14 DAY TRIAL // John Christman’s mortgage is due this week, but he is stuck with an empty bank account because either Apple or PayPal charged him 122 times for his single purchase of OS X Lion.
John bough Lion from the Mac App Store on July 23, and paid $31.79 after sales tax, according to a MacRumors post.
For one reason or another, his PayPal account was then charged the $31.79 an additional 121 times. John was soon looking at a bill that showed a bottom line of $3,878.40.
So, naturally, the man called up the two companies to ask what was going on. Unfortunately, no one had any answers for the unfortunate customer.
"Apple Blames PayPal, PayPal blames Apple. They both are claiming to investigate, but I am stuck broke for three days now," said John, who has his own theory about that happened.
He believes the new iCloud feature that allows iTunes to download previous purchases automatically might have something to do with it.
“I fresh installed Lion, because the upgrade caused a lot of problems. My system needed as fresh start anyway,” he says.
“I logged into our developer account and got the latest iTunes Beta, and installed it. iTunes has a cool new feature to download all your purchased apps for you. I clicked download all.”
“As each download started it charged me $31.79. Some apps came fast, some took longer, but the timing was directly related to when a new app started to download,” John observed.
Christman later received his receipt with 121 lines of “refunded” Lion purchases, but the money is still not back on his credit card.
"Apple claims there was only one transaction. When I told PayPal to dispute them, they closed the cases and marked the items as refunded on the 23rd. Bear in mind all this money was taken and never returned yet."
"My mortgage is due in 2 days, and thanks to them, I don't have the money," he tells the aforementioned rumor blog.
According to at least one Apple forum thread, many customers are in the same boat with John.
Have you been mistakenly overcharged for OS X Lion, or any other Mac App Store purchase? Share your story in the comments.
