[tjsnyder]

I absolutely hate the dark pattern of fully controlling your subscription online, including changing it to a different service, but canceling requires a phone call during very specific business hours where you are very likely to forget.

It's disgusting and way too many companies are utilizing these tactics rather than building a solid business model.

More companies that are doing this should be called out. Ive seen naturebox, justfab and others just to name a few.

[harryh]

Pro tip: Email them to cancel. When they tell you they only cancel on the phone, tell them you're deaf and can't talk on the phone.

Works every time.

[levemi]

Why do I have to become dishonest to cancel a service? I don't want to do that. I don't want to lie. This is terrible. This doesn't make it any better or easier to cancel. I don't want to lie and I shouldn't have to.

[throwanem]

> Why do I have to become dishonest to cancel a service?

Because the service provider is dishonest already.

[794CD01]

That doesn't make it okay to lie to them. Where did you learn morality? Ancient Babylon?

[JoeAltmaier]

The fallacy is in considering a corporate account-management procedure as 'them'. There's no person there. There's a process set up. Do what you have to, to defeat the obstacles presented by that process.

[throwanem]

Like all such processes, this one is defined by people, and implemented mostly in terms of a set of actions available to those employees of the corporation who handle cancellation requests. Telling such a person that you're deaf, and thus unable to communicate by voice telephone, is no less a lie because that person happens to be acting on behalf of his employer. If your morality forbids lying, then this lie violates it no less than any other.

There seems to me a somewhat troubling trend of reaction to the widely derided "corporate personhood" principle in law, by deliberately depersonalizing such "persons" to an extent which appears to me to increasingly include not only the "corporate person" per se, but the actual people persons who constitute that corporation, and who implement and act upon its policies - to regard the modern corporation as a faceless alien behemoth, after all, is of necessity to overlook the fact that it is an organization of people, in theory (if to a somewhat greater extent than in practice) around a common goal.

Your comment here is squarely in this line. "There's no person there", after all, is blatantly erroneous: of course there is a person there, otherwise there'd be no one to whom to worry about lying. It's been a while since I last reread The Authoritarians, but I seem to remember this kind of depersonalization being a significant theme in its analysis of how your category of authoritarian followers become willing to countenance human rights abuses. In that light, it surprises me to see you express a perspective which includes precisely that kind of elision, and I'm curious whether you see a substantive difference where I do not.

[darpa_escapee]

Lying isn't inherently wrong. You aren't lying to a person with feelings, you're lying to a faceless operation that is fucking you over.

[etatoby]

This.

It's clearly important to treat people with respect, even when they find themselves in a job position whose description goes against your interests.

But you wouldn't be lying to them, as I can assure you the customer service worker couldn't care less whether you're really deaf or not. As an analogy, telling a lie via telegram only counts as lying to the recipient, not to the post office clerks typing and handling the telegram.

In fact you would be lying to a faceless entity that is not a human being, whose charter clearly states that its purpose is to extract as much money as possible from you and funnel it somewhere else. Where to? Into the (ultimate) pockets of people who have built this entire construction in order to be as removed as possible from the moral and legal implications of the faceless entity's actions. Not to mention remaining very well hidden. Cowards and thieves, at the very least.

Whether you believe I'm lying to the faceless entity or to the cowards and thieves who built it that way (which is a valid philosophical point) I have no qualms whatsoever doing either thing.

[794CD01]

>Lying isn't inherently wrong.

Perhaps not to you. Morality is personal, and to me this comment is abhorrent.

[throwanem]

Whether it's okay to lie to them has no obvious bearing on whether it's necessary. Where did you learn morality? A shallow reading of the New Testament?

[794CD01]

From my parents, thanks. I fail to see how it's "necessary" in any sense here. Nobody's going to die because I called the company to cancel my account instead of emailing them.

[Lawtonfogle]

>That doesn't make it okay to lie to them.

You are right. What makes it okay to lie is that no harm is done to anyone I care about not harming. That they made themselves someone I no longer care about harming is their own issue.

[turar]

Moreover, the person you'd be lying to couldn't care less if you're lying or not. The person is most likely paid by the hour and is counting down hours to clock out and go home.

[794CD01]

Sorry, I'm not a consequentialist. And if harm is your criterion, what harm is done to anyone by calling customer service to cancel your account instead of lying so you can do it via email?

[tamana]

I learned morality from my grandparents who survived the Nazis, and some who did not. When smeoen someone knifes me, I don't ask permission to escape.

[794CD01]

"Escaping" isn't immoral. Lying is.

[softawre]

What?

Sorry, deaf humor. (I agree with you).

[kels]

What if I'm trying to cancel a music streaming service?

[jtolmar]

The company might not believe you, but many deaf people do listen to music. Deaf doesn't have to mean total silence, it can also mean that sound is so muffled or distorted that you can't understand the spoken word. Music still has some value, if you crank it up.

[ovulator]

All the better reason to cancel, no?

[hvidgaard]

I have been in that situation before. I send them an email stating I wanted to cancel and I got the run of the mill "call this number". The reply proved that they're reading it so I send a reply back that I was unable to call, that they must forward the mail, and they're welcome to call me if they think it isn't me that is canceling. Then I refused any future CC payments and that was the end of it.

[Overtonwindow]

When I encounter these types of windows that I can't seem to "close" I use Google's developer console to inspect the element and then...delete it. The box goes away and I can read the rest of the news article. It's a pain but it's better than clicking anything that might lead to further annoyances.

[islon]

I do something similar but using noScript (js disabled by default).

Most of the times the news are loaded without popups and sometimes with wrong CSS but still readable.

Sometimes I need to enable js only for the actual host for it to work. In the end it's worth the hassle.

[BlackFly]

To be clear, you can do this in any browser. I also am in the habit of editing EULA's before agreeing to anything.

[dhimes]

Same. Would be nice to have a "make this recur" button so when page reloads I don't have to keep doing it.

EDIT: If it's just text I'm after, I'll also go in with elinks.

[sp332]

uBlock Origin has an element-selector built in. It pops up a little editing window, and you can modify and save the element to your own block list.

[_asummers]

You could use something like Greasemonkey and set up rules for that domain, though it'd be nice if this was automated from the action of deleting an element.

[seanp2k2]

Write a small TamperMonkey script to fix their BS JS. That's what I did when Comcast wouldn't let me pay my bill without creating a Comcastic!!! Account. My login worked just fine, but they really wanted to block me from paying my bill until I created a separate account with their useless email features and other things for some reason. Killing some DOM elements let me pay their ransom.

[knowaveragejoe]

The downside is that web pages often change, so this might not work for long.

[sago]

Unfortunately, you're risking your credit score. If you signed (or agreed to) a contract with a specific termination procedure, then just cancel your payments without going through that procedure, they are within their rights to recover the money.

There's no law to say that you can terminate by email. Most companies won't bother chasing, but there's nothing to stop them really hurting you.

[kuschku]

> There's no law to say that you can terminate by email. Most companies won't bother chasing, but there's nothing to stop them really hurting you.

In most of Europe, there is.

In Germany, for example, the business has to allow cancelling via the same way as you signed up.

[Silhouette]

In Germany, for example, the business has to allow cancelling via the same way as you signed up.

That seems reasonable.

Do you know a lot of companies that will let someone sign up via e-mail? I don't.

[madeofpalk]

I do know of lots of companies that let you sign up via website though.

[Silhouette]

And IMHO those companies should also let you cancel the same way, whether or not the law requires it. To me, that seems reasonable and fair.

[hvidgaard]

There is no such thing as a credit score in Denmark. I can be put in a register called RKI, but only if I acknowledge that I owe them money, or the court has ruled that I do.

[sago]

That sounds incredibly reasonable. So reasonable, in fact, that I can't see it ever being law in the US or UK.

[alphapapa]

Recover what money? Payment for services not yet rendered? In perpetuity until the customer makes a phone call?

[sago]

Yes, they are providing a service: access to their content. Whether you read it or not is not their fault.

It's a silly situation that arises because of the (almost) zero marginal cost of providing digital media. It makes sense in the physical world: you can't claim your money back because you didn't read the magazine they sent. But these laws are much the same in the virtual world.

If they provided and you agreed to a way to cancel, and you don't use that way, they are totally within their rights to continue (passively) providing access, and charging for it. In perpetuity, yes.

[alphapapa]

An analogy to a magazine subscription would be a for-pay email newsletter. In that case, if the newsletter was sent, obviously the company is owed.

But in the case of a passive web site subscription, if the customer stops accessing the site and stops the method of payment, no services have been rendered, and no cost has been incurred by the company. Web server logs could even prove this (although the company could also falsify them).

So a better analogy would probably be a gym membership. Imagine a gym refuses to allow a customer to cancel in-person or on the phone, instead requiring the customer to mail a letter. So a customer, justifiably angry at this, calls his bank or credit card and stops future payments, and never sets foot in the gym again. Now, no services have been rendered after that date, and no costs have been incurred by the gym. They are owed nothing--if not legally in all jurisdictions, then ethically and morally, and therefore legally it should be the same.

I would like to see this tested in court, even a small claims court. In the case of a company intentionally making it difficult and time-consuming to unsubscribe, and a customer cancelling the payment method due to that difficulty, I have a feeling that most judges would side with the former customer. And as has been pointed out, in many places this is not legal, and I would not be surprised if that included several U.S. states.

[sago]

> if not legally in all jurisdictions

Yep, you'd be screwed there too. If your agreement with the gym said you would unsubscribe by mail, and you just stop paying without doing so, they could recover the money.

Gyms make their money by having people pay without using the gym, so they wouldn't care that they aren't 'rendering services'. That's a big reason many companies, and most gyms, use subscriptions.

You could fight it in court if you want to. You might even win. You might even win the following battle to recover your credit score. But all that's going to be a lot more of a hassle than picking up the phone and cancelling in the first place. It takes a special kind of person to willfully seek such a pyrrhic victory.

[JoeAltmaier]

Its not sensible, but it might be real.

[tamana]

That's a scare myth. Cancelling a $50 contract won't meaningfully hurt your credit score. Missing your rent and credit card payments for 3 months will hurt your credit score.

[JoeAltmaier]

I skipped to the end of that process. Called ETrade to cancel. They said it cost money to cancel! That's why they had a minimum balance - so they could steal it when you tried to quit.

That smelled. So instead I signed up for the ETrade checkbook, wrote myself a check for my remaining balance, cashed it, and never dealt with them again.

[seanp2k2]

I tried something similar with a big bank once. I got calls from collections agencies about 9 months later. I ended up paying them about $50 in account fees to save a black mark on my credit report. They were charging me to keep my account open even though I made it very clear that I didn't want that, but I didn't go through all their proper paperwork.

So yeah, it's not like any of these types of establishments care at all about their reputation. They'll gladly ignore your not-to-their-letter cancellation, stop contacting you, and send your $50 usage fees for no actual usage to collections.

[Silhouette]

I certainly don't condone making it artificially difficult for people to cancel, but there are several reasonable points against accepting some random e-mail as cancellation. It's not authenticated or tamper-proof, for a start. There's no proof of whether or when it was actually delivered. It probably requires a real person to read and act on it, which may delay things like cancelling any recurring payment process, possibly beyond the point where more money has been spent.

For any subscription services I run, if someone mails us asking to cancel, we normally direct them to the on-site cancellation process. This does use all our normal security and log-in procedures, and is fully automated and can be used in moments at any time.

However, if someone did not cancel that way (or in one of the other ways we allow for in our terms) and just blocked their payment, we would be well within our legal rights to take action to recover the money they owed us. In practice we're only charging a small amount in these cases so we'd probably just cancel their service when payment didn't go through, but there is no guarantee any other business would make the same decision, so your strategy is risky.

[hvidgaard]

> There's no proof of whether or when it was actually delivered

If a real person replies to my mail, it's reasonable to expect that it has been delivered.

They're more than welcome to ask any question via mail or initiate the call in the time I specify (outside of my working hours) - which I wrote. Or they can have an online form to do it as well, just like they did when they accepted my money in the first place.

> we would be well within our legal rights to take action to recover the money they owed us

I don't owe any money, since I told company I wanted to cancel before I had to. That is enough done from my part such that the consumer laws protect me and any lawsuit would be dismissed before I even hear about it.

[Silhouette]

I don't owe any money, since I told company I wanted to cancel before I had to.

Sorry, but that usually isn't how it works.

That is enough done from my part such that the consumer laws protect me and any lawsuit would be dismissed before I even hear about it.

I don't know where you're from, but in any jurisdiction I'm familiar with, it seems unlikely that would be the case.

From a purely practical point of view, I'm not sure it should be the case either, even though I'm generally in favour of reasonable consumer protection laws. For e-mail specifically, there are too many problems with relying on it, particularly if significant amounts of money or other commitments are affected by whether or not a subscription continues.

[hvidgaard]

> Sorry, but that usually isn't how it works.

Depends on the laws I suppose. I Denmark you cannot bind a consumer to pay for a service for any period except for a few special cases (for instance, phone service up to 6 months).

I'm from Denmark, and we have some fairly strong consumer protection laws exactly to prevent things like this. If I cancel any kind of prepaid service, not only do they have to stop charging me money after the periode is finished, they also have to give me back the money equivalent to the remaining period from the end of month + 1 month and forward.

[Silhouette]

Denmark seems to have relatively strong laws in this respect compared to most places, and from what little I've seen of them, they generally seem quite reasonable.

There is still a question of what constitutes adequate notice of cancellation, though. If you're subscribing to a service based in a country other than your own, there may be other laws that are relevant as well.

Personally, I'm a fan of the symmetry argument: you should be able to cancel a service through equivalent methods to what you could use to sign up for it, and without requiring an unreasonable amount of effort.

[CaptainZapp]

Ok, fair enough. Email is an unreliable form of cancellation for a number of reasons. I don't necessarily buy it, but let's accept this for the sake of argument.

But then how exactly is it more secure to accept a cancellation by Random Dude on the phone?

Except to make the customer (especially international customers, which may have to call in the middle of the night and who may incur significant charges) jump through a whole lot of hoops and to make it as difficult as possible to cancel.

To me this reeks like a shit ton of bad faith by the service provider, which has nothing whatsoever to do with security.

[Silhouette]

But then how exactly is it more secure to accept a cancellation by Random Dude on the phone?

I suppose if they had some sort of credentials set up for phone access then that would be a point in its favour. My bank do have well established security procedures for me to contact them by phone, for example.

To be clear, I am not in any way condoning requiring phone cancellation as a technique for making it artificially difficult or frustrating for someone to cancel when they are within their rights to do so. As you say, it stinks of bad faith.

[BlackFly]

Call centers are in general quite atrocious as far as authentication goes. Here is one particular egregious example http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/2016-reality-lazy-authent... I cannot remember where I read it, but there are services in Eastern Europe where you can hire someone to field questions at a call center. A calm detached criminal is going to be more convincing than a flustered person who cannot believe that their identity is being questioned.

In general, there is nothing that you can ask me over a phone that cannot be asked to someone pretending to be me who can get the details in a variety of ways. To static questions there are static answers. If you perform two factor authentication properly, this is actually easier over a website than the phone.

[hvidgaard]

They often have you state particulars of the account details. MS will send you an email with a code that you must tell them.

In any case, one isn't more or less secure than the other. The physological effect of speaking to a phone just makes someone feel one is more safe. I'd say that if you send an email to the address you have on the account details, you can reasonably expect to get the right person to the same degree as you would when calling the phone number on the account.

[ssmoot]

If you tried that with someone who cared, you could get taken to small claims court. And it would end up costing you a lot even if your defense prevailed. In TX at least, companies are not allowed to use lawyers in small claims court.

You are definitely not within your rights to extort people over services not rendered.

That's a very entitled POV.

[Silhouette]

That's a very entitled POV.

What, exactly, is "entitled" about asking someone to cancel through a simple process on the same web site they signed up with? In any business I run, it takes maybe 10 seconds, and the service is completely transparent about how to do it. It's secure, it's fully automated, and it's in the customer's own interests as well because it will also cancel any recurring payment arrangements with other services immediately and automatically.

What is entitled is things like the person who mailed us the other day, after hours on a Friday and just a few hours before their next subscription payment was due, saying very rudely and aggressively that they weren't using the service and they'd forgotten to cancel before but now they wanted to and they didn't authorise any further payments and they'd do all sorts of nasty things to us if we charged their card again. I mean seriously, they were told three times when they signed up what the charging basis was, and they could have cancelled using the normal facility in far less time than it took to write their little rant. It was only through luck that one of us saw their message in time to act on it, and if we hadn't, it would have been entirely their fault.

You are definitely not within your rights to extort people over services not rendered.

There is nothing remotely extortionate about the business practices we are talking about. The services in question are completely transparent and up-front about both what the charging basis is and how to cancel, and our terms are legally unremarkable.

As for "services not rendered", anyone is free to cancel their subscriptions with any service I help to run at any time, and none of those services use any sort of sneaky long term commitments or ever have. But if you stay signed up, and you have access to the services, you don't get to decide later that you want your money back because you didn't actually use them that month. If you think that's unreasonable, I wish you luck in getting all your insurance premiums refunded if you haven't claimed on them at the end of the year.

[ssmoot]

> What, exactly, is "entitled" about asking someone to cancel through a simple process on the same web site they signed up with?

The fact that you feel entitled to their hard earned money, despite providing no service or value.

> just a few hours before their next subscription payment was due

What's wrong with that? Are customers required to provide notice? It doesn't cost you anything to back date the termination date if you don't feel like handling it until Monday. It's your system.

> they were told three times when they signed up

Expecting your EULA is binding, and that if you choose to deviate from it, that's because you're just such a great guy, and if you felt like attempting to take their money or tarnish their credit for not using the cancellation avenue you prefer, you'd be perfectly within your rights... All that sounds rather entitled to me.

[Silhouette]

The fact that you feel entitled to their hard earned money, despite providing no service or value.

We've spent several years building that particular service. We pay the bills for running it whether or not any particular customer uses it, because we have to have enough computers and bandwidth and so on available so that our subscribers can get what they're paying for. Our expenses don't magically disappear just because someone didn't use a service that they had previously used and were still signed up for during a certain period, nor can we telepathically tell whether intermittent users will not actually use the service during the next billing period.

What's wrong with that?

What's wrong with sending an e-mail to an address no-one is likely to be monitoring in real time, denying permission for a fully automated scheduled payment to be taken a few hours later? Well, no-one might read the message before the payment gets taken, for one thing.

It doesn't cost you anything to back date the termination date if you don't feel like handling it until Monday.

You don't seem to understand how this works. The money would already have been taken by the automated systems at that point. That means we would have to actively refund it, which may in itself incur a charge depending on the payment processing services involved. In any case, it requires significant manual intervention to do that and update all the records accordingly, which is at best wasting time we could otherwise spend on more useful activities.

Expecting your EULA is binding, and that if you choose to deviate from it, that's because you're just such a great guy, and if you felt like attempting to take their money or tarnish their credit for not using the cancellation avenue you prefer, you'd be perfectly within your rights...

We are perfectly within our rights. That's the point.

As it happens, we often do go out of our way to deal with messages from our subscribers as helpfully as we can. We take considerable pride in offering very good customer service, and we receive far more positive messages than complaints. In some cases, we will even voluntarily refund someone's subscription fee for a month, perhaps if we believe their situation wasn't entirely their fault or they had some honest misunderstanding about something.

But make no mistake, doing these things costs us time and, in some cases, money. We will do it anyway for most people, because that's the kind of business we want to run. However, we have absolutely no obligation to do so, either legally or morally. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we also had little inclination to do so in the case of someone who by their own admission had known what to do and failed to do it, yet who felt the appropriate reaction to that was to write to us rudely, making an unreasonable demand and immediately threatening us if we failed to comply, instead of simply asking for help if they needed it.

[hvidgaard]

Btw, I'd like to add that if you provide a simple way to cancel on the web, I'd be more than satisfied with it. If I send an email, I probably couldn't figure out where to cancel after 5-10 min.

[Silhouette]

For what it's worth, if an average user of any service I'm talking about couldn't figure out how to cancel within even 1 minute, I'd consider that a significant usability failure. Typically we have an obvious button for it on whatever the main control panel or dashboard for their account is, and we rarely have more than a confirmation button and perhaps an optional question or two to complete the process after that.

Some people would probably argue that we make it too easy for customers to leave, but as I've said, we prefer to run these services a certain way, and if it doesn't completely maximise profit then that's just too bad. It's not uncommon for some of these services to have a pattern of seasonal memberships, so from an entirely self-interested point of view, the trust we earn by making it easy to sign up and easy to cancel is probably of some value anyway.

[pkaye]

Would it be fair that if one cannot cancel by email then one cannot subscribe by mail since the same risks exist (of authentication and tamper-proof) exist?

[Silhouette]

Yes, I think that's entirely reasonable.

Of course, you normally can't sign up for services that require payment via e-mail anyway, since no-one credible is going to ask for enough details that they can charge you through an insecure medium like e-mail.

[jf271]

You are lucky you got a reply. All I got was another bill.

[illumin8]

There's even worse ones - Gyms that make you sign up for a membership that auto-renews every year and bills your credit card monthly.

They require you mail a physical letter requesting cancellation via certified mail! And you must prove you are the account holder and then wait 6-8 weeks for them to process your cancellation, so you might just end up auto-renewed for another year unless you cancelled two months in advance.

It's actually a wonder some of these business models based on theft by deception/fraud don't get prosecuted/sued out of existence...

[specialist]

Every year there's a genuine effort to reign in payday lenders in my state. Alas, those businesses know how to lobby. Bills die in committee, key votes won't budge, etc.

"Petty" issues like this don't light the activists' fire sufficiently to bring the heat required to push thru change. Another similar issue is predator towing operations. Every one agrees they have to go, but they're far down on the list of priorities.

[rham]

I just cancelled a membership at a gym which utilises these cancellation practices. When I found out that I'd have to mail a physical letter, I called my bank instead.

If you use your credit card, you can wiggle your way out of it if you explain that these cancellation processes are absurd. Call the gym and ask if they'll cancel your membership over the phone first. After they refuse, tell your credit card company about it and ask them to try calling the gym with you on the line to get your membership cancelled. If the gym persists in its refusal you should be able to dispute and block the charge.

For me though this happened to be linked to my debit card (and I never ever put monthly billables on my debit card so I'm not sure what I was thinking when I signed up). However, because I had no other services linked to my debit card, I was able to have my bank just send me a new card and that was that.

[URSpider94]

If you have a signed contract with the gym, then just cancelling the card account may be a good way to find yourself sent to collections. Eliminating the payment method just means you are not paying them any more, it doesn't mean that you aren't accruing charges.

As annoying as these cancellation procedures are, they are almost always laid out in the up-front contract (especially for a gym, where you signed up in person). The time to object is when you sign the contract, not when you're trying to cancel.

(Not that I don't <strikethrough>hate</strikethrough> like this practice and find it shady and annoying, but wouldn't want people to wind up in deep trouble as a result).

[tamana]

Collections is a boogeyman. No company actively recruiting new non-distressed customers wants to have a reputation for harassing customers who fight back against pickpocketing. They'd rather let the occasional savvy customer go and continue signing up more rubes.

[ry_ry]

That seems like an awful lot of hassle, compared to whatever arcane unsub process they have in place.

[themartorana]

A agency of some sort that protected consumers from these sorts of business practices would make a lot of sense. I wonder if Elizabeth Warren is doing anything...

[specialist]

My state's current Attorney General, who has jurisdiction, is pretty good at this sort of thing. Previous guy was quite a bit more laissez faire.

[Spooky23]

Newspapers are so desperate, they'll do anything. The answer is only use a customer focused card, or insist on invoicing, preferably where you pay in arrears.

My local paper even plays games with invoicing. They bill on a weird cycle (10 week) and will send you out of cycle/overlapping invoices that you don't actually owe. Sometimes those out of cycle invoices casually jack the rate up 20-30% -- if you pay it, you're accepting new terms.

[pkaye]

My local paper does the same thing. Didn't realize this was their new strategy and that the billing department was not incompetent. They will send fake bills ahead of time with higher rates and say that my previous weeks have run out but my wife keeps everything logged and sets them straight everytime. Also long as you are willing to "play chicken" to cancel the service, they are willing to renegotiate to your terms (just like Comcast.)

[tamana]

Why not just cancel? Is it really worth having this battle, over a newspaper? I'll do it for my internet because that's an esssenit to survive.

[ocdtrekkie]

It should be, I think, a reasonable demand of reputable business that any subscription must be able to be cancelled via the same medium as it is signed up for.

[vanviegen]

Many European countries have a law that makes this a requirement. I haven't encountered this pattern for quite some years (in The Netherlands).

[dawhizkid]

T-mobile! Worst cancellation experience ever. Won't even let you cancel in-store. Should be illegal IMO.

[SwellJoe]

I suspect T-Mobile is just deeply and embarrassingly incompetent, rather than actively user hostile. Everything, including spending more money with them, often takes a phone call. Changing plans online is impossible about half the time (depending on what you're trying to do, and it doesn't fail more often for downgrading service than upgrading). They are a phone company that barely knows how to do business as a phone company; they definitely aren't a technology or internet company, as they fail remarkably on those fronts.

[imglorp]

> deeply and embarrassingly incompetent

Correct. Former vendor, worked with their cell network crew on many occasions.

To be more fair, all the large carriers are mostly laden with corporate procedures and bureaucracy so it's hard for worker bees to make progress even if they know what's needed. T-Mo's procedures are just more broken.

[newjersey]

Kept getting bills every month even though I had cancelled and I was supposed to be on the free for life plan of 200MB. The representative acknowledges it was their fault every time. They removed the item from the bill every time within fifteen minutes of me dialing.

Then I changed address. They might still be billing me for all I know.

[jerf]

If you are in the US (reasonable guess for a(n ex-)T-Mobile customer), you might want to exercise your right to pull a free credit report check and make sure it's not screwing it up.

Since it is actually a bit challenging to correctly pull your free credit report, start here: https://www.ftc.gov/faq/consumer-protection/get-my-free-cred... (Simply Googling "free credit report" and clicking willy-nilly can lead to sadness.)

In fact I'm overdue to pull mine myself; thanks for reminding me.

[a13n]

One time I was trying to cancel my plan with Bally's fitness in New York and they wanted me to send a physical letter to Nebraska or something. I filed a better business bureau complaint and it was taken care of very quickly.

[wldcordeiro]

24 Hour Fitness has a similar policy you can put your account on indefinite hold at a location but to cancel you have to mail some letter to their headquarters. Stupid bullshit to keep their numbers up artificially.

[JoeAltmaier]

My local fitness place had a deal where for $5 a month they'd put your membership 'on hold'. What a deal! I discovered by erasing my credit card on their payment site I could do it for $0 a month.

[wldcordeiro]

Just be careful that they don't take you to collections for "missed payments". Regardless though, fuck these kinds of practices where signing up is easy and leaving is hard. That should be something massively illegal with fines in the millions to billions for the number of affected customers.

[e40]

Here's my trick: use a virtual credit card number (which is safer, anyway, since you don't expose the # of your original CC), and revoke it when you want to cancel. Or, make a VCC# with a $ limit. I don' t know if anyone other than Citibank has them anymore. They are fantastic.

[throwanem]

Bank of America has them; their Apple Pay support is built on them. You can create one directly via their online banking interface, although it's pretty deeply buried and (IIRC) requires Flash, which is weird.

[seanp2k2]

Citi used to have this with their DoubleCash card. It's now missing from their website. Looks like BofA is the only ones doing this now :<

[e40]

Good to know. This is a phenomenal feature and I'd like to see more banks offer it.

[gedrap]

In general, managing subscriptions for each media source sucks. I'd rather trust one company to manage it and have it all in one place rather than a few different ones with varying level of quality.

[takno]

Got one of those for wine yesterday - get the initial cheap (but not free offer) purchase, and then only through well-learned suspicion do I check through enough to realise they've auto-enrolled me on a £25/month subscription.

On the upside they answered the phone immediately outside office hours and it was all cancelled in less than 30 seconds, so it's not always a hard sell on the phone

[taneq]

LinkedIn's "free trial" does this too (although they are /somewhat/ transparent with it). They send invites to trial their premium product pretty regularly, but in order to activate the trial you have to essentially sign up for the service, and then remember to cancel again before the trial runs out and you start getting billed.

[kevando]

To cancel my gym membership I need to mail them a letter. It's laughable, but this shit works. I still belong to the gym

[jib]

WatchESPN (at least their college app). Requires a personal email to cancel, can do everything else on their site. So tired of those guys. They got an extra 20 euro from me by using this too, so I guess it works? (If they want no money from me ever again).

[dajohnson89]

You were going to cancel anyways, so they're still up ahead.

[wtetzner]

Comcast does this as well. It's actually worse than just cancelling. You can't even downgrade to a lower internet speed without calling, but you can upgrade to something more expensive online.

[seanp2k2]

Yup, and when you call to downgrade, it's not a quick conversation. They have to try to negotiate with you and try to actually sell you more when you're asking for less. The person I spoke to finally capitulated after about 10 minutes of trying to sell me packages, ask me what my internet was used for, trying to explain why I might want not-their-cheapest thing, trying to tell me it's a bad deal, etc. It was super annoying and a stressful experience honestly to drop from 100mbit peak download to 35mbit service; $65 a month vs $105 for the 100mbit, 100mbit came as a package deal with basic cable which I didn't use since I don't have a TV. It was $10 cheaper than without TV, priced at $60/month for 6 months as a promo, the TV bundled so they can inflate their subscriber numbers to attempt to publicly minimize the effects of cord cutting.

I'd do anything to have a different ISP, but my apartment building has the choice of Comcast or 768k ATT DSL for the same price since I'd have to also get a phone line.

[wtetzner]

So I've discovered that the trick to a faster downgrade phone call is to call and say you want to cancel your service. Then you get someone who's trying to keep you as a customer, and they are willing to do more to please you.

[banku_brougham]

I have a few credit cards dedicated to this purpose, that I cancel when I run into this problem. This article made me realize how messed up it is that we have come to this.

[criddell]

I don't think cancelling a credit card always works. I've had cards that have been cancelled that still process new charges for some reason.

[marstall]

call center hours at the globe are listed as 6AM-5PM M-f, 8AM-2PM Sat/Sun. Seems pretty generous to me.

Keep in mind this is 140 year old company which can't change all at once.

[wildpeaks]

eFax in Europe also does that.

[petercooper]

For anyone else who runs into problems with eFax. E-mail them, say you're deaf and therefore unable to call. It worked for me. Often dark patterns have great dark patterns that work in response.

[levemi]

This is lying. I don't want to lie.

[brandnewlow]

Look ye, to http://Truebill.com for relief!

(disclaimer, I am an investor)

[levemi]

Wow, look at this huge list for how to cancel from these kinds of sites:

https://www.truebill.com/how-to-cancel

That's pretty awesome. I'm just going to check this list from now on before I put my credit card info into a web form.

[JimmyM]

How does Truebill make money? It seems a little too good to be true to be free. I mean, I can think of a bunch of perfectly acceptable ways to make money off this (selling anonymous information about what makes subscribers unsubscribe to companies, for example), I would just like to know before I sign up what exactly I am signing up for.

[yahyam]

Founder of Truebill here...

We plan to make money by recommending new services (i.e. we see you have X and Y, would you like to try Spotify).

[ssharp]

You've missed a golden opportunity to claim "most ironic business model". Go ahead, charge that monthly fee :)

[levemi]

eFax does it everywhere. I paid $0.99 to send a fax and ended up with two monthly statements for $16.99 that were not refundable. It's disgusting and it should be illegal.

[narrowrail]

You should check out YC-backed Hellofax:

https://www.hellofax.com/info/pricing

[MichaelGG]

eFax is part of patent troll J2. They own patents on something like "fax, but with the Internet" and go after every VoIP company that gets big enough.

[dingo_bat]

What would happen if you send them an email stating your wish to cancel and then asked your CC company to deny any charges from them? I'd think that would be a legal and valid way to cancel any service.

[greenleafjacob]

They send to collections. Personally I find a certified letter to their registered agent is the best method when I think a company might be shady and I don't wanna wait on the phone.

[mcherm]

How do you usually go about finding the address of a company's registered agent?

[headstorm]

For the states I've been curious about in the United States, each state's Secretary of State usually has a search form for corporations, LLCs, and limited partnerships. examples: California (http://kepler.sos.ca.gov/) and Washington (http://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/).

[woogley]

Interestingly, Boston Globe's registered agent is empty! http://corp.sec.state.ma.us/CorpWeb/CorpSearch/CorpSummary.a...

[Silhouette]

It depends where you are, but many places have something broadly similar. Here in England, for example, any limited company must have a registered address and mail to that address must be read. The registered address must be shown in various places by the company, and can also be checked by anyone through Companies House, which is the government authority that deals with such things. These are all legal requirements here, and the authorities will not look kindly on a company that doesn't follow the rules, with potentially serious implications for its directors.

[euyyn]

What's the registered agent of a company?

[fleitz]

It's the person on record who should be contacted for legal matters, correspondence, etc.

Essentially, if these things ever get to court if you contacted someone other than the agent they can claim they weren't notified, didn't know, etc, if they are shady, but a registered letter to the registered agent is like the gold standard of having contacted them.

[dredmorbius]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_agent

[viraptor]

I removed subscriptions from a few services that way and none gave me any problems. Even reactivated some of the accounts later on when I decided to go back. Most of those used paypal, so I think they got cancel notifications straight away.

I can't remember the names of most of the companies though. One was definitely Match, because they expect you to call them to cancel (or did at the time)

[Silhouette]

I'd think that would be a legal and valid way to cancel any service.

Please be careful. That is not necessarily the case, and depending on your local laws you may be left owing money, going to collections, and/or having your credit damaged for non-payment.