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The FTC wants to ban tough-to-cancel subscriptions

• asah 4y ago
  thank god we're back to having regulators doing their jobs. I'm not sure whether to thank biden or anyone-but-trump or something else - but whoever is responsible, *THANK YOU*.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• Clubber 4y ago
  I subscribed to the NYT a few years ago and it took a phone call and a retention pitch to finally unsubscribe. I vowed to never subscribe again as long as this was in place.
  • xhkkffbf 4y ago
    I just interacted with the WSJ several days ago. It was extremely annoying -- and probably painful to the poor customer service rep who has to take these calls.
    • seanp2k2 4y ago
      I don’t read any of these regularly, but the Apple One subscription includes Apple News+ or whatever it’s called and that lets you read NYT, WSJ, LA Times, and quite a few others…only works in the Apple News app though. That’s the annoying part — you don’t technically have a subscription with them, so you can’t comment (if that matters to you). It’s more comparable to RSS feed access, albeit with no ads and full fidelity articles. Honestly, I prefer it to their own apps, and the price + cancellation policy is WAY better.
  • ciabattabread 4y ago
    Apparently, if you live in California, you have an easy online unsubscribe process.
  • sysadmindotfail 4y ago
    I've read this many times on HN, Reddit, etc. Last week I just used a VPN. Took 30 seconds to click-click unsubscribe. PS - During the process I was offered like 60% off if I kept the subscription.
    • brewdad 4y ago
      NYTimes changed their policy sometime during the Covid years. I canceled back in 2017-18 and can confirm that it took me talking over the phone rep repeatedly saying nothing but "Cancel." for them to stop the retention spiel and finally close my account.
  • rainytuesday 4y ago
    "Xperience Fitness" made me show up in person and sign a document. This needed to then be faxed to HQ. Of course, the gym didn't have a fax machine. So had to find a fax machine, send off a fax and wonder if anybody is going to look at it on the other end. This was in 2015 or so, not 1986.
  • Aaronstotle 4y ago
    I subscribe to the economist, and they automatically renew at a rate of $199 per year, I called to cancel and they drop it to $80 per year. Would save everyone the time if they started with $80
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • glitcher 4y ago
      My previous Internet provider Cox tried this tactic on me when I canceled. My reply to them was ok, so you're admitting to overcharging me all along. I'll agree to stay with you if you also provide a refund for all previous months I was overcharged. They finally agreed to close my account at that point :)
    • jdeibele 4y ago
      My wife subscribed to The Economist but we weren't reading it. I tried changing my address to California, which has worked for some subscriptions because of California's consumer-friendly subscription cancellation law. That didn't work. I tried doing the chat to cancel. I said multiple times that we wanted to cancel and the person (presumably a person following a script, although they certainly seemed robotic) just kept ignoring that. Eventually I said I'm cancelling, if you charge us, I'll charge it back and took a screenshot of that. When they charged me, I charged it back. No need for the screenshot, which was mildly disappointing because this was one time where I felt I had proof that I tried to cancel. We'll never subscribe to The Economist again. If you make it this difficult to leave, better not to start.
      • nanidin 4y ago
        During the chat, they kept trying to make conversation, to ask questions, and to retain me. I just copy/pasted "I'm not here for chit-chat, please cancel the subscription and confirm once complete" each time they tried to engage me. Immediately after my subscription expired they started emailing me 1/2 off offers. The whole experience put a bad taste in my mouth and I won't be back.
    • 4y ago
  • yankeetango 4y ago
    NYT problem was due in part that we had so many legacy systems related to subscriptions; there was a big push internally to solve this. When "online cancel" finally rolled out we were all so excited there was a party with a sheetcake that had the cancellation landing page printed on it. We'd rather have users trust us than use dark patterns to "trap" them into a subscription.
• blurbleblurble 4y ago
  Please do, they're predatory for people with mental health struggles.
• whydoineedthis 4y ago
  But those unused gym subscriptions subsidize the gym membership i do use. Please don't take that stimulus away.
• dangwhy 4y ago
  I there a law preventing me from canceling recurring subscriptions on my credit card? Why does my bank want me to write them some letter and create a case which they may or maynot look into. Merely changing the card number wont work because bank updates vendors with the new card. I've asked but they they have to update vendors, i don't understand why though.
  • pimterry 4y ago
    > I there a law preventing me from canceling recurring subscriptions on my credit card? No, but there may be a contractual agreement between you and a provider where you have promised to pay for a service, and merely 'not paying' is not sufficient to cancel that. This makes far more sense in a non-digital world though, where you might pay for expensive services after the fact, rather than in advance. In practice, most digital services will happily cancel themselves if you do just block upfront transactions. Many modern financial services/neobanks I've used have some kind of built-in functionality for this, even paypal has a page where you can manage & cancel all current subscriptions directly, blocking all future payments: https://www.paypal.com/myaccount/autopay/ https://www.paypal.com/myaccount/autopay/. > Merely changing the card number wont work because bank updates vendors with the new card. I've asked but they they have to update vendors, i don't understand why though. I believe it's because the 'card details' part is effectively a fiction for e-commerce. When you subscribe, the payment provider uses your card details to get a persistent token, which they can use to authorize future payments, and then they throw away the card details entirely. They just use the token alone to authorize future charges. That token is somewhat independent of the specific card, by design, as unlike card details this means it can't really be stolen or leaked (it's only authorized for certain purchases from that one vendor) and it means all your normal ongoing payments don't break in the common case where you _do_ want payments to continue when your card is replaced. Bits About Money has some more background on this here: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/improving-cards-under-the-hood/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/improving-cards-under...
    • dangwhy 4y ago
      > but there may be a contractual agreement between you and a provider Yes i understand my obligation to the vendor but why is the bank enforcing that ?
• dikaio 4y ago
  How about the tuff to cancel WSJ?
• meepmorp 4y ago
  Tangential to this - no small part of the reason why I like subscriptions in the iPhone App Store is because Apple doesn't let billers fuck around like this. There's one place to see everything, and you can cancel anything in a couple clicks. It's part of why I'd probably never use an alternative app store.
  • peoplearepeople 4y ago
    Cancelling subscriptions on apple devices is a dream, I love it
    • lp0_on_fire 4y ago
      True, but it makes auditing your bank account slightly more difficult. Charges come through as "Apple" (or some variation) without indicating what the purchase was for. They also roll charges together so they're not hitting your bank account multiple times in a short period. It's not a lot of work to go into your apple account and compare the invoices to your bank account to see what the charge was _actually_ for, but it was a pain in the rear when our credit card was stolen and used by the thief to Nickle and Dime us for 5-10 dollars here and there over the course of 6 months.
      • teeray 4y ago
        I model it as another account in my books. Each subscription has a recurring debit and it gets credited when money actually moves from my bank. It’s a bit annoying if I buy a one-off thing since I have to enter it by hand, but it’s infrequent enough that it’s not horrible.
      • post-it 4y ago
        They also send out the receipt emails a few days later than the actual charge, so when they charge you you can't immediately go check what the charge was for. I've found that spreadsheeting everything at the end of the month is the easiest way to do it.
    • nicolas_t 4y ago
• janj 4y ago
  This is great. Maybe one day we'll see action on timeshares. I got one a long time ago that was impossible to get rid of. Fully paid for, Westgate told me it had a lot of value so I told them to just take it back, but they would't of course. I ended up just stopping all payments, went through a few years of harassing calls, and then done, nothing more. Still haunts me though, I'm afraid it could come back up with outstanding balance owed.
  • Volundr 4y ago
    I think it can. More scary though, when you die unless they take active action to refuse it, your kids or whoever your inheritance goes to gets it by default. With all the financial obligations.
    • cableshaft 4y ago
      Yeah, John Oliver just did a Last Week Tonight on Timeshares. He goes over that in the video. Also there are scam companies that exist that promise to take your money to help you exit your timeshare agreement, then disappear. So you get double-scammed. And somehow this is technically legal? Link to the Last Week Tonight video: https://youtu.be/Bd2bbHoVQSM https://youtu.be/Bd2bbHoVQSM
      • janj 4y ago
        I was contacted by those people and others, both threatening and claiming to want to help. I had a suspicion they were all affiliated with the parent scam company Westgate and so never considered dealing with any of them. Maybe they weren't related to Westgate but good to keep in mind anyone in this space is not to be trusted.
    • havblue 4y ago
      I guess if you inherit a timeshare you can just insist that it goes to a sibling. Or, even better, a step-sibling...
      • loaph 4y ago
• dakial1 4y ago
  In my third world country (Brazil) we actually have strict regulations on cancellations (among other consumer focused laws): - Companies need to choose at least one channel to work 24 hours a day seven days a week. - The consumer can only be transferred from an attendant once. - If the call drops, the attendant must return the call and complete the service, without the customer having to repeat everything again. - Phone calls with human service must be available for at least eight hours a day. I'm a particular fan of the "mirror" concept, where cancelations/returna should work in the same channels and be as easy as the purchases/subscriptions. Consumer laws here are surprisingly good in my opinion and I am also surprised on how little lobby power consumers have in developed countries, to be treated like they are, with all the black hat tactics companies throw at them.
  • JamesBarney 4y ago
    Yeah we follow a mirror concept, which is cancelling should be at least as easy as signing up, and ideally easier. We don't have 1 click cancellations because we don't have 1 click sign ups. It requires an hour onboarding to use our service so they have to send us an email or a message in our chat bat to trigger a cancellation so we can sure they understand all the consequences.
  • mmmmmbop 4y ago
    I've been in Brazil recently and I was positively surprised with the great consumer protection laws. One law I really liked was the "right to regret", meaning you can cancel a wide array of contracts within 7 days. For example, when booking a hotel online, no matter the hotel's cancellation policies, you can cancel a reservation within 7 days of making it.
    • kube-system 4y ago
      There are many similar laws in the US, but many of them are fragmented either in different state jurisdictions or for different types of transactions. They're called things like: "cooling-off law", "buyers remorse law", or "right to cancel" Some examples: https://cal.lawsoup.org/legal-guides/consumer/contract-cancellation-cooling-off-periods/ https://cal.lawsoup.org/legal-guides/consumer/contract-cance...
• lax4ever 4y ago
  To preface, nothing against the poster since I know they were just copying the article title. This article headline is a bit misleading, as the FTC is not looking to ban the subscriptions themselves. Rather, they would like to implement a rule that requires servicers that provide subscriptions to make it as easy to cancel as it is to enroll, rather than the current jumbling mess that is trying to cancel something like a gym, Amazon, news, cable, or other subscription where servicers try to maintain retention by putting in a ridiculous number of hoops to jump through to cancel.
  • halJordan 4y ago
    It's not a misleading title, it would be verboten to offer certain subscriptions. Which subscriptions? The tough to cancel ones. There are subscriptions offered today which would not be allowed to be offered.
    • lax4ever 4y ago
      Servicers could change the cancellation process without ever changing the subscription itself. The issue at hand is not the subscription, but the process with which one would cancel it.
      • f272529 4y ago
        “Tough to cancel subscriptions” and “not tough to cancel subscriptions” are both subsets of “all subscriptions”. If the FTC has their way and the rules are effective, “tough to cancel subscriptions” no longer exist, and any subscriptions that previously belonged to that set now exist in the “not tough to cancel subscriptions” set. Effectively banning them. That’s how I interpret the title.
        • lax4ever 4y ago
          Which I believe actually helps to illustrate my point. The issue the FTC appears to have (and this comes from more than just this article) is with the cancellation process and not the subscription itself. The subscription is far more than just the cancellation process, just as a hard to find book is more than just its ease of acquisition. The enrollment (and if the FTC has their way, cancellation) processes of subscriptions are such a minor attribute to the subscriptions themselves that defining them by that attribute alone in an article headline seems like poor authorship. Is there some measure of semantics involved here? Quite probably, but then I say that in the world of professional writing and journalism I would expect a higher level of aptitude and proficiency. Being able to write headlines or article titles that remove as much of the semantic fuel as possible is, I believe, not an unreasonable request (or even requirement) for such professions, unless that is what the author is trying to achieve.
• asah 4y ago
  is there a link to provide public commentary?
• polygamous_bat 4y ago
  One of the most nefarious instances of this I have seen is a "online mental health counseling" startup that was charging a non-trivial monthly recurring fee, even though it did not have any available appointments with a professional in the coming month. I had to call and haggle for half an hour on behalf of someone who signed up for the app, and only after putting in their credit card information was shown that there are no appointments. Shame on the "startup", and absolutely disgusting that we as a civilized country allow scams targeted towards a vulnerable population to happen quite legally.
  • Eisenstein 4y ago
    Why don't you name them?
    • polygamous_bat 4y ago
      If I remembered their name I would 100% name and shame them publicly. Unfortunately it was a while ago during the peak of the pandemic, and I don't have any email records since I myself didn't sign up for them.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  • omginternets 4y ago
    >Shame on the "startup", and absolutely disgusting that we as a civilized country allow scams targeted towards a vulnerable population to happen quite legally. The truly dreadful part is that this is precisely the kind of thing that people with depression, ADHD, and a host of other psychological conditions are unable to deal with.
    • bowsamic 4y ago
      That's the whole point of those kinds of mental health startups. Get the credit card information of people who don't have the energy or organisation skills to ensure that they cancel it, and charge them according to the contract. It's basically like the gym thing, except instead of hoping you are rich enough or lazy enough not to cancel, they hope you are ill enough not to cancel.
• logicalmonster 4y ago
  Misguided priority IMO. Silicon Valley's actions are much more egregiously and obviously criminal than even the worst gym. As tough to cancel as some gym memberships are, they at least usually spell out their precise cancellation procedure as a part of a contract and have multiple ways to get in touch with some human to deal with a situation. And there's always some path to cancel the service (even if it's annoying by design and has you jumping through multiple hoops). And with these gyms, as a last resort you at least have a chargeback as a fairly realistic option with no consequences to your life. What I'd like to see investigated in this vein is Silicon Valley companies who provide no human customer service. Your only recourse in the event of a flawed transaction is either suck it up and take the loss, or do a chargeback and risk having your entire digital life destroyed as they retaliate against you by locking up your account. What these companies do to people daily is criminal on a level that the worst gym can't even fathom.
  • hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    The FTC can do more than one thing at a time.
    • logicalmonster 4y ago
      [flagged]
  • SkyMarshal 4y ago
    On the flip side it’s actual useful to have no human customer service in at least domain - mobile service. For example, it’s much more difficult to sim swap a Google Voice number than a T-mobile number, in part b/c it removes social engineering of customer service as an attack vector.
  • CogitoCogito 4y ago
    > And there's always some path to cancel the service (even if it's annoying by design and has you jumping through multiple hoops). Why do they even get to dictate how you cancel? You should just be able to send them a letter, an email, go in and inform them, etc. What purpose does it serve for society for companies themselves to be able decide to ignore your cancellation requests unless they follow a specific procedure?
• lp0_on_fire 4y ago
  That would be wonderful. I had the unpleasant experience of joining a gym then shortly moving several hours away. Cancelling the gym subscription was the last thing on my mind at the time. I legit had to drive back to this gym in New Jersey to sign a form to "cancel" my membership. They would not accept a phone call, email, not even a signed letter stating my intent to cancel, even after I explained to them I had moved hours away. Ridiculous.
• Zetice 4y ago
  Fucking ChargePoint straight up ignores account cancellation requests, and honestly at this point my next idea is to reach out through LinkedIn contacts to their legal team to see wtf I'm not understanding here...
  • __derek__ 4y ago
    Not sure what state you live in, but file a complaint with your AG's consumer affairs office.
  • ejb999 4y ago
    had a related - but not quite the same issue - with a vendor, and was getting zero help from the company trying to get a refund for a few thousand $$ for a defective product - got nowhere for weeks - finally resorted to finding the officers of the company and repeatedly calling them and their spouses at home, on the weekends in order to get satisfaction - very early in the morning and very late at night. Hated to resort to that, but have no regrets about pissing off the CEO, CFO and any one else I called at home - and this was not a small company.
    • jlund-molfese 4y ago
      Who could blame you? If the situation was reversed, and you got a working product, then refused to pay for it, they’d have no problem sending a debt collector to annoy you as often and inconveniently as legally possible.
    • genocidicbunny 4y ago
      > Hated to resort to that, but have no regrets about pissing off the CEO, CFO and any one else I called at home Personally, the only people they should be pissed off at is their employees and themselves. Had they not tried screwing you out of thousands of dollars, you wouldn't have been forced to escalate; I would get a pretty perverse pleasure from knowing I made their day worse in a situation like this.
• _yb2s 4y ago
  These things are insane. I tried to cancel a month-to-month gym membership from a small local gym, and they told me "cancellations become effective on the 1st of the following month" and "require two months advance notice" thereby effectively charging me for three additional months after I gave notice. Apparently, this was all in the agreement I signed, although it was written so unclear, that nobody would even suspect this is how they interpret it. I told them if you don't cancel it effective right now I am posting this dishonest predatory practice on every social media and review site in town, as well as telling all of my friends I met in here what you are doing, and asking them to please quit in protest. I'll also be doing a credit card chargeback, and a small claims court case to recover the time it takes me to deal with all of this. I will also take action to recover my back membership fees, because they repeatedly failed to maintain equipment in a usable condition, so I didn't get what I paid for. They did concede, and canceled it immediately.
  • bgun 4y ago
    Even though they conceded, you should still follow through on all of the above. You aren't hurting a person, it's a corporation that will only change when forced financially or socially to do so.
    • SanderNL 4y ago
      A small local gym is not “a corporation”.
      • chitowneats 4y ago
        The "small local gym" sure was pulling some corporate B.S. on their supposed "neighbor".
      • crazygringo 4y ago
        Legally it usually is, isn't it? It would be unusual for it to be a sole proprietorship. In any case, predatory/scammy practices are bad no matter what the ownership structure is. Being small and local doesn't excuse you from abusive behavior.
• SkyMarshal 4y ago
  Can they add T-mobile to the list too? You can’t unsubscribe via their website, have to call and argue with a customer retention assho… er rep.
  • cocoa19 4y ago
    I get the sentiment, but we should blame the system. The reps are just trying to make a living for a low pay and don't have much power to change things.
• yieldcrv 4y ago
  hit NY Times too please.
• 1970-01-01 4y ago
  I really like the idea of having a hard limit of 'clicks' to get something done/undone. If it's 4 clicks to subscribe, it should be no more than 4 to unsubscribe.
  • CogitoCogito 4y ago
    I think a better approach is to just require business to accept certain standard ways of being informed of cancellation. I.e. they must accept an email, a phone call, a letter, etc. If they then want to have an even simpler cancellation flow, that is fine, but they must accept all of these basic methods. This is how it works in Sweden.
• 52358 4y ago
  I still have a membership to Planet Fitness from 5 years ago that charges to my account every month while I had no problem signing up online, you can only cancel your membership in person at your "home" location, or by sending them a certified mail letter formally request cancellation (which I have tried and failed apparently because I never heard back) I now live on the other side of the country, so it feels ridiculous to spend money on a flight ticket just to cancel a gym membership worse, Planet Fitness requires you provide bank account/routing number for payment, so there is no way to cancel payment unless I switch bank accounts
  • ChickenNugger 4y ago
    I forget which gym but I sent them an email cancellation ("in writing") and they told me I had to come in. So I cancelled the card. They had some bullshit agreement with my bank where the subscription followed to my new card. So I cancelled the bank account. Bank accounts don't need to be some terminal relationship. If they don't treat you right, leave. edit: It was Workout Anytime
    • dangwhy 4y ago
      Ballys? whatever happened to that shithole.
      • ChickenNugger 4y ago
        Workout Anytime
  • shanebellone 4y ago
    "unless I switch bank accounts" And if you do, they will keep your membership active (for years) before reporting debt to the credit agencies.
    • dangwhy 4y ago
      no because they don't require ssn to signup.
• ksec 4y ago
  You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else. - Winston Churchill
  • _Wintermute 4y ago
    I don't think America is the outlier here, I've had some maddening experiences with French companies when I lived there. You basically have to send them formal recorded letters threatening them with legal action just to cancel basic things, and even then they call your bluff and just ignore you 50% of the time.
• IronWolve 4y ago
  Mine had a clause if I moved 30 miles away I could cancel. And I moved to the country, so I canceled. They wanted a letter from my preacher to prove it, my power bill wasnt enough for them.
• AlbertCory 4y ago
  Similar to privacy.com, which you can use to give predators a credit card that you can cancel: You can open another checking account at your bank easily, online. I use that for my book expenses and (cough) royalties. Close the account after notifying the gym in writing that you're canceling, and voila they can't charge you anymore. (that's if the gym draws from your bank account and not by charging a credit card. You could also tell the bank to reject charges from the gym, if that works.)
  • MrStonedOne 4y ago
    [dead]
• dwighttk 4y ago
  What about NYTimes and the only cancel via phone?
  • idontwantthis 4y ago
    Fortunately I gave them my PayPal because they randomly signed me back up for $4.50 a month after I cancelled. I opened a dispute with PP and they set it straight.
  • five82 4y ago
    They're mentioned in the article. You can cancel by chat now though. I take advantage of that to renegotiate yearly.
• PaulHoule 4y ago
  I got the run-around one time when I tried to cancel my membership at Planet Fatness. After my evil twin got me in trouble at the gym I made sure to bring along my 6′3″ son and my 300 pound probably-autistic and foul smelling friend (also offended by my evil twin) for backup and had no trouble canceling “our” membership.
• PaulHoule 4y ago
  Credit card companies should have special handling for recurring billing. You should just be able to tell them “I don’t want to pay this bill anymore” and put a stop to it without having to get a new card and a new number.
  • rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
    I'd sign up for a new credit card just for this feature alone.
  • jabbany 4y ago
    The problem is that with credit cards, recurring bills aren't "special" compared to normal purchases. This is different from digital-native payment systems like PayPal which do have (albeit also riddled with dark patterns) a way for you to de-authorize recurring bills from a vendor, at which point they need to wait for you to initiate a payment instead.
    • PaulHoule 4y ago
      They should change the system so it is. They introduced chip cards to improve the system and they can introduce this change too.
      • jabbany 4y ago
        They should, but it's the businesses that pay the fees to the payment processors and not the consumers, so...
    • unethical_ban 4y ago
      I'm not sure I agree. I can't recall specifics but back in the day a trick to get out of these was to report a card lost or stolen so you'd get a new number. But some banks now allow recurring charges to continue on the new number for "convenience" reasons. Therefore you need to use a throwaway or cancel the card. I got a card from X1 and am using it solely for my recurring services, since you can create unlimited virtual numbers and put price caps/age limits on them.
• ipqk 4y ago
  I assume the side effect of this happening is that everyone's rates will go up.
• rootusrootus 4y ago
  I want this for all subscriptions, not just gym & cable. I had to waste 15 minutes of my life a few weeks ago convincing The Economist to actually cancel my subscription. They were deceitful and tried various ways of phrasing their counter offers hoping I'd slip up and say something other than "No, just cancel." If I can sign up on the web site, I should be able to cancel with just as many clicks.
  • loaph 4y ago
    You should read the article! You would get this in the case you'd described as well
  • OkayPhysicist 4y ago
    > If I can sign up on the web site, I should be able to cancel with just as many clicks. Fun fact! Websites actually have to support this for their California subscribers. If a website is refusing to let you do so, it's not that they haven't implemented it, it's just that they want to screw you. As a corollary, a lot of websites get a lot easier to cancel if you change your billing address to somewhere in CA.
• jaynate 4y ago
  It’s even worse for some companies. Planet Fitness makes you go in to a physical location to cancel. Complete bullshit.
  • ElfinTrousers 4y ago
    As a gym, Planet Fitness is nonsense. As a moneymaking scheme it's top-notch.
  • kube-system 4y ago
    Usually people sign up at gyms that are convenient for them to physically go to, since that's the entire point. But you can cancel PF via certified mail.
• donatj 4y ago
  I literally canceled my gym membership by cancelling my credit card. It was easier to update a handful of services on autopay than go through their daedric rituals of submitting cancellations by fax 90 days in advance. Years later my wife and I signed up for the same gym. She was later able to cancel by talking to someone in charge and crying about it.
  • barbazoo 4y ago
    Virtual cards FTW. Too bad they're not that common here in Canada.
  • TAKEMYMONEY 4y ago
    your credit (FICO) score might take a hit when you close a card, especially an old one
    • kraquepype 4y ago
      If you close a particularly young card, it can also bring your score up if the others are older. Last I looked it used an average for the age of all your credit lines.
    • MrStonedOne 4y ago
      [dead]
    • insane_dreamer 4y ago
      I did not realize this until I cancelled a card that I'd had for 15-20 years, much longer than any others, because I'd switched to another card from the same company (AMEX) and wasn't using that old card anymore. My score went down quite a bit, and I was so upset at Amex for not telling me when I was trying to cancel that old card. I would have just kept it and not used it.
    • hot_gril 4y ago
      That's why I use a prepaid one. Although, that's mostly for free trials.
  • 4y ago
• Waterluvian 4y ago
  In Canada (and probably elsewhere) it's very common for a cell phone web portal to give you a TON of power to make changes, add features, make upgrades. All automatically. But any sort of downgrade or cancellation magically requires you to call a retentions department where, surprise, the employees are incentivized to hang up on you or screw things up to meet their quotas so they can feed their families.
  • oidar 4y ago
    > so they can feed their families. You are free. But you are only free to sell your labor.
• nashashmi 4y ago
  > Khan said it likely wouldn’t apply to non-commercial services like recurring political donations, which have also left some donors feeling scammed and tricked. Khan knows how to stay clear of politically intense scenarios. She also has not gone against Amazon which was the entire thesis of her paper. Assigning Khan into this position forced Amazon to cozy up to politicians, and keep funding them in some shape or form. This was a net gain for both parties. This was a net gain for politics.
• Fnoord 4y ago
  It should be rather simple to deal with: if the cancel method is more difficult than the method to subscribe, then the customer does not have to pay any service due if they do not want to. Or with the addendum: its up to the company who deliver the service to prove that the customer has used their service; otherwise, the other party would need to prove.
• kumarski 4y ago
  This is going to be amazing if you can time it.
• wkat4242 4y ago
  Lol the EU has done this years ago. Silent renewals for a year are forbidden now and so are cancellations that must be hand-delivered on gold paper on the third Thursday of the month between 9:00 and 9:05 kinda deals. Cancellations must be available the in all the same manners a sign-up is. The US should really catch up to banning this consumer-hostility.
• jabbany 4y ago
  > The proposed 'click to cancel' rule would require companies to let you cancel a membership in as many steps as it takes to sign up. This is actually a very smart and simple rule and I love the reciprocity of it---if it takes a click to sign up it must take no more than a click to cancel; if you want to require months of advanced notice to cancel, then you also have to wait just as many months before charging when someone signs up. Tit-for-tat. Seems like fair game.
  • hoistbypetard 4y ago
    Yep. I've never understood why this wasn't the default, and making it so after self-regulation failed feels like the right level of regulatory involvement to me.
• sylware 4y ago
  yeah, and don't forget those "timeshares" abominations (cf latest last week tonigh).
• cloverich 4y ago
  Can they loop in New York Times subscription? You have to _call_ them during business hours to cancel. When I was subscribed, I prompted myself to cancel when we had to change CC numbers (random fraud), so I finally called NYT to cancel. "You have to pay out first" -- no problem, I'll pay last bill right now and cancel. "Once you pay out, you have to wait two days before you can cancel it". WTF? Outright shady.
  • kemitche 4y ago
    I've cancelled my NYT sub online, a year or two back. I keep seeing anecdotes like yours pop-up, though. I don't know if they have different policies based on billing address or something. I remember distinctly because when I _first_ signed up, it wasn't an option. A year or two later they emailed something about "Look how cool we are, you can cancel with just a few clicks now!" as if it was something to be proud of, rather than just them finally using consumer-friendly practices.
    • Spoom 4y ago
      Are you in California? They are forced by law to make it easier to cancel in California, but they don't extend that anywhere else AFAIK.
      • noelsusman 4y ago
        I'm in NC and I'm seeing an option to cancel online.
      • yankeetango 4y ago
        it's not because of CPRA
    • Someone1234 4y ago
      Supposedly it is doable if you sign up in California/EU and a few other states that have regulations on this.
    • astura 4y ago
• temporallobe 4y ago
  I am extremely disappointed that US laws in almost all cases, seem to side with businesses, or at the very least turn a blind eye to very obvious consumer abuses. Actually, I’ll take that further: it seems like our system is designed to allow consumer abuse. I am shocked that our government is actually standing up for us, but I am being cautiously optimistic because lobbyists have a way of shutting that shit down real quick. Look at how ferociously corporate America has been fighting against proposed right-to-repair legislation. Yay for New York, but we need federal involvement on that one too, please and thank you.
• dang 4y ago
  Related: “Click to subscribe, call to cancel” is illegal, FTC says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29250063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29250063 - Nov 2021 (860 comments)
• Mizoguchi 4y ago
  Go gettem.
• weezin 4y ago
  I had a gym that I signed up online for, I tried to cancel one day in person and they said I had to fill out a questionnaire and mail it to cancel. Fuck that company.
• inglor_cz 4y ago
  It is so wild to read stories about gym subscriptions from here (Czechia), where gyms mostly work on "prepay principle" (buy 10 entries or 3 months in advance etc.), or you use a "Multisport Card" that will let you enter one sports facility a day almost anywhere in the country. I have been frequenting gyms since 1998 and I don't think I have ever heard of anyone actually signing a contract with a gym and letting them charge his card. That is just not a part of the local gym culture, most gyms probably don't even have the necessary logistical structure in place to handle such contracts with repeated charges.
• kazinator 4y ago
  Nothing is tough to cancel; just nuke the credit card and tell them to pound sand. Never, ever, allow pre-authorized payments out of a bank account. At most, from a credit card. Use a throwaway credit card number if you have that available. Never share your banking information other than credit card numbers with any vendor. Whenever signing up to pre-authorized payments is optional, make sure it's easy to revoke before getting into it. I only do such a thing for my cell plan, which is a monthly pre-paid thing. I can go in there and revoke it at any time. If you have it set on automatic, you get some benefits, like more gigabytes. If post-dated cheques are an option, that's not a bad way to go. Young people should learn how to write checks. (I'm using both spellings cheque and check here on purpose.) I pay condo management fees via post-dated cheques. I write them around half a year in advance or so. They cannot cash a cheque before the date written on it. You can ask for unused cheques back: they are physical tokens, using copies of which would be fraud. Tip: if you're under forty, ask a baby boomer in your family for a run down on cheque writing and cashing.
  • mikestew 4y ago
    They cannot cash a cheque before the date written on it. Man, I hate to be [citation needed] Guy, but I don’t think that’s true. A quick search only gives me this: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/banking/postdated-check https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/banking/postdated-check I’d doubly-check that before relying on it.
    • toast0 4y ago
      You can't really rely on it, but if you ask your bank nicely, they might enforce it and wait to process a postdated check. My credit union says there's a $15 charge for a postdated order per check, so I'd rather save my money and provide the check later. It's kind of like stale dated checks; the bank doesn't have to pay a check that's more than six months old; but you can't rely on it, the bank can pay that check and if they do, it will come out of your account; the bank has no duty to you to not pay stale dated checks.
    • kazinator 4y ago
      I'm in Canada. (You know, that country that didn't have a banking crisis in 2008.) Here, I'm reasonably confident that banks will not cash a cheque before the date on it, other than if it slips through by clerical error. My government recommends this: https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/payment/pay-by-cheque.html#toc4 https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/... They don't say it can never happen, but if a post-dated cheque is prematurely cashed, it's a problem, and you can complain about it to have the payment reversed. You should complain before the date on the cheque (after which it is more or less moot).
• readme 4y ago
  Once when I was without money, I had to cancel a gym subscription. Inside the gym, the manager informed me of how I couldn't cancel because of my contract. This was a mom&pop level gym, too. It's also worth mentioning that he parked his Porsche cayenne on the sidewalk. He did let me cancel, on the condition that I acknowledged it was because a he is a good christian man. I'm not making this up.
• SMAAART 4y ago
  The principles should be that the same methodology used to signup should be used to cancel. Online signup -> online cancel.
• marcell 4y ago
  I hate uncancellable subscruptions too, but under what authority can the FTC just ban these subscriptions? I had a similar issue with their ban on non-competes.
  • OkayPhysicist 4y ago
    The authority granted to them by their charter granted them by Congress. "(2) The Commission is hereby empowered and directed to prevent persons, partnerships, or corporations, except banks, savings and loan institutions described in section 57a(f)(3) of this title, Federal credit unions described in section 57a(f)(4) of this title, common carriers subject to the Acts to regulate commerce, air carriers and foreign air carriers subject to part A of subtitle VII of title 49, and persons, partnerships, or corporations insofar as they are subject to the Packers and Stockyards Act, 1921, as amended [7 U.S.C. 181 et seq.], except as provided in section 406(b) of said Act [7 U.S.C. 227(b)], from using unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce." Congress has the authority because the Constitution grants them the power to regulate interstate commerce. The Constitution is the root of all authority in the US.
• jmyeet 4y ago
  I would support making fixed term contracts for gyms in particular (plus possibly cable) just plain illegal. There is absolutely no reason why such places can't charge month-to-month. None. Even "initiation fees" should be illegal. At least cable requires a box. I read a story recently about Planet Fitness (IIRC). They realized that certain equipment was popular (eg free weights, racks) so they could remove that equipment and people stopped showing up but a good portion of them kept their membership. So the number of members per location is extraordinarily high. This is incredibly profitable. I, for one, just hate all this adversarial bullshit you have to deal with on a daily basis. I don't want to fight to cancel something. It's one reason I don't pay for some publications that do good reporting because canceling those is notoriously difficult. So instead they get nothing for me but of course they've done the math and the people who don't cancel make them more money than people who don't join because of this. Another thing: automatic price rises. Cable is the worst for this. You can go through a dance of cancelling to get a lower rate. If you don't your $60 FIOS bill will turn into $150 in a few years without intervention. I'm so tired of the constantly nickle and diming.
• benguild 4y ago
  Can’t wait for all of the deceptive corporate marketing against this!
• baron816 4y ago
  Timeshares too I hope.
• waylandsmithers 4y ago
  So- I'll pose the question from the other side because I've been in the position before- do you have any moral obligation when you know for a fact that a paying customer is not using the service you're providing?
  • young_hopper 4y ago
    My gut would say it's not really your responsibility to prompt the cancellation as long as you're not actively trying to make it hard to do. That is, in this situation you'd be accountable but not responsible. On the flip side, as a consumer, doing something like automatically pausing a subscription if it's not actively being used would make me think highly of your company
    • hoistbypetard 4y ago
      I think very highly of fubo precisely because they warn me to cancel my sports add-on packages once the season for the things I regularly watch has passed.
  • bigmattystyles 4y ago
    I've often thought this with digital streaming services - a law that said if you charge for the Month of January and it shows at the end of the January that not a single stream even started, then you can't charge for the next month. Not holding my breath.
• voytec 4y ago
  Binance next, please[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34682469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34682469
• ztetranz 4y ago
  This is why I pay most bills with a push rather than a pull.
• expertentipp 4y ago
  I know it's about US but this screams to me "Germany". They are the top subscription predators on our continent. Two years duration by default, automatic renewal, cancellation 3 months in advance by post or fax. Stay away from subscriptions when dealing with entity incorporated in Germany.
  • kunwon1 4y ago
    Tangentially related - I signed up for DSL through Deutsch Telekom while living on a US military base in Germany, in 2002. I signed up in person at a DT location, and due to the language barrier, I did not get the 'unlimited' plan that I asked for. Instead, I got a 10 hour per month plan, with hourly overage charges once I passed 10 hours. I did not discover this mistake until I returned from a deployment several months later, during which I left my DSL connected. The bill from DT was over 10,000 euros. I never paid, and I had to use creative methods to get online from then onwards. It was annoying.
    • expertentipp 4y ago
      Ah yeah typical German customer service "we will straight out lie to your face because fuck you". Unsurprisingly every mistake and misunderstanding is at a disadvantage to the customer.
  • skrause 4y ago
    It seems like you haven't followed Germany's laws for a while. It's now mandatory that you can cancel the say way you signed up, so if you allow people to sign up online you have to allow them to cancel online. All contracts can also be canceled monthly now after the agreed minimum duration. Source: https://www-baden--wuerttemberg-de.translate.goog/de/service/presse/pressemitteilung/pid/vertragskuendigung-wird-ab-1-juli-2022-einfacher-1?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-baden--wuerttemberg-de.translate.goog/de/service...
    • expertentipp 4y ago
      Too little, too late. Damage done. Scream "deutsch sprechen" at your children or at knife-wielding immigrant.
• jimt1234 4y ago
  This situation was actually a lot worse back in the late-90s, when the consumer internet first got rolling. I recall conversations with my local ISP and my credit card company that were just bonkers.
• insane_dreamer 4y ago
  Also the NYT! You should be able to cancel your subscription online.
• insane_dreamer 4y ago
  I hope this extends to every business. I wanted to cancel an arts&craft subscription package for my son (he lost interest) and had to call during business hours and be on hold forever to get through, which I never managed to do because ... guess what ... I'm f*ing working during business hours. Literally months went by before my wife, bless her soul, finally got it done (and was on hold for an hour and then had to haggle with them for another hour). Never again.
• brutusurp 4y ago
  How about those sneaky add-on subscriptions in Amazon Prime (via Prime Video and Music)? Lots of people complaining that there was auto-enroll happening.
• gpm 4y ago
  I wonder if part of the solution here might be to put firm limits on the period over which subscriptions can auto-renew. That would limit the upside to these practices. Is there any real societal benefit to subscriptions lasting years without contact between the company and the user? It should be simple to make it the law that people must affirmatively re-subscribe every 12 months, contracts saying otherwise are invalid, and charging someone for an expired subscription entitles them to twice the money back + $1000 (to make it worthwhile to fight illegal charges).
  • monospaced 4y ago
    Germany introduced a legislation like this recently ("law for fair consumer contracts"). It mandates that there is a cancellation button (and clicking it sends you an email confirmation), offers via phone have to be sent and confirmed in writing, contracts can be canceled at any time within one month after the initially agreed runtime. In German: https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/wissen/vertraege-reklamation/kundenrechte/gesetz-fuer-fairere-vertraege-mehr-schutz-bei-kosten-und-laufzeiten-55274 https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/wissen/vertraege-reklamat...
• dboreham 4y ago
  Something wrong here: government agency taking action on behalf of citizens, against corporate overlords??
• babyshake 4y ago
  I don't understand the notion that if you cancel a credit card, a company can continue to bill you afterwards, unless they are billing you for a service you have already incurred prior to being billed (which is pretty rare - most times you pay before the next month/year of service). Enterprise contracts may add some more complexity to this, but for standard consumer subscriptions I can't comprehend why a company is allowed to bill you for a service once you stop paying for it.
  • ianburrell 4y ago
    You agreed to the payments, you owe them regardless of ability to pay. A lot of services will cancel if not paid. But gyms are usually on fixed contracts and will milk you until you cancel. If you stop paying your rent, you still owe your landlord. If your cancel credit card for autopay electric bill, you still owe the electric company. Both of those will cancel but you still need to pay them back.
• datavirtue 4y ago
  How about Congress do it? They could wrap it into an inclusive worker and consumer rights bill that bans a laundry list of predatory practices.
• xiaodai 4y ago
  think thrice before i subscribe to the economist ever again.
• tryitnow 4y ago
  Yes please, this is a legitimate course of government action. I personally am very reluctant to sign up for new subscription from smaller companies because I don't want the hassle of unsubscribing. Tough-to-cancel subscriptions actually make it harder for small businesses to succeed because potential customers like me are reluctant to sign up for subscriptions thanks to a few bad apples polluting the market.
• m3kw9 4y ago
  They should mandate unsubscribe like how they do with email, make it like apple app’s subscription, you just sign in and cancel with a tap.
• riantogo 4y ago
  I would like to propose an addition: “Business can’t charge the consumer’s card if the consumer has not been actively using the service for last 90 days. Active is defined as significant usage. Significant is defined as consumption equal-to or greater-than a median user in the same pricing tier.”
  • friend_and_foe 4y ago
    There's a lot of vague terminology in there that would inevitably need to get hammered out in court.
• hakfoo 4y ago
  Wouldn't changing from a "pull" payment model to a "push" one solve all these problems? Why don't we have a system where we can, by default, give out highly restricted payment credentials? Yeah, you CAN get a virtual card IF your bank offers or you go through a third party and set it all up as a bunch of extra hoops... I keep thinking about joining a gym, there seem to be six within a 5km radius, but I think the best choice might be to go to the Senior Centre 15km away because I figure the city government that runs it has no motive to roach-motel my bank account.
  • CSSer 4y ago
    Privacy.com offers such a thing if you’re interested.
    • ridgered4 4y ago
      Do you still need to use your real name and address with the virtual cards? Hearing the stories about collections it seems to me like the only logical move is to avoid these services all together.
• kjs3 4y ago
  I have gotten some fraudish autopays canceled by having my lawyer send a certified letter that we'd take action if it happened again. Cost a few $$...worth it.
• NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
  You know what's tough, is when you inherit someone else's finances, and they've signed up to things and you don't know what they are. By the same token, when you've signed up for a lot of things when you have a good income, and then years down the road, you need to clear up that stuff, especially what you don't use and what yields no goods or services. I think it's a bank regulation now that all recurring charges must include a phone number for cancellations and inquiries, but of course that's like saying all spam needs an unsubscribe link.
• lacoolj 4y ago
  like GEICO?? YESSSSSS!!!
• tipoffdosage904 4y ago
  I hope this included gym memberships!
• tipoffdosage904 4y ago
  I hope this includes gym memberships!
• consultSKI 4y ago
  About time.
• jrnichols 4y ago
  California law supposedly allows this but I haven't had much luck. Very recent experience was with wifi on American Airlines. I was taking a bunch of flights in a 30 day period, so I signed up for the wifi subscription. Very easy to do online. But there's no way to cancel it online that I could find. I couldn't even find "cancel" in the FAQ, and had no choice but to engage a customer service agent (during business hours) to cancel. They cancelled it, but it was a greater number of hoops than I ever should have needed.
  • dragonwriter 4y ago
    Laws don't magically make things happeb, they punish them not happening, which, ideally, over time, encourages compliance. This, especially with things like consumer protection law, relies on people seeking enforcement when they are violated.
• sophiabits 4y ago
  Hopefully this does end up happening. One of the reasons I personally don’t mind Apple’s 30% IAP take is because going through Apple guarantees I won’t need to deal with any dark patterns—cancelling is one or two clicks in the settings app, I get email notifications a few days before each billing cycle happens, and if something does go wrong then Apple’s customer support is generally very helpful. 30% is a big price increase, but the peace of mind is wonderful. I’ve been burned a lot of times in the past by businesses that make it extremely hard to cancel, and cracking down on this kind of behavior seems like a no brainer to me personally.
  • bguebert 4y ago
    I don't think Apple is any better about dark patterns with apps. It's been a while back, but they got sued for in-app purchases and settled with a large payout. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-lawsuit/apple-to-settle-lawsuit-on-inadvertent-app-purchases-by-kids-idUSBRE91P05O20130226 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-lawsuit/apple-to-se...