HOW MICROSOFT IS ABOUT TO CHEAT THE VAT AUTHORITIES….AT YOUR EXPENSE

I’m told (and have since checked out the verity of it) that from 28th July Skype is going to charge VAT on premium accounts like mine at the time the calls are made. For the last three years, Skype has been owned by Microsoft.

Like many premium Skype users, I have a running line of Skype credit topped up automatically. Without this convenience, calls made to everywhere from Australia to Zambia would bankrupt me in short order.

This was, of course, the original idea of Skype: face to face calls with contacts and loved ones at little or no cost. But that represented a massive threat to the phonecos and a range of ISPs who did not, at the time, either have or understand the technology.

So this – and Microsoft was in the vanguard – is what they allegedly did: they deliberately sabotaged Skype’s one big drawback – the need for enormous bandwidth – by denying it to the company by every means at their disposal.

Not that Skype themselves were angels: as early as 2006, there was strong evidence that the company was monitoring and selling call content to advertisers, who could use the customer data to target them closely on other communications channels.

But eventually Microsoft had its way, and in May 2011 it bought Skype for $8.5bn. Ever since that time, Skype customers like myself have experienced dealings with the service ranging from the stupidly surreal to the downright obstructive. However, the main new element brought in by Gatesville has been uncontrolled greed.

Go to the Microsoft-run Skype website, and you simply cannot get from there to your contacts: the sole purpose of the site is to sell you add-ons, these being allegedly destined  to “enhance your user experience”. But this latest VAT trick is where the greed factor really comes to the fore. As from 28th July, customers with outstanding credits – who have already been charged 15% VAT on that – will be charged VAT again on the call as it is made.

Neat, huh? Skype customer ‘service’ sends you not so much round the houses as round the dark side of the Moon on the issue: but delve into the service conditions legal flysh*t, and you will read this little gem:

‘You explicitly waive any right to a VAT refund from Skype if the amount of VAT ultimately payable by Skype to the tax authorities is, for any reason, lower than the amount of VAT you were charged at the time of your purchase’

Oh dearie dearie me. When VAT was first introduced, it was a criminal offence for any provider to profit from it. For all I know, it still is. But all you need these days, as a globalist sh*thead cheat, is a little bit of legalese which (let’s face it, none of us ever read during downloading) basically says we reserve the right to do WTF we want.

Major hat-tip to Lionel for alerting me to this.

Earlier at The Slog: Is Erste Bank dem lätzten Wort in stress-test bollocks?