Refund and cancellation policy
The short version: you can cancel for a full refund of our service fee at any time before we submit your request to ServiceOntario. Once it is submitted, the ministry has its fee and will not return it, so neither can we. If the failure is ours, you get everything back including the ministry's fee.
The rest of this page explains each case, with the ministry's own rule linked, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
What you are buying, so the policy makes sense
We order one thing on your behalf: the Ontario 3-year driver record, uncertified, from ServiceOntario. The Ministry of Transportation charges $12.00 for it and emails it to you as a PDF, immediately. We charge $40.00 in total, of which $12.00 is the ministry's fee that we pay out of our own account and $28.00 is ours.
Nothing physical exists in this transaction in either direction. There is nothing to post, nothing for us to hold, and nothing that can be lost in transit. That removes an entire category of refund event that a document-handling service would need to cover, and it is why this policy is short.
Before we submit: full refund, no questions
Email us with your order reference and we refund the whole $40.00. We do not ask why, there is no form, and we do not keep a handling fee.
This is genuinely worth something because of how the product works. We submit in small batches rather than the instant you pay, so there is normally a real window in which nothing has been spent. If you tell us to stop within it, nothing has been spent.
After we submit: the ministry's fee is gone
ServiceOntario charges for the search, not for the result. Once the request is submitted the $12.00 is spent, the ministry does not return it to us, and we are not going to pretend we can return it to you.
Our own $28.00 is also non-refundable at that point, and the reason is worth stating rather than leaving implied: what you are paying us for is the check we do before submission, and by then it is done. There is no ongoing service to stop.
If we get it wrong
You get a full refund, including the ministry's fee, if we:
- submit a licence number different from the one you gave us;
- submit the wrong record type;
- take your payment and never submit the request at all;
- or fail to pass on a record the ministry did issue.
This carve-out is narrow on purpose. “The ministry returned no record for that licence number” and “we failed to do the job you paid for” are different events, and we are not going to blur them in our favour. Keeping the second one explicit is what makes the broad rule defensible on everything else.
If you gave us a licence number that is not yours, or is wrong
This is the one case that catches people, and it is not a refund event.
The ministry charges for the search whether or not it finds anything, and it charges the same if the number is valid but belongs to somebody else. That is the ministry's rule and it applies identically if you order directly from ServiceOntario yourself.
What we do about it is check the format before you pay. An Ontario licence number is fifteen characters, one letter then fourteen digits, and a number of the wrong shape is refused at the form rather than at the ministry. A validly-shaped number that is not yours cannot be caught by anybody, by us or by ServiceOntario, because it is a valid search returning a different record.
If you realise before we submit, tell us and cancel. That is the whole of the remedy available and we would rather say so than imply there is more.
If we cannot serve you at all
We do not accept orders from customers in Quebec, because Quebec's Law 25 attaches privacy-impact-assessment obligations to the personal information of a person in Quebec that we are not currently set up to meet. We try to catch this before you pay. If it is discovered afterwards, you get a full refund.
If the record says something you did not expect
An accurate record showing something you would rather it did not is not a refund event, and no service can make it one. We order the ministry's record; we do not compose it, and nothing about our involvement changes a single line of it.
If you believe the record itself is wrong, that is a real problem with a real route, and it runs through the ministry and the courts rather than through us. What to do when your record is wrong sets out who is responsible for what.
If someone asked you for a different record
We sell the uncertified 3-year record. If a court asked you for a certified copy with the ministry's seal, that is a different product: the ministry's certified record, processed within 15 business days, and posted by Canada Post. We do not sell it and we say so on the page you order from, with the ministry's fee and timing next to it, precisely so that this does not happen after payment.
If it happens anyway and you have not yet used the record, tell us. Before submission this is an ordinary cancellation. After submission the ministry's fee is spent, but talk to us anyway rather than assuming.
Our timing is the ministry's timing
ServiceOntario issues this record immediately and emails it. We are not faster than that and we do not claim to be — there is nothing to be faster than. If a record has not reached you when it should have, tell us and we will chase it, but a delay at the ministry is not a refund event and we cannot compel it.
If something has gone wrong, talk to us first
Email [email protected] with your order reference. We reply within one business day, Mon-Fri 9am-5pm ET. There is no ticket maze and no phone tree.
We can usually tell you within minutes whether the request was submitted and what the ministry returned, because we keep the submission record and the confirmation. If the answer is that we made a mistake, we will say so and refund you under the rule above. Nobody has to argue for that.
Approved refunds go back to the card you paid with. We issue them within one business day of agreeing them; your bank usually posts them within five to ten business days after that.
About chargebacks
You have the right to dispute a charge with your bank and we are not going to pretend otherwise. We are asking you to email us first, because most disputes on orders like these turn out to be a question we can answer faster than a bank can.
If a chargeback is filed without anyone contacting us, we will contest it, using the evidence we keep on every order: the submission record, the ministry's confirmation reference, and the copy of this policy you accepted at checkout. That is not a threat, it is what a bank asks a merchant for.
If we got it wrong, we would rather refund you today than argue about it for ninety days.
One more thing
DriversAbstract is a private company. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of ServiceOntario, the Ministry of Transportation or any other government body. You can order this record directly from the ministry for $12.00, and every page on this site shows you that fee and links you to it.