I want to share a small story of something that just happened to me, in the hope that it will prevent others falling into the same trap. I have been using an online game rental company for a while to rent Xbox360 games. I’m sure you know the kind of deal, pay xx amount a month and rent as many games as you want in the time but you can only have one out at a time. The company in question is called www.swapgame.com.

All was well until I decided to cancel the account as I didn’t feel I was using it enough and not getting my money’s worth. Now I had no real concerns at the time as I had also recently cancelled my Amazon DVD rental service and it was a totally painless exercise. With Amazon all I needed to do was fill in the online cancellation form, Amazon cleared out my waiting list and gave me a date by which I had to return my last hired out item, couldn’t be simpler.

So with this confidence I tried the same cancellation with swapgame, I filled in the online cancellation form and was told that I couldn’t cancel as I had a game out for rental. Hmm, I though if I just sent the game back they would send out another so the first thing I had to do was manually clear my rental queue, painfully one item at a time. So I cleared the queue and packed up the game I had in THEIR return envelope and sent it off. Now I just needed to wait for confirmation of the return and cancel the account.

And so I waited and I waited and then an email come through, notifying me of the next months charges just being taken. Naturally I was pretty annoyed by this so I logged into my account to see what was going on. I tried to cancel again using my account page and was told that I could not because I still had a game out, so I looked at my current rental list and nothing was showing. So I saw no other choice but to email the company.

Eventually days and days later I received an email stating that I hadn’t received the disk back and to cancel I would have to pay them the cost price of the game (£19.85) unless I could produce proof of postage. Apparently somewhere in the small print there’s a statement about getting proof of postage for returns, not that you’d know in they’re poorly laid out system. Of course I as any normal human being didn’t have the proof of postage as it never even occurred to me that I would need one. This was my mistake to assume that other companies would be as reliable as the likes of Amazon.

So after an email exchange with me expressing my disgust given the fact that I’ also jut paid £10 for a months service that I didn’t need they offered to combine the months rental with an additional £9.86 charge to cover the cost of the game. This they actually considered to be a fair deal. So here I am totally ripped off to the tune of £20 without a leg to stand on.

My advice is to be wary of the small print of these rental services as you can end up out of pocket when the post office makes a mistake, and to stick with the bigger better known companies like Amazon instead of the small unreliable vendors.