If you are in a state of disagreement with a company, e.g. AOL customer services or taking an example from another list SAGA insurance has not repaired your car to your satisfaction, then you can refer the matter on to an ombudsman rather like ACAS in an industrial dispute. Sometimes to stop both sides jumping the gun, the ombudsman asks that the company supplies the consumer with a "deadlock" code to show that they agree that they cannot come to an agreement between themselves and require conciliation services to move forward. By withholding the deadlock code after they have agreed to disagree with you AOL are in fact breaching the agreement and it will take a number of customers pointing this out to jump start the ombudsman into getting AOL to do what it has agreed formally to do. Look at the complaints procedure on the AOL help page, you may need the UK version, and you find the procedure outlined outlined there. Tigger