Lately, I have noticed some companies that have started crossing the line into outright fraudulent business practices, and believe that it is important that we are aware who these companies are.
I first noticed it with e-on software, owned by Bentley Systems. They sent me a direct mail asking for money, in return for the next major version of their software Vue. They never delivered the software, and refused to refund the money.
Recently Unity are starting to make it clear that they have chosen the same fraudulent path. I received a notification about a payment made to Unity, and investigated the cause. I had not received any prior notification from Unity about any upcoming payment. It turned out that they had switched my yearly Unity subscription to a monthly subscription, and invoiced almost USD50. I switched back to yearly subscription the same day, and notified unity, asking to refund the erroneous invoice. Though, I received a very strange answer from them, that clearly indicated that their intention was to scam out money from their customers. So in the end, I ended up paying for a yearly subscription, plus the amount they managed to steal from their scam.
This is totally unacceptable! We as customer can not allow the industry to deteriorate into outright criminal practices. I encourage everyone to share the word, so that we as customer can know what companies are to be trusted, and which to avoid.