The worst one is probably trying to make it hard for users to stop paying for a service, like cancelling a subscription. That shit should be punishable by literal prison time.
About 10yrs ago NBA did this to me. They made it impossible to cancel a $99/m sub.
Their instructions were login and go to the cancel button but the cancel button was broken and said call this number. But no one ever picked up the number.
I will never buy a NBA branded thing after that obvious bullshit scam.
New York Times does this also. As far as I can tell it's literally impossible to cancel a subscription. I had to close the card attached to my account.
I'm highly in favor of making this illegal. My credit card expired and I switched my NYT subscription from through their website to through Apple (so I could cancel), and they sent my account to collections! Working with the collections agency to get it removed was easy, however.
I guess the law that I would be in favor of is twofold:
1) You must be able to cancel subscriptions from the same website that you created it from. After you cancel, the subscription must last until the end date. (So you aren't forced to set a calendar reminder for the day before.)
2) Sending an account to collections falsely should carry a 100x penalty. If they make a mistake and their billing system sends your account worth $300 to collections, they pay a $30,000 fine. Should motivate someone to write some unit tests for that.
I would be in favor of a different approach: a merchant should not, under any circumstances, be able to remove money from an account, charge a credit card, or otherwise take money from someone without the explicit authorization of the customer. In this context, explicit means one of two things:
1. The customer intentionally authorized that specific transaction. A specific transaction means one transaction. If a merchant wants to use this approach, they need to ask for authorization each time they charge.
2. The merchant may register a subscription or other recurring charge arrangement with the customer’s bank or card provider. The customer must explicitly authorize this registration at the time it occurs and may, by contacting their bank, revoke the authorization at any time. The merchant may not recreate the authorization without the customer re-authorizing it at the time of creation.
Eventually, the whole pull model of money transfers needs to go away. Taking money from someone by knowing their account number is nonsensical and should not be possible.
>The merchant may register a subscription or other recurring charge arrangement with the customer’s bank or card provider.
An advantage of Direct Debits in the UK is that I see them all in my banking app and can cancel them individually. A company is legally required to gain my consent again before charging again.
I think the explicit authorization is the contract you sign that allows for the subscription. It's already pretty risky to loan people money, and your system makes it even riskier. (Consider the business model of cloud providers; you agree to pay for whatever you use, and then they charge you for last month's usage. If you could just not pay, then the business wouldn't really be viable. You'd have to figure out what you're going to use in advance, and pre-pay, and the consequences for getting it wrong by 1 cent would be unnecessary downtime. Cloud providers of course let you pre-pay at a discount, but having both pre-pay and post-pay make a lot of sense. But, we're all paying extra because of the people that walk away at the end of the month and don't pay their bill.)
It would be worthwhile to consider not letting "click agree" create a binding contract. I think I'm in favor of that.
I agree that things like newspapers don't need to be a subscription or have a contract. On the first of the month they should just pop up a dialog that asks if you still want the subscription, and if so, it charges your card for 1 month. I would certainly like that, but it does carry a risk on my end -- if they go out of business on the second of the month, I'm stuck paying for 29 days of the subscription I can't use.
Like I said, the big problem is not being able to cancel. That's why I buy subscriptions through Apple -- there's always a cancel button. I think we should make that mandatory for every subscription provider.
This is literally what “sending you a bill” is. They don’t need to have an upfront agreement to charge your card. They need an upfront agreement that you will pay for services used at the end of the month. This is standard invoicing that these companies already do just without automatically charging cards.
When you pay your medical bills it’s still an explicit payment.
I think there are a couple of issues. One is that most countries consider giant piles or fine print that no one reads to be binding contracts and that customers can’t credibly negotiate them. The other is that it’s far too easy for merchants to extract money from customers without the customers’ consent.
Attacking the latter might make a large difference even if the former remains unsolved. The New York Times can get away with making cancellation difficult because they have the power to unilaterally take money from their (former?) customers. But, if anyone could trivially revoke their authorization to charge them money, I doubt that the New York Times would actually try to sue or collect from their customers en masse. Sure, they could try, but that would be a fantastic way to piss everyone off and to recover very little money.
Though I’m skeptical of cryptocurrencies as a market, I’m very bullish on the technology long-term for use-cases like this. Having programmable money where every party is able to audit something like a smart contract and see how their deposited money will be treated is huge. We could effectively get rid of pull-model money transfers and instead relegate similar functionality to open smart contract pools.
Even worse! Now you don't have protection from your credit card company not redress through the courts.
You already have the ability to "audit" the EULA/ToS/PP; it's that link you never click next to the "I agree" button.
The powerful (in money, size, skill, fame, strength, etc.) always try to (ab)use systems to bully the weak. Smart contracts only amplify their ability to do so.
Why would a company, which (reasonably) declines to deploy its limited legal resources negotiating with each user, possibly be interested in deploying its limited engineering resources to negotiate a smart contract with each user—especially when one screw-up can "legally" bankrupt the company? (See The DAO.)
If there can be no negotiation, the options are:
1. You reject their terms and don't use the service.
2. You accept their terms and legally use the service.
3. They accept your terms and you legally use the service. (Usually too risky/costly for them.)
4. You reject their terms and illegally use the service anyway.
We could legalize option 4, but that is a very bold move—the equivalent of the Chicxulub impact on legal and business practices.
I'm always amazed reading that this isn't already the case in the US. In India, every charge requires SMS based 2fa. Starting a bank mandate (ECS/NACH) for automatic transfers needs me to physically sign a paper. It can be revoked any time by the user without any involvement of the receiving party, and can be done online as well.
> You must be able to cancel subscriptions from the same website that you created it from.
More to the point, it should be required that canceling/downgrading is as easy as or easier than signing up/upgrading. Want to offer 1-click-buy, you also need to offer 1-click-cancel.
I think unlimited recurring subscriptions should just not be allowed, period: all multipay plans should have a fixed & finite pay period, after which the service expires. Only the card holder has the unilateral right to re-establish the payments.
What if the user wants to cancel before the term is up? If that's allowed, there won't be discounts for annual plans. (Maybe not a bad thing, but maybe inefficient.)
They way to do this is to run the subscription though something like Google Play. Then you cancel it on Google's side.
Be wary if a company avoids Google. For example Tinder started forcing users to subscribe directly instead of using Google. This is because most people cancel almost immediately since once you subscribe you find all your matches are bots.
The entire purpose is to make it just hard enough so you think ohh it's only 10$ a month. Another trick is to offer a month free. Hulu does this. If you cancel on their website you get several pages which try to convince you to stay.
Google also makes it easy to manage all your subscriptions in one place. What is all this crap I'm paying for, I can quickly see what and delete it. Also I'm much more likely to try a service ( I'm studying Chinese right now and have used various apps) if I can do it via Google Play .
This is one of the few things that actually makes me happy with the closed ecosystem of the App Store on iOS. There's virtually no risk with subscriptions in there- they can all be canceled in a few clicks in the Subscriptions section of your Apple ID. And if something's straight up a scam or an accidental (but unconsumed) purchase, you can request a refund from Apple with rather little friction.
First-party trials annoy me since cancelation is instant, unlike trials from third-party apps (those cancel after the trial period if you cancel during). Fortunately, you can go to Report A Problem and just say you didn't mean to have the subscription charged and they'll refund it as long as it's a few days from the charge date.
I'd need to see the purchase page to fully form an opinion on this. Apple has rather strict guidelines for displaying cost and that appears to be one of the most important parts of app review. I'd equate someone being surprised by a subscription cost to someone not looking at menu prices when eating out: all purchases through the app store use the same sheet to display price, renewal period, free trial, etc when requesting payment.
Of course, the app's premise is a scam, but my comment was about the ease of canceling and managing subscriptions. Dare I say that apps like this would be even more bold and prevalent if alternative app stores were available.
There are also scams costing people money without using iOS, for example where the person is tricked into thinking they have a debt and sending thousands of dollars in cash to a random address[1]. What’s your point?
> Tinder started forcing users to subscribe directly instead of using Google. This is because most people cancel almost immediately since once you subscribe you find all your matches are bots.
More likely it's because Google takes a 30% cut. Adyen takes a ~4% cut. I still maintain that if Apple and Google took a 5% cut from their app stores, no one would have complained.
NY Magazine too. After renewing my subscription at 2x the original rate I paid, they made it incredibly difficult to cancel. When I called their customer support, they told me I had purchased my subscription through a third party so they couldn’t cancel it for me and I’d have to contact the third party.
Me: what’s their contact info? Agent: inquiries@nymag.com
Me: This is a third party but they have an NY Mag email address?
Agent: Yes.
Me: ... How are they a third party then?
Agent: One second, I’m transferring you to my supervisor.
Nothing turns me off a brand I like and want to support more than 1) autorenewals at 2x your intro price and 2) making cancellations both arbitrarily difficult and insulting.
I recently cancelled without any issue... by virtue of paying for it initially with Paypal, which makes it trivial to cancel the recurring payment on my end. When I called them to cancel, and they tried giving me a runaround, I interrupted to tell them I had already cancelled the payment anyway so they literally had no choice; then I hung up. No worries! I will never subscribe to anything that doesn't accept Paypal for payment, thereby giving me the last word in controlling said payment (yes, I know a credit card would allow this, only not as easily.)
I ran into this as well with NYT (grabbed a sub for election season only). You can cancel if you chat with someone during business hours - and immediately shoot down any attempt to to extend etc.
Related, I really hate Apple taking a permanent 30% cut of iOS subs, but I will use that route whenever possible. Canceling an iOS sub is always a painless single click experience from a known location. In fact I usually subscribe and immediately cancel so I’ll renew only if I actively choose to do so.
I also was able to easily cancel online a few months ago (not in California). I'm wondering if they changed their policies recently, in which case this complaint is out of date.
I ran into this myself 18 months ago. I had subscribed years ago online, but was unable to cancel online.
I informed the person who canceled my subscription over the phone that I'd never consider doing business with them again, unless they fixed the problem.
I hope it's fixed now! That'd be a great improvement
You can change your payment option to paypal, remove your card from NYT, then remove your card from paypal. They'll complain to you for a couple weeks, but they'll cancel it for you after a while after that.
My girlfriend and I were both able to cancel. The number worked for us, but we had to say no through a bunch of sales pitches before we got it successfully canceled.
It really does make you wonder that “the paper of record” deals in such immoral actions what else they are willing to compromise on. I seem to remember Pg being completely misrepresented by the same paper [1]. Maybe they are just really unethical people with a good brand.
People who want quality journalism pay for it. It comes up in the comments here a lot, how journalism has gotten lazy/bad because of the lack of money in doing it well. The solution is to pay those doing it well.
The problem is anyone can make a blog and there are a ton of good writers. The media used to be an exclusive club like Hollywood but now anyone can make their own news blog so there’s nothing special about NY times or any of the others except their name and possibly some unique information sources from their contacts. I have read many small news blogs that are better written than the major news outlets. They also don’t choke you down with intrusive ads and pop ups and give you paywalls just to read their version of the same story being reported on other blogs for free. Their days are numbered to be sure.
I do not know how it is in the US, but where I live those automatic subscriptions are cancelable (and usually refundable) by the user via the bank or credit card company if the company collecting it is not responding. This is very easy in the first 56 days and a bit harder afterwards. They can retry to collect but you can keep doing it. The idea is you send them a official letter telling them you revoke your authorization which they have to do, not adhering to that request is their problem not yours. Depending on the contract this might trigger fines or require you to front the entire bill at once but for normal recurring subscriptions this is not an issue and otherwise should be reasonable (paying a 'fine' higher than the total sum is not allowed for instance).
It's the same in the U.S. If you do this, the failed charges might be sent to collections agencies, but that doesn't usually matter much to lenders if it's a small subscription - although this $100/mo NBA charge might cause some issues.
I wonder if someone can start a service to facilitate this for people. So many dark patterns, so many opportunities to ease the transaction costs/friction of disentangling? ;)
American debit cards generally don't have these protections, but American credit cards absolutely do have robust consumer protection mechanisms.
It's also a pretty big negative mark for merchants that get charge-backs issued against them, if just a small percentage of people used charge backs to cancel these "subscriptions" it would make their processing fees skyrocket or even get them dropped by the major processors
Companies are required to provide California residents with an easy-to-use mechanism for cancelling subscriptions, and any subscription that you sign up for online must be cancellable online [1].
This actually works quite well. I've had no trouble cancelling any subscriptions in the past few years, including the New York Times, which took maybe 3 or 4 clicks from the account screen (IIRC, there was an optional "why are you cancelling?" screen, then they offered a discount, and that was it).
Just use Privacy's virtual cards to sign up for services. If a service doesn't let you cancel, just cancel the card itself. That's what I've been doing.
Of course, it's a different story if you signed some kind of contract, but for the pay-montly kind of things, it's a no brainer. You also keep your real cards number private in case the service gets hacked and Privacy doesn't seem to check the name, so you can give a fake name to the service.
If you're in the UK, EU, New Zealand, Australia, or Singapore, I found out yesterday that Wise (TransferWise) customers get 3 virtual cards free of charge [1][2].
I'd be interested to hear about any other UK/EU firms offering similar.
The worst I’ve seen was Nord VPN. Three or four modals / screens where the action to stop your subscription was the smaller, secondary UI element, almost not even noticeable. How a dev or PM can live with themselves while implementing that I have no idea.
My Nord subscription went from $5/month to $200/month recently. When I complained, the CSR told me to just cancel the account and sign up using the special offer link and a throwaway e-mail address.
That tells me there are deeper problems, and I'm not interested in doing business with that company.
Audible does not allow you to cancel through the app, and cancelling via the web takes you through two extra pages of customer retention, "Continue Cancelling", or similar.
I haven't used the Scribd app, but cancelling the service through the web similarly takes more than one extra page of customer retention "special offer" pages.
I signed up for a one month “free” trial of Scribd. I noticed they charged my card but I (wrongly) assumed it was a pre-authorization that would fall off before it ever actually hit my account. I liked Scribd okay but I felt I hadn’t really given it a fair shake during my trial month and figured I’d pay for this month, too and then decide whether I’d keep it. Woke up yesterday and checked my card statement for the month only to find out Scribd charged me for my “free” trial. Since I didn’t notice until my free month was up they charged me for this month, too. I cancelled this morning and had to go through one “special offer” page (for “Scribd Lite” @ $4.99/month IIRC).
I’m SOL on this month’s charges but you’d better believe I disputed the original charge with Amex. Scribd even sent me a “receipt” for my “free” trial showing a total of $0.00 at the exact time they charged me $9.99.
It’s just bad business. I should have heeded the many warnings about Scribd’s deceptive billing and now they’ve added yet another unhappy customer who will complain about their shady business practices at every opportunity I get.
If a company makes it difficult to cancel, you can always talk to your card issuer. They are required to allow you to stop all future payments to a recipient but may force you to request this in writing.
However in my experience, you can usually accomplish it with a phone call and can often dispute the most recent charge as well.
IMHO, chargebacks are the best way to fight back against companies that use dark patterns in their billing/cancelation process.
And getting a new credit card used to be a reliable failsafe to stop getting billed for a hard-to-cancel service, but not so if the subscription agreement allows for automatic updating:
If it takes more than a couple of clicks from the accounts section, or so ambiguously states the cancellation process that it suddenly seems hazardous, then I just cancel the temporary privacy.com card.
Good example of this is where you can only unsubscribe via phone so they can route you to a 'specialist' that attempts to talk you out of it. i.e. you can subscribe via software but but unsubscribe via phone.
Their instructions were login and go to the cancel button but the cancel button was broken and said call this number. But no one ever picked up the number.
I will never buy a NBA branded thing after that obvious bullshit scam.