I signed up for the website monitoring service from Pingdom a couple of years ago, as there was a special offer to sign up and use it. I like special offers with online services and sign up to a lot.

One of the things I've learnt to do when you sign up for a special offer is to immediately cancel your subscription because you can often forget and you all of a sudden get billed again and it can be for quite a lot of cash. When I signed up for Pingdom, I was convinced I had cancelled it, but last January they billed me again and despite me communicating with their support desk, there was no getting out of it.

Do you think I didn't just sign in and cancel my subscription? Well, earlier this month Pingdom sent me an email saying it was all automatic - fools, I've got screen shots of me cancelling my subscription - so this time, if they want to go renew my subscription; I'm going to be asking for two years worth of money back and while I've not got proof, my gut is telling me that I did actually cancel the first time round and these people at Pingdom are just scamming me.

I don't know what it is called these days, maybe the Pingdom theory, but years ago it used to be called the Coleman's Mustard theory. Basically Coleman's used to earn more money on what was thrown away, under the rim of the mustard jar, than they did with what the customer actually used. These days, I guess companies like Pingdom, who use this auto-renew feature are making money out of people that have forgotten or those mugs like me that didn't use screen shots the first time round - mostly because you don't think you have to. I don't like scams and this smells of a scam to me.

I've just logged in to my account and it is saying my subscription runs until January 2010, so I took a screen shot, because there is no way they could charge my card as I got a new one a few months ago with new numbers. The one they have on file is dead.

Still, maybe them giving me the extra year is their way of saying sorry for scamming me and getting caught - have another year.