed up for portal, an email I sent to Neopets with no response, so my account status was public the day I gave you my credit card information.

I no longer even want my account back and have un-installed every application and web link associated with Neopets from my computer. My kids have not been on either, why bother if you can simply be kicked out even when you have done nothing wrong. No reason, Just a rude message saying that if you were scammed and fell for a fake log-in, go to hell, we don’t really care.

Now I spent a great deal of time on Neopets over the past six months but now I will re-focus that energy into protecting children from a system that teaches them the value of scamming and cheating and will do little to nothing to protect them if this happens to them. As I paid for the opportunity to have you let my personal information be compromised, I will be filing with the better business bureau in Glendale today, and will concentrate my efforts and time on spreading the word on the internet about how this site operates and how they totally disregard the safety and privacy of their customers.

In this day and age when a company such as yours is out to market to our children but then does nothing to protect their users, they really need to re-examine their business goals. The news reports on this site, as well as Webkins, were absolutely on spot. You encouraged cheating and manipulation and do little to help those that this has happened to.

When You examine my Neopets account you will find that I have never broken a rule and have paid money out of pocket to use your system as well as buying products and even participated in your mall tour back in 2004. Myself and my two children may not impact your marketing as a group of three that have removed ourselves from your site, but I will make certain that word gets out and my story is told to all who will listen as your customers need to know how little you respect your paying customers and how incompetent you are when it comes to protecting their personal information!

Also understand a copy of this letter along with all of my personal contact information will be forwarded to every current sponsor of your site and past sponsor, including Target, Tyson, Topps Candy, well I could spend hours listing these, I will take the time and they will get the letter. They will be able to contact me personally to know that I am who I say I am and that this is how your site treats their customers. That may not have an impact on your marketing but maybe they will take the time to search the web for the myriad of complaints levied against your site and think twice about whether or not they want their product associated with this corporation.

In closing I want to say that I never really understood why people who were wrongly frozen just walked away, even when their account was returned to them, but now I know. The self-righteous indignation I feel right now about the treatment I have received from a Website that I have supported for five years and even paid for, even two days after this incident occurred, has provided me with enough anger to no longer want anything to do with your site. I will focus that energy though into something productive, warning others not to let their kids end up feeling the way you have made me fee and making sure all of your sponsors are aware of how you treat your long term paying customers. I am an adult, I can get over this and realize I am really probably stupid for wasting any time on this site. This kind of thing could devastate a child, parents need to know what they are signing their kids up for and I am going to make sure they all find out! – Patricia Brooks

Cc/Regular Postal, Cc/Email

I have to be honest with you, I no longer want the account back, now I am going to see that this poor treatment of those that support this site is stopped so “frozen and furious’ is going to be designed to call attention to the treatment of these moderators of their paying, and non-paying customer base.

It will have a section for people to tell their personal experience with TNT and their accounts as well as the contact information for sponsors of the Neopets site so they can know how the Neopets customers are treated and how they are not protected from scams that the TNT in aware of. It will give those that have been treated unfairly the opportunity to let these sponsors know that if they continue to support this site while it treats it’s customers this way, the customers will in fact boycott their products.

These sponsors need to know what kind of operation they are giving their money to. I know for a fact that two of the paying Neopians in my guild had the same scam freeze their accounts that night so the accounts targeted were premium accounts and Neopets has done nothing to rectify the situation. I will also have a link to The Better Business Bureau in Glendale so people can file on-line complaints. it will have links to the many reputable sources, including Wikapedia, that site TNT as being so over-zealous about account freezing that in fact they estimate 45 percent of all accounts are frozen, and by bots, not a real person, with no real person their to repair the damage done.

I don’t know if this site will be of interest to you or your readers but I wanted to pass it along, instead of investing my time in making Neopoints for nothing, I am going to see just how big of a change one person can effect on a large company. I am going to see how much money I can cost Neopets until they stop this unprofessional and totally outrageous nonsense because now that I am over being wrapped up in Neopets, I will have a lot of free time on my hands. Let me know if you would like me to email you when I get this site up and running.

http://www.la.bbb.org/Home.aspx (Better Business Bureau in their area)

I understand if you do not want to get involved, you don’t want to get frozen out of revenge but I just thought I would email you so you knew someone was trying to make them change this behavior. – Trish Brooks