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California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

niemanlab.org

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Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#311

Post by Matheus28 »

aphextron wrote: post #279

Honestly, the best way to handle these things is to forget even bothering with the company and file a charge-back with your bank or Visa/Mastercard. You have every right to call up your bank and deny a charge for a service you're not using, and didn't ask to renew. Plus it's guaranteed to get the charge removed immediately, and you'll be hurting the company by adding to their charge-back tally, increasing payment pro…

I wouldn't advise telling people to do chargebacks often. They're meant to be used when venues of negotiation with the company are exhausted and you still believe they're in the wrong. If your bank suspects you're being too liberal with them, they will cut you off, as they'll suspect you're the fraudster.

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#312

Post by sonnyblarney »

petilon wrote: post #298
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately the solution is to let the customer manage their subscriptions via their payment service provider. PayPal does this.

PayPal tried to take money from my checking account because Consumer Reports "autorenewed" my subscription -- without my knowledge or explicit authorization. As soon as I saw this I reported this as an unauthorized transaction on PayPal. But PayPal failed to stop the payment in time, even though at the time of my flagging it was unpaid. I then called BofA and blocked PayPal and that worked. So at the moment I have a…

"I didn't realize PayPal could dip into my checking account any time they wanted to."

EBay did this to me once, I think this is an American thing, doesn't happen here in Canada like that.

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#313

Post by sequoia »

leekyle333 wrote: post #17

The New York Times doesn't allow you to cancel your subscription online.

Not only do they not allow you to cancel online, they autorenew your annual subscription to the tune of HUNDREDS of dollars. This happened to me and I'm certain I didn't explicitly opt-in to autorenewal, as I would never consciously opt-in to autorenewal of such a costly service. The told me the following: "by choosing to pay by credit card, you opted into autorenewal." !!??

I moved out out of the country, they autorenewed, I called them, and they refused to cancel the rest of my year's subscription! They insisted upon continuing to send papers to my old address for an entire year.

Completely scammy, I will never do business with them again.

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#315

Post by mehrdadn »

Skunkleton wrote: post #305
mehrdadn wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bringing up such a minor illegality implies you care about the morality of it. If somebody was speeding and I said “hey, you know speeding is illegal right?” they would rightfully think I have some sort of weird moral problem with speeding. Huh... that's actually very much the opposite of how I would interpret that sentence, but okay.

Maybe this is presumptive of me, but you should consider not just the the words you say, but also their implication. Most other people will, and if you don't you can't communicate effectively.

I thought we just concluded that the problem is that we come to different conclusions about what the implications actually are, not that I didn't consider the implications?

When someone asks me if I know something is illegal, to me, it seems they are being quite explicit that they are talking about legality and not morality, since otherwise they could tell me that that something is not cool, not that it's not legal. To me this is obvious, but maybe everyone else finds this strange and this is evidence that I just think weirdly, I don't know. But either way it's certainly not that I don't try to think in the first place.

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#316

Post by craftyguy »

ryandrake wrote: post #291
craftyguy wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They almost always record your calls for 'quality purposes'. But you're not exactly right.. you can record phone conversations in the US provided you let them know before you push the 'record' button.

When they say, “this call may be recorded,” aren’t they giving you permission to record it?

I've never thought about it that way, but yes, it does seem like they are giving you permission. Thanks for the new insight!

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#318

Post by Merad »

petilon wrote: post #298
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately the solution is to let the customer manage their subscriptions via their payment service provider. PayPal does this.

PayPal tried to take money from my checking account because Consumer Reports "autorenewed" my subscription -- without my knowledge or explicit authorization. As soon as I saw this I reported this as an unauthorized transaction on PayPal. But PayPal failed to stop the payment in time, even though at the time of my flagging it was unpaid. I then called BofA and blocked PayPal and that worked. So at the moment I have a…

FYI anyone can dip into your checking account anytime they want to. AFAIK there is literally zero security, all you can do is dispute unauthorized transactions after the fact. Even with a paper check all the info on the check (including recipient and amount) is effectively just a paper trail to be referenced during a dispute.

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#319

Post by mygo »

chimeracoder wrote: post #93
mygo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually have a speech impairment (a stutter) and you’d think people would be willing to accommodate. I can speak just fine when I have complete agency over the words I choose to say, but it’s the absolute worst when I have to read out some long specific access code or account number and say it 100% correct. Stutter even once and they think I meant 2 P’s when I just wanted to say a single P. And then it becomes thi…

> Stutter once and they think you meant 2 P’s when you just wanted to say a single P. And then it becomes this long drawn out process of “after AF6, it’s just a single P, but the rest of it is right” because you really don’t want to have to read out the entire code again Have you tried using the NATO alphabet? I don't know if that would be easier or more difficult for you to say, but it's worth a shot, since it'd be…

I can do the NATO alphabet when speaking to a human, that’s a good suggestion.

One thing though, when speaking to a robot, they’re not usually programmed for that. They want exact letters and numbers that their speech-to-text engine can convert. Eventually the robot takes me to a human after it fails enough times but there’s usually a queue, which isn’t always great because the wait times can be very long.

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#320

Post by olliej »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #312
petilon wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PayPal tried to take money from my checking account because Consumer Reports "autorenewed" my subscription -- without my knowledge or explicit authorization. As soon as I saw this I reported this as an unauthorized transaction on PayPal. But PayPal failed to stop the payment in time, even though at the time of my flagging it was unpaid. I then called BofA and blocked PayPal and that worked. So at the moment I have a…

"I didn't realize PayPal could dip into my checking account any time they wanted to." EBay did this to me once, I think this is an American thing, doesn't happen here in Canada like that.

Oh yeah, this was one of the most insane things I experienced moving to the US.

If someone has your bank account number they can withdraw money from it. For example the errands bank account authentication mechanism is to withdraw some money from your account, and then ask you how much they took. I honestly could not believe it.

It gets better: if you have someone’s bank account number you still cannot transfer money to them. It would literally be easier to tell your bank (say etrade or whatever) that it was your bank account.

That’s why all these absurd abank payment systems exist in America. The act of just giving someone money is incredibly hard.

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