Time Warner Cable - Legacy → [TWC] I'm now ineligible for the promised $200 gift card

Have any of you been successful in getting your gift card? I am approaching my 1 year anniversary of fighting with TWC and I still have not received it . Let me know. Thanks.

TWC actually is allowing in more 3rd party ISPs. Although the list is very slim. and besides Earthlink there maybe is only 1 or two other national ISPs to choose from. But some do allow statics and servers on residential connections.

A number of our readers have run into this because of the registration requirement. The problem is you need a hard copy of your competitor's bill, which most people don't keep month after month. By the time the next bill turns up, people forget about the rebate registration or too much time passes and they are up the creek.

It is true these conditions are all found in the rebate fine print. Rebate houses are third party operations that work under the rules established by companies like Time Warner -- very helpful for both when pointing fingers back and forth over who can fix things.

In truth, Time Warner Cable is the company that has ultimate authority to approve the rebate. The company handling rebate processing works for them. Usually telling them you sent the stuff and they never recorded it buys you a second chance easier than admitting you didn't follow the arcane rules.

Usually filing a complaint with the BBB or Attorney General will get you the rebate just to make you go away. The more noise you make, the better your chances. Start with the BBB, which will automatically get you connected to someone in executive customer service who can make anything happen.

Threatening to walk with a regular rep will only get you transferred to retentions, which probably won't help get you a rebate earned by signing up.

TWC has tightened up on new customer deals a lot this year. The rebate deal is a lot cheaper than giving everyone a lower monthly promo price for a year because so many fail to complete the terms of the rebate and some never even try.

Why does TWC assume every user has a scanner? I haven't had a scanner since 2003 when I got my first XP computer and my expensive 1.5 year old Visioneer scanner would not work because Visioneer did not provide a driver for XP. My HP Deskjet printer is 14 years old (still works great even with my new Windows 8 computer) so it is not an "all in one" with a scanner included.

I notice it says in the FAQ that TWC MAY allow snail mail of proof but they don't want Deliver to Addressee Only with signature required, etc so the sender is protected. It all smells like a scam to me.

Plus, the FAQ doesn't even have a phone number for Hawaii residents to call if they have questions, etc. They have a Pacific region MAINLAND number which is NOT the correct number for us. Besides, I would have assumed (if coming from HawaiianTel DSL) that I could just either mail a copy of my HawaiianTel bill to Oceanic or that I could drop it off at the local Oceanic office. The local ads are very misleading as they do not indicate that one cannot get the rebate through OCEANIC which is what you would logically expect but instead must deal with a THIRD PARTY MAINLAND contractor! Most in Hawaii would be very against that as we prefer to deal LOCALLY and most would assume the rebate would be done locally.

Why is it "arcane" to assume that folks have good business practices? If they don't that is their fault. I have all credit card paper statements, Oceanic TW monthly paper bills, etc going back at least ten years. I am just starting to clean out the records that are over seven years old. I would never sign up for online statements. It is potentially very dangerous to do that for many reasons. I don't have much room in my condo for keeping paper records but that is no excuse for not keeping them.

I got a 5% gift card from Dell when I bought my Win 8 computer and the only hassle was that I could not get the Dell Member Purchase Program website to accept the proper code for the gift card so I had to call and purchase the computer over the phone which meant my Discover card would not give me the bonus they had for online purchase...but I got both and the only hassle was that I had to pick up the phone to buy the computer. So, if I was doing this TWC offer, I would have expected to do it simply and easily over the phone with LOCAL CSRs and be allowed to drop off proof to the local office. What is the point in having local CSRs if they can't handle this sort of thing? What is the point in allowing local bill payment at the local Oceanic TWC office if they could not handle a promo?

Ditto with my parents for Target $150 gift card from last summer for triple bundled package (cable+TV+phone). With all the proofs, registrations, reading fine prints, phone calls, etc. too. Finally, they gave up and gave us the $150 credit on cable bills instead which was fine.

I switched from DirecTV to TW about a month ago and submitted a PDF of my DirecTV bill made from my DirecTV online account webpage. TW has accepted it now I'm just waiting for the 90 days + 4-6 weeks to go by.

So it appears that a scan of a paper bill is not necessary (at least in my case).

I received a 'Thank You' postcard after I signed up for service that had some text on it about registering online, it also had a unique code on it. Once I registered online, it asked me for a copy of my final bill with a competitor. I emailed the PDF - it took about seven months from the start of service for me to receive my $200 gift card.