Companies that make it difficult to unsubscribe should be penalised, I live in Europe and got the New York Times on a 12 month trial for €4 a month. Trial just ended and it's now €8 a month, only way to cance is to ring them, have tried once so far and was on hold for 20 mins before I hung up. There should be a law that if you can sign up online you can cancel online.
In France, Le Monde (most famous daily newspaper) requires you to send a paper mail (and not a regular mail, but a registered mail, which costs around 5-10€) to cancel your subscription. Even if you subscribed on the website, for a 100% online subscription.
I had a case with another company. They required a letter to cancel, so I sent an email. Got automated reply that they have received it and later an email that they required a letter. I sent back an email pointing to the law. After some weeks I got a claim from a debt collection agency. I sent the email history to the agency, it did take less than 1 hour before they answered that all claims where dropped since it wasn't a legal claim
> "In France, Le Monde (most famous daily newspaper) requires you to send a paper mail (and not a regular mail, but a registered mail, which costs around 5-10€) to cancel your subscription."
What is it with French companies? BlueCity, the UK arm of the French "Autolib" car sharing service, had this same ridiculous "send us a letter in the post to cancel" policy. Since they charged to a credit card rather than use direct debit like most UK companies would, you couldn't easily cancel the payments through your bank either.
Since I'm quite lazy I never got around to sending them the letter and the £5/month continued (and I did use the service, occasionally). Finally a few months ago they went out of business and the charges stopped.
yeah, when i saw that i got so mad that I created a virtual credit card, changed the billing method, and then deleted the card. You can not imagine the big smile on my face when i received the email "we cannot charge you"....
I tried that with rebel.ca (domain reg) a few years ago. They setup this dark pattern where domains wouldn't expire they get renewed two months before they were due.
In my case they froze the account preventing me from moving domains. I called support and they unfroze it. The next night the system it froze again. It became a race, manually moving 200 domains over in 12 hours. They don't allow bulk moves and you can't quickly open each domain for editing in a separate tab.
Fyi: Why move. There prices went up to some crazy amount $30 for a .org 60% more for[a .ca it ended up costing me hundreds extra one month. Glad I caught it...
Some credit card companies have card generators (Capital one has Eno, Amex has one I believe, Citi calls it Virtual Card Generator etc) but you can also use privacy.com, revolut and I think there's an app called token or something?
I think I pay for everything online with my privacy cards now. It's just easier to keep track of stuff when you get alerts after a company charges a closed card, or tries to charge you more than your card limit that you set up.
I’ve been using this not only for subscriptions, but also when I’m making an online purchase at a store that I think may not have the best security in place.
You can but they won't stop charging your card. They have the credit card number, so the only way would be to change the payment method to an invalid card.
Another comment actually says that he managed to create a virtual credit card, change the payment method, and delete the card. Quite clever. It's a shame that methods like this have to be used instead of just the click of a button.
Can't you start issuing chargebacks? Chase is not the most Lawful Good of banks but I have to admit that on the times I needed someone to GTFO my credit card, they had my back.
In the EU you can ask your bank or credit card provider to block subscription payments from specific merchants. This is something EU requires them to support.
Do people really have the same credit card number for that long? I feel like every year I end up with a new card for one reason or another and suddenly I have to track down all the places that can no longer process my payments.
I learned that you can request a replacement card with the same number, which I was initially very excited about. But when you get the new card it has a different expiration date, so it still needs to be updated most places.
There's a process for some card providers by which merchants can automatically update their card details for recurring purchases. Visa calls it Account Updater and at least Braintree has had support for it for over a decade.
Well that would be super convenient for me. At this point I'm just slowly transitioning to always using my checking account number directly for payment since that is stable.
The risk with that is you have no ability to contest a charge. With a credit card, you can contest and the card issuer will do a chargeback to return the funds.
Netflix US charged our new Citibank credit card at least 3 times based on a fraudulent purchase (somehow someone had made a Netflix account with our credit card number).
On top of that it wasn't even activated because we'd stopped using Citibank to simplify our accounting and just hadn't cancelled entirely yet. Backdoors exist apparently for recurring charges that roll over onto new cards for "customer convenience" because you wouldn't want to miss your bills and lose access to Netflix.
In my (recent) experience, periodic charges are automatically applied to a new card, even if it has a new number. For your convenience, if you forgot to update your payment info...
Amex is particularly good at these things. Not in the last place because they have actual humans answering the phone and fixing things. On the other hand, their fees are much higher than the others so you're paying for it as well.
It may not be followed in every country, but at least in Denmark the "forbrugerombudsmanden" slams down on things like that, I think that they recently sent out a message that online services should be able to be unsubscribed online as well.
Let them come after you. Just cancel the service in the same way you signed up (send an e-mail if you've signed up online), and then stop paying them (or block the direct debits, or reverse the credit card charges). I haven't had any company that actually bothered to send it to collections (or even sue me). Only once I got a mail that I hadn't payed, and when I replied with the cancellation e-mail attached, they said "oh, ok" and never bothered me again.
As for media companies with cheap offers and shady cancelation tactics, I discovered the following:
I send them a cancelation by eMail citing a german court ruling that states (roughly) "If you subscribe electronically, you must be able to unsubscribe electronically". I additionally cc one or two journalists writing about consumer issues (sometimes on cancelation oh joy) on the topics from that exact media.
Works every time.
And if you want to rub salt in the wound, request a detailed gdpr information about you and your account. gdpr even applies if it is not a european country based media company.
Which basically means that if the foreign company tries to collect, sends to an EU collection agency, .... they come in jurisdiction. So they can only bark but not bite.
That's like saying American law doesn't apply to Russian citizens in Russia when it clearly does.
The court may struggle to apply it's judgements, especially if there isn't an applicable extradition situation, but all it takes is one representitive of the company to go to Europe and they are open to things like arrest for not following the judgement of the court
Only if you have no people or capital in the EU. If you were a small business that sounds correct, but every medium to large business I have worked at has had at least something important going on in europe (clients, suppliers, offices, etc).
Almost certainly false in practice. It would be shady bordering on illegal to detain a mere employee of a GDPR violator. Unless you are a famous employee of a big company that was egregiously flouting the GDPR but also had no other ties to the EU, then maybe you’d rethink your holiday plans.
If you want to say: This does not apply to a non EU citizen in an non EU country, you are correct.
But if you do business in the EU - i.e. have advertising from EU companies inside your media website or you are already dealing with the EU AND you have readers/users in the EU that pay for your service, it makes you instantly responsible for being GDPR compliant if you like it or not.
This is why some media companies block EU ip-address ranges not to fall into that "trap".
Only if there’s a clear link to the EU. Not refusing to sell to EU residents isn’t sufficient to show targeting—but offering Euro pricing or Swedish language options might be.
And at the end of the day, all law fits into the cross-section of jurisdiction and motivation. If you’re a Singaporean company offering global services, there’s no jurisdiction and (unless your activities are especially egregious) no prospect of motivation.
I know only a law in germany where you have to be able to cancel your phone contracts with the same medium you accepted them... But I don't know anything about more broad laws.
There is a similar sounding provision in GDPR, which requires that it is as straightforward to withdraw consent as it is to grant it (i.e. it must be possible through the same procedure, so preventing postal letters being sent to a dedicated address). Not sure if there's a similar provision for cancelling paid services, but potentially if the service relies on consent for data processing, you could use GDPR grounds to force a cancellation through the same means you signed up.
It's worth a try, but GDPR specifically excludes contractual information. So if you have pending bills, whatever info they need to charge you is not protected by GDPR. And even after you pay, they still need your name for accounting purposes (you received $100 last year? from whom exactly? will the law ask, and you have to be able to answer)
We need a law that requires it to be no more difficult to unsubscribe from anything then it is to subscribe to that thing. If you can subscribe with one click on the website then you must be able to unsubscribe with one click on the website. The law should make it individually actionable in small claims court for each subscriber that is inconvenienced to recover damages and not allow arbitration clauses to override that right.
This reminds me of my gym membership. They said I had to come in person to cancel it instead of by phone. So I cancelled my credit card naively thinking that my gym membership would be cancelled. After a few months I get letters and calls from a collection agency demanding the monthly payments and an additional late fee of $100
I really like reading nytimes and have a digitial subscription since a year back (EU citizen) but wanted to cancel it to get away from the news cycles for a while, but now found out that there is no option to cancel other than calling a phone number.
The signup page mentions canceling subscriptions several times, which isn't false, but it isn't what you expect from a subscription-based page in 2020. This is in my opinion a dark pattern today. It probably would have been ok...20 years ago!
One reason I try to never give my card to lots of websites. If they have paypal, good. Or playstore subscription, sure. A one time/non recurring payment via a platform/provider/bank, ok.
But never the card. Reading such user horror stories, or Terms & Conditions, makes me turn around and never come back.
Paypal allows canceling subscription but they have hid this link deep inside. I don't know how well that even works. Also, Paypal payment protection is basically a joke. If you get dupped by someone and try to get refund through their payment protection, you get nothing no matter how right you are. That's my first hand experience.
After my kid was banned on Fortnite, I filed a bunch of paypal chargebacks on Epic Games for all the packs and extensions we bought, going back like 8 months. Got all of them back.
Not to say that Paypal won't screw you over, just that it doesn't do so all the time.
Always makes sense of having a separate card for online stuff (shop, subscriptions, etc). But having to go to the bank and renew, create a new one, the waiting lines.
Some banks have web/mobile banking where you can restrict actions/limits/transactions, so it's a good option too.
Others have virtual cards for this purpose, but these are not offered in a lot of countries (revolut, privacy, yandex money, etc).
I never use PayPal as they still keep over thousand pound due some bullshit reason and don't want to release it. And it's pain to get to speak to a human. Currently, it's at the Financial Ombudsman
When I was in Europe for a holiday I subscribed to Eurosport to watch the tennis. Unfortunately, when I returned to my country, due to geofencing, I could not access the relevant Eurosport site to cease the subscription... Fortunately it was via Paypal and I could achieve the same outcome by revoking the authority...
Yeah, agreed. I canceled my NYT subscription a while back in protest over some of their editorial misbehavior. It took me weeks to get in canceled and all my money back. Especially frustrating is that they dragged out the process and then charged me for the time that I was trying to unsubscribe. Eventually I just made American Express take the extra $2 back.
I want to resubscribe eventually, as they put out a lot of good journalism. But there is no way in hell I'm doing it until it's as easy to quit as to join.
One sort of workaround is to subscribe through Apple. Then cancelling is as simple as toggling your subscription to Off. As an added bonus, when you subscribe this way, you do not even have to give the NYT any of your contact info - Apple has it set-up so you can use randomized tokens to login. One of the many things I appreciate that Apple does.
Same story with myself and NYT almost a decade ago. Keep an eye on your statements: they kept charging me and I kept needing to cancel for 3ish more months until it all finally stopped.
California has such a law, and at least on one website I changed my address from WA to California do it would show me the option to cancel directly on the website.
I believe Visa has started working on requiring platforms "Provide customers with a digital or SMS cancellation method", though due to Covid it's been pushed back a year [1].
This sounds like a good and sensible step. It is a shame it has been pushed back due to Covid, as this is really not a particularly onerous requirement. Given how many companies are resorting to limited "service levels" as they have emptied their call centres and contact centres, it seems this should be expedited rather than delayed.
Yeah, Adobe did this to me, then I reminded them that they broke Dutch law by increasing my contract term by 1 year after a year (this can only be done automatically for a month), after talking to bosses of bosses of bosses they finally ended my subscription.
As someone fromnEurope, I was in the same boat as you with a NY Times trial subscription. I didn't even tried to call them, since they not only require you to call them to cancel your subscription, but do it during US east coast office hours too.
In the end I just canceled the recurring payment contract at PayPal. A few weeks later I received a 'Sorry to see you go' email from them and that was it.
I'm not sure if credit cards also allow you to cancel recurring payment contracts, but sepa directdebit does (which is the payment method used if you used for example the Dutch iDeal payment method as initial payment.
It would be interesting to see a credit card company differentiate on this. Have an internal team which works through the various companies (presumably in order of popularity) and does the leg work of figuring out how to subscribe. So the customer would be presented with: Go to these locations and upload this information. Or even: Enter your username and password and this information and our scripts will unsubscribe you.
That might be dangerous. At least in Germany there's a difference between the service agreement and the payment. As long as you don't cancel the service, if you are not paying you just amass more and more money that you owe them.
“Legally speaking, we can’t allow you to cancel via the app. You can only cancel via a web browser but unfortunately that system is down. Please mail a letter to PO Box 937192 or send a fax. We will process your cancellation with 4-6 weeks once we have the legally required paper request. Thank you for being a valued customer.”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
We have that law in California. A trick for non-californians is to change your address to a California one and sometimes the site will let you cancel. Depends if they use your shipping or billing address though.
Exactly same issue a few years ago with The Times in the UK, with the ringing and very odd restricted availability hours, except they also said it was “technically impossible” to cancel without charging three more “monthly” charges.
I cancelled my card and somehow they managed to rescind access.
Same with me. And somehow, their online costumer service was always unavailable... What a coincidence! Luckily, in my country there is a service that allows us to create temporary credit cards and I had subscribed with one. It was just a matter of canceling that card.
Also in Europe, I tried unsubscribing by SMS, and it seems to be pretty frustrating, I confirmed a few times I wanted to cancel and instead all I got was more questions and offers.
In the end I took the offer of 25 cents a week for a year, waiting to see how they'll charge my PayPal.
Email them and say you want to cancel and state that you're deaf so you can't do it over the phone. They have to oblige because of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Tell your credit card company that it’s an unauthorized charge and request a new credit card. Some will even ship it expedited for free if you request it.
Maybe it's different based on how you signed up, or what kind of subscription you have, but for me at least there's a "cancel subscription" link when I go to manage my subscription online on this page: https://myaccount.nytimes.com/seg/subscription
I remember it didn't exist when I signed up a few years back, and they made a big deal about announcing that I could now cancel/change my subscription online when it launched.
