Cupertino (CA) - Apple’s MobileMe payment processing system is causing frustration among users as increasing number of people around the report that are being charged the full membership fee or more for supposedly free trial accounts. The support team of the company appears to be overwhelmed by the problem and is delaying replies to angry emails from customers.

"Apple dropped the ball. Can you believe it ?" wrote Tomislav Jakupec, a long-time Apple user and owner of a company that relies entirely on Macs to make and sell motion backgrounds at Videobacks.com.

"I held my credit card in hand on day one, ready to purchase a $149 MobileMe Family Pack when a friend from the UK phoned me up to say he has just been unexpectedly charged almost twice the annual fee for the supposedly free trial MobileMe account," he said. When several other friends confirmed the same issue, Jakupec decided to hold off on the purchase for now.

At this point, he does not even want to sign up for a trial account, fearing Apple may charge him for it. "Apple needs to get their act together and they need to do it ASAP," he said in a phone interview with TG Daily.

Unlike .Mac trial accounts, the new MobileMe service policy requires users to provide valid credit card details to create a free trial account. This strategy serves as an ID check to discourage spammers from using the service, it limits trial accounts per user and automatically charges the annual fee as soon as the trial period expires. The MobileMe terms of service state that "Apple may seek authorization of your credit card account prior to your first purchase to validate that you can charge the applicable fees to access the service." The authorization amount is typically $1, which may be credited towards the subscription fee.

But some trial accounts are authorized with a sum that equals or exceeds the advertised membership fee of $99 per year. Users from the UK appear to be affected the most by the issue, but we are receiving reports of similar issue from users around the world. The O2 support forum leads the debate, with users claiming to have been charged up to £120 for a trial account, well above the regular £59 MobileMe price in the UK.

To look a bit closer at the issue, we created our own trial account. We were able to successfully sign up for a MobileMe trial account using a Europe-based credit card. Our bank report revealed that Apple’s issue may be not limited to isolated cases. Apple did not charge the usual $1 authorization amount, but a whopping 99 Euro, which is above the official 79 Euro price point for MobileMe across Europe.

We then checked MobileMe web interface to confirm what we received in exchange for our 99 Euro - and that was a free trial account. Using the interface, we chose the Skip Trial option to opt for the full membership. The system once again asked billing information and we provided the same VISA card details. This time, however, our bank account balance was charged with 79 Euro. We basically ended up with an individual MobileMe membership that cost us 178 Euro (around $250 in total).

It was time to call Apple. A phone call later, all I knew was that the company "will look into issue." I then sent two emails to the support department on Friday and Saturday. Until today, the company has not replied.

It’s unclear at the moment what is happening, because Apple chooses to remain silent and its support department is not replying to user emails. It will be interesting to see if Apple will acknowledge the issue and offer an apology to the affected users - and refund any overcharges.

We have to note however, that we did not receive an invoice for the excessive 99 Euro charge for the trial account, suggesting it may simply be an authorization that will disappear next month. Also, Apple invoiced us for our full membership that was charged correctly. But even if the 99 Euro charge is an authorization charge, we feel that this amount is outrageous.

If you would like to try or sign up for MobileMe, we recommend that you purchase a MobileMe box through an Apple retail or online store and use the activation code that is in the box to activate the full membership (that option is available during the trial account creation).

One user on the MacRumors forums is claiming that MobileMe accepted his gift card with no funds ($0) on it, using "Gift Card Recipient" as the name to start his trial. We were unable to confirm this claim.

MobileMe growing pains

The $99 a year MobileMe cloud service replaces aging .Mac service with a sleek web interface and desktop-class web applications that handle email, contacts, calendars, photos and online storage. MobileMe instantly pushes contacts, calendars, email and bookmarks from the cloud to authorized Macs, PCs and iPhones.

MobileMe saw the worst service launch in Apple’s history. It was launched late and was affected by wide-spread outages and performance issues due to a heavy traffic load. Ongoing server issues forced the company to temporarily pull the MobileMe 1.0 Updater that enables MobileMe functionality in OS X. Apple later released the MobileMe 1.1 update available via the OS X Software Update mechanism, replacing the 1.0 version of the software.

Although the company has been struggling over the weekend to improve service availability and made noticeable progress in terms of service speed and performance, some users are still reporting problems with data syncing, webmail and contacts unavailability, sluggish web interface in Safari, disappearing user content and hiccups when pushing contacts to the iPhone.