Why do you think that? You entered a legally binding contract with an obligation to pay. You refuse to pay without canceling the contract. Why should the fact that it's a recurring payment change anything here?
Modern subscriptions are little more than saved payment information. Merely having someone’s payment information does not give consent.
No, merely having payment information is not giving consent, but you signing up for a subscription service was giving consent to a recurring subscription. That's a totally different situation.
Why? I’m surprised at the downvotes I got on my original comment. The Dropbox online cancellation, like many others, is a deceptive, tricky option designed to make you think that you cancelled when you did not to rip you off. Dropbox isn’t unusual. Why is a phone call so evil? It’s bizarre to me that a arguably marginal inconvenience is more noxious than active trickery.
Can you imagine a business that insisted on a phone call to begin a subscription? Like, say the NYT website had just a phone number instead of a link and a form. That would severely reduce their circulation. The whole reason the signup flow is done entirely online is because its simpler and more convenient for both the subscriber and the provider. Which tells you why they don't offer the cancel flow through the same…
> Can you imagine a business that insisted on a phone call to begin a subscription?
It seems to be a dark pattern in the news/media industry. Even the otherwise enlightened Economist makes you CALL in order to cancel/change your subscription. Going from a quick, precise and inexpensive communications channel to a slow, synchronous, error-prone and costly one is something that really annoys me.
I just sent them an email in order to cancel but maybe that’s different in the EU.
I'd also like to add that despite the negative publicity PayPal gets from the merchant side, it's also preferred over credit cards by merchants for better handling of "disputes". Some consider paypal to be archaic, but it's bleeding edge payment tech when placed alongside traditional credit cards.
Years ago I used PayPal to pay for an on demand server that was advertised to be ready within an hour. Twenty four hours and zero servers later, I had already gone to a competitor and asked for a refund. The company refused and PayPal sided with them. American Express sided with me. I closed my PayPal account forever that day. Now we have even better tools available for subscriptions. Check out privacy card.
In my experience with credit cards they almost always side with the customer for small charges, and for extremely large charges (and if you're a big enough company) they side with the merchant. I had case where free credits were offered for a cloud provider, but they decided to bill me anyways. Chase decided to validate the charges, and it was clear through multiple calls each agent was making things up about why it was validated (They would give different reasons anytime, from how I worded "free credits"). In the end the cloud provider admitted to the mistake and ended up siding with me, despite chase siding against me (they're supposed to be on the consumer's behalf). So I think in your case Amex probably didn't even consider or evaluate the terms of the sale—they just refunded you because it was within some parameters. This of course can work for or against you depending on the situation.
I'd also like to add that despite the negative publicity PayPal gets from the merchant side, it's also preferred over credit cards by merchants for better handling of "disputes". Some consider paypal to be archaic, but it's bleeding edge payment tech when placed alongside traditional credit cards.
As someone who did millions of $ via PP as merchant, I can say the experience is great as a consumer usually but really stinks as a merchant. We had a far higher fraud rate on PP than CC and it was a high price to pay really. Especially because after enough users chargeback or dispute, even though it was very clear they were just scamming us for free product (you could very clearly see it as they did not even tried t…
To be fair the manner in which you were defrauded for product sounds like it can also be easily done with credit cards. That being said, I'm pretty sure PayPal can also be hit with a chargeback from credit cards, which they pass to you.
Had it happened with a credit you'd not only have your funds immediately blocked for 90 days, you also get hit with processing fees regardless of if the customer was scamming you or not.
if it takes more than 30min to cancel a service/account i just call my bank, explain the situation and reject all future transactions from that merchant.
Can you run into legal issues with this? If the company still thinks youre using the product/service but not paying? I would like to know because i want to use this strategy.
merchants are always notified of chargebacks and penalized. if a certain percent of your transactions have chargebacks you can have your merchant account cancelled.
this may not work if you have a contract, but if the business doesn't make it easy enough to cancel a service agreement they have no right to my money and i'm going to make sure my response affects their bottom line so they pay attention and cancel my account.
What's 'scummy' about being unable to delete an account?
Many people (me included) hold the opinion that you should be able to control your data, which includes the right to ask a company storing data about you to delete it unless they have a valid justification not to (e.g. they may have to keep payment history for 10 years for compliance reasons). In fact, in Europe it's so many people that that's the law.
I hold this opinion too but I struggle with the high cost of accidental and unwanted deletion.
To delete your account's content I think here should be email verification or 2FA.
Years ago I used PayPal to pay for an on demand server that was advertised to be ready within an hour. Twenty four hours and zero servers later, I had already gone to a competitor and asked for a refund. The company refused and PayPal sided with them. American Express sided with me. I closed my PayPal account forever that day. Now we have even better tools available for subscriptions. Check out privacy card.
In my experience with credit cards they almost always side with the customer for small charges, and for extremely large charges (and if you're a big enough company) they side with the merchant. I had case where free credits were offered for a cloud provider, but they decided to bill me anyways. Chase decided to validate the charges, and it was clear through multiple calls each agent was making things up about why it…
You are probably right. It was a small amount. I would be surprised if the charge back approval wasn't completely automated. But at least they side with the consumer some of the time. PayPal was just straight up "nope, we don't care that they didn't deliver the product at all".