It’s well known how annoying this process is with deal communities, to the point that everyone recommends using temporary cards (like Privacy) to avoid the hassle with cancellations.
Unfortunately that doesn’t stop the mountain of sales outreach they’ll try after you’re no longer a subscriber.
I'm surprised someone hasn't started a "Warehouse POBOX" style address location where you can just maintain like a 5 dollar address as long as you complete appropiate paperwork.
Obviously, that'd be abused, but man, all these lawless corporations acting with impunity to common decent regulation enforcement makes some aweful work for no particular value to society.
virtual mailing addresses are real. I have one for my LLC (they bin spam and forward on real correspondence) and there are more involved services for RVers to forward batches to their current location or do mail-to-email.
There's a ton of services like that. You pick one of the physical addresses they offer, get a unique mail address to you, and whenever mail arrives they scan the envelope, giving you the choice to either shred, open and scan contents, or forward.
They have a bunch of addresses for you to pick from, and it works the same way for any other similar service, so check around and see if one has addresses that you like. The keyword is "mail forwarding service".
For US addresses, there's a form you have to sign and get notarized to authorize them to handle your mail, because USPS does not fuck around with people illegally handling someone's mail.
In my experience, there is a bit of friction as you need to get a form from the post office and have it notarized before a third-party can accept and forward mail on your behalf.
I hope (& have suggested) that USPS themselves should offer virtual po boxes like domain name, which themselves should have an underlying forwarding address (with no leakage to companies like data lists, forwarding address requested etc). Company sends a letter to me at that virtual po box, usps scanner systems see it, slap a yellow (or brown) sticker with correct/forwarding address.
In the past you had to chat with a rep, but for at least a couple years now you can cancel your NYT subscription with just a couple clicks.
You can also pretty much perennially keep your sub at $1/week w/o talking to a rep just by starting the cancellation flow when the promo rate nears expiration.
Thanks for this, I"d been meaning to work up the energy to deal with their retention ops, but this was super easy.
For anyone else looking to do this, the trick is to choose "Other" instead of "Too expensive" or "My rate is going up" as the reason for cancelling. The later will just result in them trying to sell other standard subscription offers to you.
Same for The Economist. I was about to enter my payment details for a subscription but then thought to check what the cancellation process was. Turns out it's one of those sleazy processes that's way harder than signing up.
Just to be sure I contacted their customer support to see if there was a way to cancel online. They confirmed that there was not, and then had the gall to say that this is because it's better for customers this way.
The content itself is good but I will never ever give money to a company that treats its paying customers this way.
Substack probably has a similar customer base and does things the right way. A paid subscription can be cancelled with an easy to find button. The money I would have spent on The Economist instead goes to several substack authors that I like.
Hah I went through this last year. I canceled Sirius/XM with an agent over chat. Basically you just need to paste: "no thanks, I would just like to cancel my account" to everything they say. After about 10 times they will actually do it.
Same here, but just said I want to cancel, and am screen-shotting the conversation, if it is not cancelled I will file a complaint, and they ended the chat and cancelled it. Pretty egregious that you have to resort to that. Also they have the audacity to send me letters every couple weeks to sign back up for like $4 a month. I might consider that if I knew I it was easy to cancel... so they lost a customer over it. I think they must be desperate with how everyone can just stream music almost everywhere now.
If you have a modernish smartphone you have no need for SiriusXM unless you like to listen to sports or talk radio in the middle of nowhere. I stopped paying XM after getting tired of the cancel and get a cheaper offer dance, and never once missed it.
This is exactly why I place SiriusXM on a virtual credit card and a throw away email. I sign up for $6 per month SiriusXM promo with a $7 per month ceiling on the virtual card. When the 7th or 8th month comes around and the offer expires they have the audacity to charge $22+ for this content. The overcharge is caught and they don't get my money, and I'm happy to receive the disconnect signal.
Not the person you're replying to, but when you get in this mindset the workarounds are pretty easy.
I don't trust any business to act responsibly with any information I give them, so I also use a lot of virtual cards and spoofed email addresses (actually I just use a catchall on my domain most of the time which is less secure I guess, but does most of what I need).
It's because generally I do like their product at a $6/mo price point. It's leagues better than FM radio. I just don't like their billing/promo practices and so these are the tricks to protect yourself as a consumer.
As another person said, this has become standard practice for me. It's less about doing business with shady companies and more about insulating myself from shady practices. I've had a few cases where I've been on a plan that suddenly changes with only a few day's notice, or I get "graduated" to another tier because the previous one is going away. In all cases, I was charged more money than I initially agreed, and the virtual credit cards saved me.
You can go to privacy.com and create an account. You then link your real credit cards or bank accounts for payment source.
Privacy.com also has a browser extension and a mobile app. So it's easy to create/manage virtual credit cards per service. You can also create single use virtual credit cards that automatically close after a single transaction with a limit that you can set.
Unfortunately privacy.com requires the use Plaid, which demands your banks auth details and grants Plaid the ability to scrape your bank accounts (they pinky promise they do not for the account verification product). I thought it undermines the whole "Privacy" aspect.
From what I recall when I registered some time back, it was possible to simply use any debit card for the process. This meant there was no need to share login details with anyone.
Their documentation may provide more current details than I can though.
They don't exactly require Plaid, they can also use a debit card or ACH. You have to email support for the privilege though.
I had tried Plaid at first, but quickly switched when I found out that they would watch your bank balance and disable your Privacy account if it went below $50. They would require you to prove a balance of at least $50 in order to enable the account again. Fortunately, both of the other methods don't really care, and as long as you disconnect Plaid while your balance happens to be over $50, your account will stay enabled.
Better than privacy, many credcards themselves now offer virtual card(s), and can cancel them. Capital One is my go to for these. Google Chrome offers capital one virtual cards on the fly if you added the actual capital one card to google pay.
Using privacy.com requires me to give them access to my bank, and I lose points, cashback, any charge back protection.
This isn't as much of a hack as people think. Plenty of companies will continue to provide you with service for many months even if the card declines and then send the unpaid debt to collections, resulting in infinitely more headaches for you.
SiriusXM is also in violation of GDPR/CCPA. Before shutting down Stitcher, they failed to respond to multiple data requests within the required 30 day window. Then, they contacted requestors 20 days before Stitcher shut down to direct them to complete a separate, redundant form for their request. They never responded to that form, and presumably they will claim that because the service was shut down within 30 days of that second form being completed, they have no obligations to provide the data anymore.
> SiriusXM doesn’t operate in Europe - so why would they care about GDPR?
SiriusXM is a holding company that operates many products, some of which are sold in Europe, and in California, so as a company they are beholden to both GDPR and CCPA.
My truck came with a short SiriusXM trial, and they have not relented in spamming me with physical mail, email, and phone calls, all to try and get me to renew. I'll stick to my downloaded music and Spotify.
I had a similar experience when I had a trial with my previous car.
I got the calls to stop by changing the phone number on my account. For e-mail/physical mail, there was an opt out that I found and to my surprise, they actually stopped.
But yeah, it was ridiculous. I'd get mail a minimum of once a week asking for me to come back. So much wasted paper.
Honestly, if SiriusXM would simply offer a fair price for life I would pay for it. I refuse to do business with companies that force me to play the "threaten to cancel" game every year just to keep a fair price. My time is worth more than that.
Dont click any link in the emails, dont scan any qr code, don't call any numbers on postal mail, and they will stop in about 2 years (as in my case, no paid membership, used car came with some free trial, I didn't even used it once).
I would be thrilled if there were repercussions for this kind of scammer in the US.
I keep getting "SECOND NOTICE" physical mail from scammers who have 1. never sent a first notice and 2. never had any business relationship with me (they have been trying to reach me about my car's warranty). Those make me so furious that I always report them as mail fraud.
This is good news. LA Fitness should be next. Is super-easy to become a member online. Enter CC ... click on agree ... done.
Want to cancel your memebership?? ... well, please drive to the nearest LA Fitness and try to find a manager ... not a rep taking new members but an actual manager, the reps can't help you to cancel. I went twice to my neighborhood LA Fitness to try to cancel my membership and the manager was 'not available at the moment'.
Gyms are notorious for sending unpaid dues to debt collection. Even if the designated cancellation process ought to be illegal, you still have to end the contract to end your legal obligations.
There's still a contract between LA fitness and the person stealing your identity. The debt just happens to get incorrectly assigned to you for collections because we allow "identity theft" to exist. Separate issue.
> There's still a contract between LA fitness and the person stealing your identity
There's a contract between LA fitness and someone commiting fraud with my CC. My identity can't be stolen because I still have it - LA Fitness has been defrauded by a 3rd party and they shouldn't involve me in their mess.
If you sign up and immediately cancel, maybe. But if you actually visited the gym a few times and made use of their service, I doubt any judge would follow that logic.
LA Fitness won't stand a chance in a court. You'd show the judge a email demanding to cancel the subscription, and LAF will show a scammy "terms of service" implying you can't easily cancel. That's why scammy companies like this want binding arbitration and try to avoid any real scrutiny.
I'm absolutely with you that their games around cancelling are beyond shitty and hopefully illegal - but my point was that those are two orthogonal legal matters and it's not a good idea to start playing games of your own if you suspect the other to do so.
In this case, your argument was that you never had a contract with them in the first place. But this would be hard to believe if you actually used their services. Your cancellation email would undermine this argument even more, as you don't request cancellation if you don't have a contract.
So a court could perfectly well decide that the gym acted in breach of the law by making it deliberately hard to cancel, but that you acted in breach of the law too by stopping payment without even trying to cancel.
If you argue that you made your best effort to cancel, as documented by the email, that would be a more convincing argument I think (not a lawyer tho) but that's a different argument than claiming there never was a contract at all.
My email would say that I'm no longer visiting the gym and they must stop charging my card, and to avoid confusion, I'm stopping the payments on my end. I actually did exactly this many years ago with another sleazy gym, and it worked.
Obviously, nowhere in the communications with the gym I'd acknowledge there is any contract. It's no different than going to a grocery store: just because I've been using it for years doesn't mean there's any contract, even if the grocery stores believes so.
I've been on the receiving end of a company that sent their unpaid bills on disputed invoices to debt collection and I just took it to court and won. Note that the debt collectors also don't like buying disputed debt so if enough people took them to court they'd stop doing this. But if enough people fold then it's worth it for them to try. So don't fold. Take it court and make it count for them.
I’m a huge fan of privacy.com’s virtual cards. I create a new one for every service. I can place time based /absolute limits so nothing can be surprise overcharged, and can just kill the card anytime.
kind of a tangent, but about 3 years ago I was thinking of joining Planet Fitness (inb4 "they're the worst gym ever", perfect-enemy-good-etc) and thought "I know, I'll outsmart them and use one of those burner credit cards so if they block me from cancelling, I'll just shut off the card!". Well this must may as well be a class in Entomological Evolution because as soon as Consumerus Cardioworkii evolves a thicker exoskeleton against Gymnascus Financialus Capitalus, spc. Captialus evolves a defense against credit cards and goes checking-account only.
I feel like being forced to print a letter, find an envelope, and mail the letter is a bit much in this day and age. There have been times in my life when I did not have a printer, or any spare envelopes. Should people like me-back-then not be able to cancel their gym memberships? Should we have to track down office supplies to be able to do so?
My public library will let you print for 10 cents. The post office will sell you an envelope or maybe even give you one for free depending on the level of service you are paying for.
It's far from ideal, and the process should be easier but keeping the membership is costing you actual money and a solution is possible with a little extra effort. That effort shouldn't be necessary but we live in the world that exists not the world that should exist.
Doesn't work. I tried this with a NYTimes trial-rate subscription, to make sure it wouldn't renew at the $exorbitant rate.
Apparently there's a thing called a "force post" that the merchant can do, which blasts right through Privacy.com's veil. I didn't understand this until they explained it to me:
> From: Sigourney (Privacy)
> Jun 1, 2022, 5:21 PM EDT
> Hi, [Name]
> I've been reviewing your dispute and wanted to touch base with you to explain what happened.
> It appears that the disputed charge is a "force post" by the merchant. This happens when a merchant cannot collect funds for a transaction after repeated attempts and completes the transaction without an authorization — it's literally an unauthorized transaction that's against payment card network rules. It's a pretty sneaky move used by some merchants, and unfortunately, it's not something Privacy can block.
> We are refunding the transaction to the original funding source used for this purchase. You should see this refund reflected in your bank statement in the next 5 business days. However, please note that since this merchant uses force posts, they will continue to do this monthly until the subscription is cancelled. Please contact them to have the subscription cancelled.
> Let me know if you have any questions or concerns!
Okay, so Privacy refunded it, and I'm not clear whether they ate that cost or if they pulled some lever to claw-back the money from the NYT, but the fact that this is even possible in the first place is alarming, and it completely shattered my idea of what Privacy.com is even good for.
Did you deactivate/close the card or only pause/lock the card? If it's deactivated, I'm not sure how they can go after you. Sure, for a service like privacy.com the card itself is attached to someone, so there's theoretically someone to go after, but prepaid card exists as well. If you "force post" a transaction on those cards, who's going to be on the hook? The bank?
It wasn't a prepaid, it was the standard privacy.com thing as suggested by the grandparent post, where they make a new number that you can use per-merchant. The card was set to a $6/mo limit, so the $4/mo trial offer would work, and the $25/mo after that wouldn't.
Great site! Surprised it doesn't list the prices transparently. Are you charging differently per region? (I saw you charge less than a month's membership - which is great, but clearly that varies locale to locale as I'm sure your costs do as well)
i got in a situation like this once with a saas company. I called my cc and told them what happened and to block all payments to the vendor. It took some convincing but they did it.
you can buy an airhorn for about $20 and your cancellation will definitely be processed in a single visit. $20 may seem like a lot but it can be reused for just about any disagreement you have at any business. It's an investment for the future, really.
What are you going to do? Blast the airhorn until the manager shows up? Sounds like a great way to get ejected from the premises and possibly get charged with disorderly conduct or similar.
I had a similar experience with 24 Hour fitness. Serving them notice that I was taking them to small claims for ignoring my attempt at cancelling my membership turned out to be easier.
I hate to defend them, but I'm honestly sharing my experience: circa 2020, maybe '21, I called them (L.A. Fitness), said I lost my job as the reason, and they let me cancel. Maybe that was a fluke, maybe it's different now, I just want to share counterpoints to "X is impossible", because it's not always the case.
Somewhat tangent, but everyone says "nvidia doesn't play nicely on Linux", I've never seen that! I've installed cuda, switched to cuda drivers/nvidia proprietary (non-cuda) drivers, FOSS Nouveau drivers, ran x11, wayland, never seen a bona fide issue. I'm not denying others' experiences, but dont make up your mind before you try. worst I've seen is laptops that have dual video cards (nvida + intel, for instance), but that's on par with any other Linux snafu you could have, it goes with the territory.
That's the first place I looked, but googling all the weird settings doesn't seem to bring up anything except for the usual suspects like Resizable BAR, which I definitely have enabled. It's just suck. The reason why some people have issues and other people don't is because the issues are picky about the computer you use it with, I guess.
I've always wondered what the best way to prevent this is. There is clearly little motivation on the company's side to prevent this.
One idea that keeps coming to mind is that the company should be forced to pay for the customer's time. I don't know how to handle this in the general case but for things like cancelling a subscription, making a warranty claim or fixing some other service issue that isn't the customer's fault the company should be required to pay for any time spent. You ask me 30min of questions before letting me unsubscribe? I look forward to my $50 in the mail next week. My warranty claim requires 3 calls and 2h to resolve? I'll take $200.
Obviously implementing this would be super difficult. What if the customer talks slowly or ambiguously to get more money? But I feel that the core idea has merit. If the company is wasting my time they should be forced to compensate me.
My local west coast newspaper (Owned by USA Today) used to pull this crap. Offer a $8 subscription for 6 months with a simple click, then automatically switch to monthly billing at $15/month and you had to call, during east coast business hours (again, I live on west coast) and if! they answered, they would work very hard to make sure you didn't cancel.
I started using the virtual cards from Privacy.com, and only authorizing the original purchase. its been a game changer.
How about every charge they pass you after you contact them in any verifiable way (including submitting a support ticket to their website and taking a screenshot, sending their support email an email, or writing a letter) requesting cancellation they have to pay back to you triple.
Then the ball's in their court. You're happy to let them keep charging you, it's an investment.
For those times when you’re driving in the middle of nowhere, and your ‘52 Studebaker can’t pull in any AM radio stations. Otherwise, since the advent of smartphones, I have no idea how Sirius stays in business. Live sports, I guess.
I’ve had satellite radio, and when I think of SiriusXm, at the front of my mind is what a pain in the ass it is to cancel. We bought a new car this year, and I didn’t even activate the free trial because I didn’t want the hassle of canceling later. Think about that: the UX is so bad, there are customers that won’t even use it if you give it to them.
In a car, I find the radio to be far easier to use than fumbling around with my phone. I've never had SiriusXM so can't comment on that specifically, but I never use my phone for music in the car, I just turn on the radio.
> It often takes less time and way less mental energy than a phone call.
Really now? Preparing a physical package and dropping it off at a physical location to be picked up and delivered is faster and more efficient than speaking into a wireless device for a few minutes?
> I just drop it off and other people do the delivery for me.
That's what I said. You have to create a physical letter and drop it off. Not everyone can just walk over to their mailbox and stick an outgoing letter in there for the delivery truck to pick up; I have the privilege, but it absolutely hasn't been common everywhere I've lived.
You don't have to drop anything off in order to make a phone call, you don't even have to get up if you already have your phone.
The amount of time I spend doing things costs me opportunities to earn money. So, minimizing time spent performing a single accounting action by writing a letter, while systematically "inefficient" is actually the most efficient financial decision I can make for myself. I am uninterested beyond that.
The USPS maintains a pretty wide network of collection boxes. In a city you'd be hard pressed to not find one very close to you and most large apartment buildings have their own mail drops. There doesn't seem to be any "privileged" access issues here.
Point is.. the differences are so small.. that the decision is going to be made by subjective preference in most cases, and trying to suggest that there's an objectively correct solution is easily disproved.
I was originally addressing a comment that claimed it "often takes less time and way less mental energy than a phone call". I'm not pushing an "objectively correct solution" here, rather the opposite.
For me, as someone with ADHD, the time it takes to do something means absolutely nothing compared to the amount of mental energy it takes to even try. It's different for everyone.
Do you even realize you can send mail from your mailbox?
I can walk to my mailbox and put the little metal flag up in a couple minutes. I can't be put on hold or have the conversation drag on for 40+ minutes, as some in the complaint stated. No need to make this hard.
> Do you even realize you can send mail from your mailbox?
Yes, one of my comments posted three hours before yours described how I can indeed drop off mail at my mailbox to be picked up by the postal service. But before I do that, I have to find an envelope, paper, write or print a letter, seal it and address it and then leave my house to go drop it off at the mailbox. It's within walking distance, but notice the number of steps there are compared to picking up your phone, calling someone up and just saying "cancel my subscription" however many times they require.
And then the retention department pretends to cancel, as they want to be on target for their monthly bonus. Now you can print a copy of your phone call as evidence when you get billed again (oops, you can't). So now you get to deal with the vendor and the credit card company. Very smart time savings!
This post reminded me to cancel before my signup offer expires, so I tried via a chat agent. They claimed that they were having technical issues and told me to contact Sirius customer service again in 2 hours. I said that the “technical issues” were a lie, and that they can cancel now. All of a sudden they were able to cancel for me without technical difficulty, but only after refusing one more promotion.
It looks like they use sentiment analysis to assess whether they can use poor excuses to hassle you out of cancelling.
I love SirusXM. They are a truly unique offer in the modern music landscape of algorithm-driven music listening experiences. The human curation of shows and stations is why I listen. That said, they have a lot of problems: I have to complain yearly to keep my $8/mo rate, and they seem to be slowly moving toward wanting more algorithmic content with their Pandora merger.
I wish they'd focus more on growing their technology (e.g. a macOS app). They just did a big rewrite on all the platforms, seemingly toward this goal; I hope they keep going down that path.
If the government forces them to adopt more modern subscription practices, I think _more_ people would use their platform, not less.
This is coming from a person who has a SiriusXM membership and who actually likes it, but is the human curation really that much better? I frequent SiriusXMU to listen to more obscure stuff, but I feel like I get pretty fairly comparable performance with YouTube Music's "Start Radio" on an Imogen Heap or Secret Machines album or something.
Yah, the merger between Sirius and XM was a dramatic difference in programming content. XM had spent most of their time getting quality PM and on air talent, Sirius was basically a glorified Winamp playlist. As the channels merged, you found yourself going from a base of 5000 songs a channel to a few hundred. The folks who used to have XMPCR's (computer connected receivers) published a comparison of songs at one point but my google fu can't find it right now.
I agree some of the stations are somewhat repetitive, especially those stuck intentionally in an older genre like Lithium or one of the decades channels. I think the mix tends to still be less than surface level in those. They also have DJ-hosted segments; I think Tom Morello has a lot more flexibility in what he's playing, for example. It's still their superpower compared to the algorithmic track selections.
I subscribed for a few years and would renew each year when they jacked the rates back up. Finally decided it just was not worth it and went through their arduous cancellation process. Got a call back the next day asking to sign me back up and I took the customer service rep to task saying he knew perfectly well I just canceled yesterday. He gave a sheepish laugh, did not argue the point, and they have never called me back.
I wasn’t exactly rude about it, but they were acting as a representative of the company - probably the only one I could ever actually talk to - so I didn’t see any reason to sugar coat it either. I am often direct with sales people that I am not interested in their product, and I have been yelled at and harassed by them before. This is all late stage capitalism at its finest.
Interestingly it's actually not that bad. You do have to call them but when I did so for several cars they didn't try to waste my time further. I may have had to answer "because that's what I want" to some question about reason for termination. Also I still had several more active vehicles so perhaps they felt less pressure to Shane don't go me.
Sirius' cancel process is absolutely painful. People reading robotically from scripts that don't sound convincing even to them. "Did you know that we now have award winning X? Maybe you would like to listen to that on your [insert car here]".
Just repeating "No, I just want to cancel" and nothing else doesn't help, either.
On the flip side, they have offered me ridiculous deals. As of right now I have the Music Showcase subscription for 2 vehicles (meant to be $13.99/mo each) for "$7.99 for 6 months, for both vehicles" - as in $7.99 for the entire 6 months, not per month, and for both vehicles, not each.
To be fair, it is very useful and plenty of people swear by it, myself included. I wish my bank hadn't introduced new debit cards that "aren't supported" by Privacy (whatever that means, it's literally just a visa), but whatever, I guess.
None of the comments are sponsored or anything, but Privacy seriously is the hidden cheat code of using cards online, and the reason why you see so many mentions of it is because it prevents exactly these kinds of shady practices from working.
And isn't it interesting how the other half of the discussion was dominated by discussion of a specific fitness membership?
I think these companies have gotten wise to the Streisand effect and no longer try to block discussion, they just very carefully make sure that a very active *offtopic* discussion dominates so people are distracted.
165 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 232 ms ] threadIt’s well known how annoying this process is with deal communities, to the point that everyone recommends using temporary cards (like Privacy) to avoid the hassle with cancellations.
Unfortunately that doesn’t stop the mountain of sales outreach they’ll try after you’re no longer a subscriber.
Obviously, that'd be abused, but man, all these lawless corporations acting with impunity to common decent regulation enforcement makes some aweful work for no particular value to society.
That's nice! Can you suggest one (or more) services you like?
Does it have to be in the state you live in? (ex: matching the driver license address)
They have a bunch of addresses for you to pick from, and it works the same way for any other similar service, so check around and see if one has addresses that you like. The keyword is "mail forwarding service".
For US addresses, there's a form you have to sign and get notarized to authorize them to handle your mail, because USPS does not fuck around with people illegally handling someone's mail.
You can also pretty much perennially keep your sub at $1/week w/o talking to a rep just by starting the cancellation flow when the promo rate nears expiration.
For anyone else looking to do this, the trick is to choose "Other" instead of "Too expensive" or "My rate is going up" as the reason for cancelling. The later will just result in them trying to sell other standard subscription offers to you.
Just to be sure I contacted their customer support to see if there was a way to cancel online. They confirmed that there was not, and then had the gall to say that this is because it's better for customers this way.
The content itself is good but I will never ever give money to a company that treats its paying customers this way.
Substack probably has a similar customer base and does things the right way. A paid subscription can be cancelled with an easy to find button. The money I would have spent on The Economist instead goes to several substack authors that I like.
I don't trust any business to act responsibly with any information I give them, so I also use a lot of virtual cards and spoofed email addresses (actually I just use a catchall on my domain most of the time which is less secure I guess, but does most of what I need).
Privacy.com also has a browser extension and a mobile app. So it's easy to create/manage virtual credit cards per service. You can also create single use virtual credit cards that automatically close after a single transaction with a limit that you can set.
Their documentation may provide more current details than I can though.
https://support.privacy.com/hc/en-us/articles/7970157169943-...
I had tried Plaid at first, but quickly switched when I found out that they would watch your bank balance and disable your Privacy account if it went below $50. They would require you to prove a balance of at least $50 in order to enable the account again. Fortunately, both of the other methods don't really care, and as long as you disconnect Plaid while your balance happens to be over $50, your account will stay enabled.
Using privacy.com requires me to give them access to my bank, and I lose points, cashback, any charge back protection.
Pretty scummy stuff.
https://www.siriusxm.com/help/service-outside-us
SiriusXM is a holding company that operates many products, some of which are sold in Europe, and in California, so as a company they are beholden to both GDPR and CCPA.
The only other major service I can see is Pandora - which also does not have a presence in Europe.
I got the calls to stop by changing the phone number on my account. For e-mail/physical mail, there was an opt out that I found and to my surprise, they actually stopped.
But yeah, it was ridiculous. I'd get mail a minimum of once a week asking for me to come back. So much wasted paper.
I keep getting "SECOND NOTICE" physical mail from scammers who have 1. never sent a first notice and 2. never had any business relationship with me (they have been trying to reach me about my car's warranty). Those make me so furious that I always report them as mail fraud.
Want to cancel your memebership?? ... well, please drive to the nearest LA Fitness and try to find a manager ... not a rep taking new members but an actual manager, the reps can't help you to cancel. I went twice to my neighborhood LA Fitness to try to cancel my membership and the manager was 'not available at the moment'.
There's a contract between LA fitness and someone commiting fraud with my CC. My identity can't be stolen because I still have it - LA Fitness has been defrauded by a 3rd party and they shouldn't involve me in their mess.
If you've been going for nine months, good luck. They'll pull up all the photos they automatically took of you entering the doors to check in.
In this case, your argument was that you never had a contract with them in the first place. But this would be hard to believe if you actually used their services. Your cancellation email would undermine this argument even more, as you don't request cancellation if you don't have a contract.
So a court could perfectly well decide that the gym acted in breach of the law by making it deliberately hard to cancel, but that you acted in breach of the law too by stopping payment without even trying to cancel.
If you argue that you made your best effort to cancel, as documented by the email, that would be a more convincing argument I think (not a lawyer tho) but that's a different argument than claiming there never was a contract at all.
Obviously, nowhere in the communications with the gym I'd acknowledge there is any contract. It's no different than going to a grocery store: just because I've been using it for years doesn't mean there's any contract, even if the grocery stores believes so.
I’d know, I’ve won 17 Nobel prizes.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/...
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/p064202_negativ...
https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2023/03/pros-and-co...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CWbc6pekd8&t=1310s ("We have a complaint database, we collect information, and are always eager for information" -- FTC Chair Lina Khan at Y Combinator)
It's far from ideal, and the process should be easier but keeping the membership is costing you actual money and a solution is possible with a little extra effort. That effort shouldn't be necessary but we live in the world that exists not the world that should exist.
:)
Apparently there's a thing called a "force post" that the merchant can do, which blasts right through Privacy.com's veil. I didn't understand this until they explained it to me:
> From: Sigourney (Privacy)
> Jun 1, 2022, 5:21 PM EDT > Hi, [Name]
> I've been reviewing your dispute and wanted to touch base with you to explain what happened.
> It appears that the disputed charge is a "force post" by the merchant. This happens when a merchant cannot collect funds for a transaction after repeated attempts and completes the transaction without an authorization — it's literally an unauthorized transaction that's against payment card network rules. It's a pretty sneaky move used by some merchants, and unfortunately, it's not something Privacy can block.
> We are refunding the transaction to the original funding source used for this purchase. You should see this refund reflected in your bank statement in the next 5 business days. However, please note that since this merchant uses force posts, they will continue to do this monthly until the subscription is cancelled. Please contact them to have the subscription cancelled.
> Let me know if you have any questions or concerns!
Okay, so Privacy refunded it, and I'm not clear whether they ate that cost or if they pulled some lever to claw-back the money from the NYT, but the fact that this is even possible in the first place is alarming, and it completely shattered my idea of what Privacy.com is even good for.
They somehow sucked $25 right through that.
This is all like trying to cancel an apartment lease by not paying your rent for a few months.
You might get lucky and they decide it’s not worth it to pursue it, but they still have a legal claim to that money.
No, it’s not.
No, it might be a tort. It is almost never (the few exceptions are things like failure to pay child support) a crime.
More of a value-based pricing thing, LA fitness costs more per month than Planet Fitness and is also a much smaller market.
Somewhat tangent, but everyone says "nvidia doesn't play nicely on Linux", I've never seen that! I've installed cuda, switched to cuda drivers/nvidia proprietary (non-cuda) drivers, FOSS Nouveau drivers, ran x11, wayland, never seen a bona fide issue. I'm not denying others' experiences, but dont make up your mind before you try. worst I've seen is laptops that have dual video cards (nvida + intel, for instance), but that's on par with any other Linux snafu you could have, it goes with the territory.
One idea that keeps coming to mind is that the company should be forced to pay for the customer's time. I don't know how to handle this in the general case but for things like cancelling a subscription, making a warranty claim or fixing some other service issue that isn't the customer's fault the company should be required to pay for any time spent. You ask me 30min of questions before letting me unsubscribe? I look forward to my $50 in the mail next week. My warranty claim requires 3 calls and 2h to resolve? I'll take $200.
Obviously implementing this would be super difficult. What if the customer talks slowly or ambiguously to get more money? But I feel that the core idea has merit. If the company is wasting my time they should be forced to compensate me.
I started using the virtual cards from Privacy.com, and only authorizing the original purchase. its been a game changer.
Then the ball's in their court. You're happy to let them keep charging you, it's an investment.
I bet that would get them off their asses.
I’ve had satellite radio, and when I think of SiriusXm, at the front of my mind is what a pain in the ass it is to cancel. We bought a new car this year, and I didn’t even activate the free trial because I didn’t want the hassle of canceling later. Think about that: the UX is so bad, there are customers that won’t even use it if you give it to them.
It often takes less time and way less mental energy than a phone call.
Really now? Preparing a physical package and dropping it off at a physical location to be picked up and delivered is faster and more efficient than speaking into a wireless device for a few minutes?
Perhaps that's why they're being sued?
That's what I said. You have to create a physical letter and drop it off. Not everyone can just walk over to their mailbox and stick an outgoing letter in there for the delivery truck to pick up; I have the privilege, but it absolutely hasn't been common everywhere I've lived.
You don't have to drop anything off in order to make a phone call, you don't even have to get up if you already have your phone.
The USPS maintains a pretty wide network of collection boxes. In a city you'd be hard pressed to not find one very close to you and most large apartment buildings have their own mail drops. There doesn't seem to be any "privileged" access issues here.
Point is.. the differences are so small.. that the decision is going to be made by subjective preference in most cases, and trying to suggest that there's an objectively correct solution is easily disproved.
For me, as someone with ADHD, the time it takes to do something means absolutely nothing compared to the amount of mental energy it takes to even try. It's different for everyone.
I can walk to my mailbox and put the little metal flag up in a couple minutes. I can't be put on hold or have the conversation drag on for 40+ minutes, as some in the complaint stated. No need to make this hard.
Yes, one of my comments posted three hours before yours described how I can indeed drop off mail at my mailbox to be picked up by the postal service. But before I do that, I have to find an envelope, paper, write or print a letter, seal it and address it and then leave my house to go drop it off at the mailbox. It's within walking distance, but notice the number of steps there are compared to picking up your phone, calling someone up and just saying "cancel my subscription" however many times they require.
It looks like they use sentiment analysis to assess whether they can use poor excuses to hassle you out of cancelling.
I wish they'd focus more on growing their technology (e.g. a macOS app). They just did a big rewrite on all the platforms, seemingly toward this goal; I hope they keep going down that path.
If the government forces them to adopt more modern subscription practices, I think _more_ people would use their platform, not less.
The only way to cancel was to call a US 800 number. I don't even know if you can call 800 numbers from outside the USA.
https://cloudcovermusic.com/music-for-business/siriusxm-radi...
Just repeating "No, I just want to cancel" and nothing else doesn't help, either.
On the flip side, they have offered me ridiculous deals. As of right now I have the Music Showcase subscription for 2 vehicles (meant to be $13.99/mo each) for "$7.99 for 6 months, for both vehicles" - as in $7.99 for the entire 6 months, not per month, and for both vehicles, not each.
None of the comments are sponsored or anything, but Privacy seriously is the hidden cheat code of using cards online, and the reason why you see so many mentions of it is because it prevents exactly these kinds of shady practices from working.
I think these companies have gotten wise to the Streisand effect and no longer try to block discussion, they just very carefully make sure that a very active *offtopic* discussion dominates so people are distracted.