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.

Can you not call the bank to block the card on account of fraud and get a new one? The subsequent payments would surely be declined...

In the UK, last time I did this my bank themselves have shared the updated details with which they could charge me again.

Ugh, that sucks. I've changed banks for less.

It's quite a hassle, you don't have your card for a few days..

Yes a lot of French companies do this, I signed up for gym membership at fitness park on the internet, they had the same behavior.

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"....

Reaaaaaally big smile on my face

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...

Where'd you move to? Namesilo's been fantastic to me after transitioning from ENOM years ago.

I moved to 10dollar.ca for my .ca domains.

How can i create such a virtual card?

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.

There a few options for virtual cards. Ive been using https://privacy.com/.

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.

I only use virtual cards for online payments. I use Citi and they have an option to generate a card with specific amount and expiry.

Last I checked, Citi's virtual card feature inexplicably requires Flash. I was like "I thought that was dead?"

This was true for Bank of America, too, at least in December 2018.

They killed the feature altogether.

https://www.bankofamerica.com/security-center/accounts-cards...

I had a few like that as well but they were going through PayPal, pretty satisfying to block alright.

That's illegal in the EU. So you could just send them a cancellation email and stop paying.

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.

Chargebacks don't exist in France.

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.

>You can but they won't stop charging your card.

Report the transactions as fraudulent, they'll soon stop.

That’s the problem with credit cards. Once they have your number, it’s very difficult to “stop paying”.

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...

Well I guess maybe I don't need to worry about it as much then. You'd think companies would do a better job informing people of that.

I think it's one of those things that doesn't necessarily happen when you want it to, but happens when you don't.

> it’s very difficult to “stop paying”.

"Hi, these are unauthorised, fraudulent transactions, please revert them and block future charges from that merchant"

That's all it takes with Amex and most others AFAICT.

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.

If you can charge-back, it will damage their credit each time.

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.

Also that you should sent out an option to cancel, before each withdraw for the membership.

Really? Not done by any of the Danish services I subscribe to

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.

I've had a German collection come after me for 2 years with payment notices. I had unsubscribed by mail (which they got) and some email.

They stopped last year after I wrote to them I considered I didn't own anything (a human probably read the file and dropped it).

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.

The GDPR does apply to foreign companies that trade within the EU but does not (because it cannot) apply outside of the EU’s jurisdiction.

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).

Even a small business might have an employee visit europe on holiday, and then you're screwed.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.

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".

> But if you do business in the EU

Yes, that’s exactly what I said. I’m confused about what you’re think you’re clarifying.

The GDPR also applies to non-EU companies in non-EU countries targeting EU nationals, although it can not be directly enforced (yet).

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.