These things are insane. I tried to cancel a month-to-month gym membership from a small local gym, and they told me "cancellations become effective on the 1st of the following month" and "require two months advance notice" thereby effectively charging me for three additional months after I gave notice. Apparently, this was all in the agreement I signed, although it was written so unclear, that nobody would even suspect this is how they interpret it.
I told them if you don't cancel it effective right now I am posting this dishonest predatory practice on every social media and review site in town, as well as telling all of my friends I met in here what you are doing, and asking them to please quit in protest. I'll also be doing a credit card chargeback, and a small claims court case to recover the time it takes me to deal with all of this. I will also take action to recover my back membership fees, because they repeatedly failed to maintain equipment in a usable condition, so I didn't get what I paid for. They did concede, and canceled it immediately.
Revoking ACH authorization is an effective tactic. The CFPB dictates that if you give 3 days notice, companies are obligated to honor this. If they charge you afterwards, your bank will be more than happy to reverse the charge. To be clear, this doesn't void the contract you have with them, you're simply revoking their privilege to charge your payment method. If they want your money they'd have to take you to small claims. Here is a sample email which I've used many times to great effect:
May this email serve as your notice to revoke the ACH/Bank Access/Debit Card authorizations of both the below primary bank account and debit card, from [company] effective today, [date]
Additionally, I am revoking withdrawal authorizations from any other accounts associated with my personal information, listed below
name:
DOB:
phone #:
email:
I am also revoking your further access to my banking accounts and have already removed your authorization with the Bank directly.
THIS REVOCATION APPLIES FOR THE NEXT PAYMENT DUE DATE AND ALL FUTURE DUE DATES.
Kindly, I ask that your response to this email shall be confirmation of receipt and you agree it is at least 3 business days prior to any scheduled repayments or membership fee deduction.
Note that in accordance with 12 CFR Part 1005.10(c) (Regulation E) you MUST HALT PAYMENT.
FAIL TO COMPLY and I will submit a report to the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. Additionally, you will be responsible for any fees, including overdraft fees, incurred as a result of your failure to halt payment
> To be clear, this doesn't void the contract you have with them, you're simply revoking their privilege to charge your payment method.
It's gotten better, but on more than one occasion I've had to argue with my bank to honor my request to block the charges. I've had tellers say "Well, if you have a subscription with them, this needs to be allowed". No. As you say - my bank's obligation is to honor my account wishes, not be an arbiter of my agreements with third parties.
Some companies report this type of thing to consumer trust worthiness services (similar to credit bureaus). Other companies use these services to gage customer risk before initiating new service so you can effectively get yourself blacklisted.
Not saying this answer isn't the way to do it, but it's not without additional collateral damage in some cases.
Even if it doesn't impact other companies, the company in question may refuse to do business with you in the future (which may or may not be of concern).
> and have already removed your authorization with the Bank directly
Can you expand on what you mean by this?
My banks don't offer me some way to revoke authorization from the bank's website. Does this mean calling customer service and giving them a business name to disallow future ach debits from?
> If they want your money they'd have to take you to small claims.
No, they'll just send it to collections, and now your credit is dinged for seven years because unless they violated their contract with you, you're still liable for the charges.
If you're dealing with a (normally small) company that generally takes care of their customers, an email like this as a conversation starter is just going to make the customer support reps lives miserable and make them not want to lift a finger for you. Save this for the companies that really deserve it.
Sometimes people you talk to have powers to change the outcome in your favour, sometimes all you need to do is ask.
I had an experience like that last year. I was cancelling my broadband in UK with Virgin, and got a £280 disconnection fee. The person who informed me said I will have to pay it in my final bill. Then over a month later I got a call from someone who's task was to see if I need a new connection where I was going. I said no, I was leaving the country. He asked if there was anything else he could do for me. I said, "you could cancel that huge penalty fee I got.." And he was just like "Sure, no problem, done."
A "disconnection fee"? This has to be the most absurd charge I have ever heard of.
What does "disconnecting" a customer involve, anyway? I recall having to return equipment or face a penalty to cover costs (high, but still somewhat understandable), but I have never had to pay to get off a broadband contract.
They prey on people who don't want to rock the boat, don't know that they can try to rock the boat, or are just too busy for this absolute nonsense.
The leadership of any company that does anything like this should be very consciously aware that they're mediocre leftovers of the professional world. Real leaders of real companies don't have to be predatory. It is a screaming confession of incompetence.
> Real leaders of real companies don't have to be predatory. It is a screaming confession of incompetence.
There's a certain toxic element of business culture that preaches dominance as a virtuous thing, ether overtly, or through dubious terminology/beliefs in ideas like "alpha males." It argues that if you aren't dominating someone, then they necessarily must be dominating you in this interaction.
It is an extremely reductionistic view that has trickled down into certain parts of Weird Internet, too.
I imagine there are consultants that go around to gyms (especially chains) and say "We've got x things that are trivial to implement and will guarantee you make $123 more per customer on average. Cost for our analysis and recommendations is $12,345 with an assurance that you will make this back in the first 6 months." And one of the things is adding a paragraph to the sign up terms.
> Real leaders of real companies don't have to be predatory
I dont think it works as your described. Amazon is plenty predatory.
What happens is a company tries to see what it can get away with. If they don't get in legal trouble, and customers don't abandon them in droves, then other companies start doing the same. It becomes industry standard.
I had a gym membership that I wanted to cancel because I had moved, and their closest location was no longer convenient.
First, they tried to tell me I had to go back to the location I had originally signed up at in order to cancel. No phone cancellation options or anything. I guess if I had moved more than a few miles away, I'd be out of luck.
After some fighting, the closer location let me fill out a paper cancellation form. The cancellation form had a very clear section that showed "paid in full" and "$0 remaining due." Despite this, I got a bill a month later for my "final month." I refused to pay it, obviously. They harassed me, calling me daily. Only once I posted a poor review online did someone finally decide the $50 (or whatever it was) wasn't worth it.
They gym itself was a fine gym, but these billing practices are scummy scummy scummy. I refuse to sign up for any other gym (except maybe a local rec center) until there's more legislation to protect my consumer rights. The cancellation nonsense isn't worth my time.
Maybe you would since it's a local gym, but if it's a national chain credit card companies won't even let you initiate the chargeback whatsoever.
I had to go so far as to completely cancel my Amex account to get Lifestyle Fitness to stop billing me. American Express utterly refused to either chargeback, or deny future billings. To the point a new card number issued didn't even fix it. I was quite happy to sign a waiver that I'd take all liability.
This was after moving states, calling to cancel, and them saying I needed to fly in to cancel in person. Outright scam that the banks help enable.
my amex processed my chargeback for gold's gym just fine. They said it was a no obligation free trial I could cancel at any time and then when I called to cancel before the first bill they said no, you have to come once a week for that to be true..?
Even though they conceded, you should still follow through on all of the above. You aren't hurting a person, it's a corporation that will only change when forced financially or socially to do so.
Honestly, I was mostly bluffing... I didn't have time to do all of that, which is why I also had to quit the gym. I was planning to temporarily quit/suspend and then rejoin when I was able to, but they lost out on that possibility.
I think these kind of predatory cancellation things must be in part a generational thing, and these policies are so old they haven't responded to the times. Older people I know seem to expect it or be okay with it, but millenials and younger will tend to be outraged and refuse to do business with them on principle. America Online, Sirius XM, etc. were able to retain some customers by making it hard to quit, but I think turned away far more without realizing it.
This is why I always prepay for my gym membership up-front and do not enter into any agreement. There are a few places that do this. Last one I went to, I prepaid for 90 days. I confirmed they weren't even storing my payment information because I had to provide it again to renew the next quarter.
The best part of this is that when you decide you are done, you simply do nothing and its all over. Sure, you will get some marketing text spam for a few weeks but that's about it.
I had a similar situation. During covid, a gym I was attending shut down some of their locations because of covid, forcing all those members to crowd into fewer locations. Those gyms became unusable to me because of equipment hogging and overcrowding (I typically counted on one hour to complete a full workout and was extremely pressed for time, now it would take me at least twice that). I tried to cancel, citing my reasons, but I got a similar runaround to you. I also had to submit my cancellation in writing and mail it into their corporate office. I refused to do any of this, so I called my credit card company and complained that they were fraudulently charging me and requested that they block further charges. Sure enough, a few months later I got letters and emails threatening to cancel my membership because there was an issue with my payment method. Since the membership was month-to-month, they couldn’t hold me responsible for anything beyond the month for which I had already paid.
I joined a small private gym that works on a monthly prepaid membership. Just pay for the month in advance, and you have access. Don’t pay? No access, no pressure, no worries. Leave for months at a time and come come back with no hassle.
I'm thinking as an added protection measure we should always use a secondary phone line plus a secondary email and fake address for these types of subscriptions. You don't know what they are going to do.
My daughter had dancing lessons in the past (never again!), we quit because she did not want to go anymore. They told us we can only quit by the end of the quarter with a month's notice - it was beginning of March, so too late to quit for end of June.
Then Covid hit, classes got cancelled; we still had to pay until end of September. This fine print is totally insane.
I’m guessing you probably won’t win a chargeback unless you can show that you sent them a letter telling them to cancel (and because of this, they actually will cancel if you send them a letter).
I think another aspect of this problem is that credit cards don’t just let you mark a transaction as “don’t allow any more of these.” Of course that probably wouldn’t solve the problem. The gyms would probably just continue charging you and eventually send you to debt collection.
> credit cards don’t just let you mark a transaction as “don’t allow any more of these.”
Ironically, they do almost all support this, you can mark any merchant as non-future-billable and prevent all future charges from a given merchant. Unfortunately, you have to call in and ask a phone rep to do it for you, most cards don't let you set this yourself.
Modern banks like Revolut have this as literary part of their UI.
They use some simple ML to figure out which are you recurring payments, place them in a separate folder for you to keep tabs on and allow you to unilaterally stop any “future payments like that”.
I mean on top of tech like virtual cards and chargebacks with a few clicks.
It seems so simple to implement I have no idea how its not a standard feature for banks these days.
The opposite happened to my partner here in Portugal. She signed up to a gym ($100/month), and they literally forgot to start charging the account until 5 months later. Everything tends to be so inefficient here. I guess at least in this case the inefficiency worked in our favor. Now let's hope they won't take 5 months to stop charging when we cancel ;-)
I personally had to get cc dispute started, because, $my_local_gym_that_is_not_a_chain also uses the same scummy tactics including, but limited to starting to add more charges. They also said, I need to fax my hand written cancellation to their HQ. I did, but as you can guess there is a reason I opened a dispute with CC.
Similar. I got badly injured. Gym said I could only cancel in person. Was not possible. Played me off between gym and corporate for several days. Went ballistic on all social media, review sites etc. wrote some emails shaming them. Charged back from bank.
Collections is mostly meaningless if you are otherwise financially responsible.
The entire system is quite abusive. You may try experimenting with "I don't give a shit", assuming your other ducks are in order. I have found it to be therapeutic.
Depending on the law though, you may be able to ignore collections, and you can dispute it if they put anything on your credit report. Just because something is in a contract that doesn't mean it is legal an enforceable. See a lawyer for details as this is different in every state and country.
You can contest being sent to collection tho (in the US: Fair Debt Collection Practices Act). It takes time and research to understand what you have to do, but being sent to collections isn't always a credit death sentence.
Just cancel the payment, I wouldn't even bother to talk to them if it's clear it'll be difficult. They'll send you a letter or something saying if you don't update the payment method your access will be cancelled. Ok?
honestly there will be a delay from the government taking action on smaller local gyms too so I feel like there should be a way to submit the businesses for inspection at least to threaten them to improve their policies
In my third world country (Brazil) we actually have strict regulations on cancellations (among other consumer focused laws):
- Companies need to choose at least one channel to work 24 hours a day seven days a week.
- The consumer can only be transferred from an attendant once.
- If the call drops, the attendant must return the call and complete the service, without the customer having to repeat everything again.
- Phone calls with human service must be available for at least eight hours a day.
I'm a particular fan of the "mirror" concept, where cancelations/returna should work in the same channels and be as easy as the purchases/subscriptions.
Consumer laws here are surprisingly good in my opinion and I am also surprised on how little lobby power consumers have in developed countries, to be treated like they are, with all the black hat tactics companies throw at them.
I've been in Brazil recently and I was positively surprised with the great consumer protection laws.
One law I really liked was the "right to regret", meaning you can cancel a wide array of contracts within 7 days. For example, when booking a hotel online, no matter the hotel's cancellation policies, you can cancel a reservation within 7 days of making it.
The funny thing about this, when there is a public conversation about their practices or legislative process to stop it, companies (i.e apple, uhg, john deer, Facebook, etc) will cry floods of tears, claim they'll go out of business due, people will lose their job, to the extra cost of compliance. They'd rather keep disadvantaged customers rather than compete and deliver value.
All of this while reporting record profits, trying to pr spin this, and throwing more money than lost with compliance at lobbyists who will lie and financially influence to the legislators.
This is the surprising thing about Brazil, here we have the big corporations as well, and a lot (if not all) corrupt politicians. But somehow these consumer laws passed got approved and will be pretty hard to remove.
Yeah we follow a mirror concept, which is cancelling should be at least as easy as signing up, and ideally easier. We don't have 1 click cancellations because we don't have 1 click sign ups. It requires an hour onboarding to use our service so they have to send us an email or a message in our chat bat to trigger a cancellation so we can sure they understand all the consequences.
Tangential to this - no small part of the reason why I like subscriptions in the iPhone App Store is because Apple doesn't let billers fuck around like this. There's one place to see everything, and you can cancel anything in a couple clicks. It's part of why I'd probably never use an alternative app store.
Also they force subscriptions to make the actual price you pay the most prominent. Common dark pattern is to put "8.99" a month, then under it in tiny text "Billed immediately as 107.88, renews annually". To pass Apple's approval, they would have to write "107.88" in large text, as that is what you are actually going to be charged.
1Password got me with this. I was getting it for free because my work used it, but when I left, write/autofill was suspended. I had planned to move to a different service as I dislike 1P8, but I was in a hurry to just get things working again, and $2.99 a month is cheap enough to get me by for a few months. I enter my CC details. Get charged $39.47 (10% for GST). I go back and look at the site and realise the monthly price is billed annually. I don’t recall being quoted this price when I entered my CC details, perhaps it was displayed in a way that was easy to miss for people in a hurry. In any case there’s a dark pattern in their checkout flow. It’s disingenuous to to advertise $2.99 and bill $39.47. Imagine a cafe that advertises the price of their coffee as 40c then in smallprint “times 12 made in a single payment”. The advertised price should match the billed price for all products and services.
Completely true. One way this has saved me in the past: Audible has an incredibly shady practice where the only way to get books is that their subscription service gives you tokens (1 a month) to redeem books with. However, if you cancel your subscription, your tokens are lost. But, if you subscribe to Audible through Apple, then because of Apple the tokens are retained, even if you cancel.
I agree but interestingly had a conversation with my family and they all had the opposite impression. They were complaining about mysterious recurring apple charges on their bank cards that they had no idea what they were or how to find out. I pointed out that you could see all your subscriptions under your Apple ID on your phone and they were all amazed. Long winded way of saying, if anyone from apple is reading this, maybe make this more discoverable and if possible disambiguate the charges on the bill (maybe put the originating app name for the subscription in the charge?).
One of my friend maintains a fitness app that uses in-app subscription when subscribing through the app or subscription through the website with a credit card.
The apple subscription generate a lot more support requests because a lot of customers are confused on how to stop the in app subscription. Unfortunately, the company can't stop the subscription, it can only be done by the customer through the app store, so instead of just being able to cancel it for confused customers who request it, they have to guide them to cancel it on their side which is a lot of work.
True, but it makes auditing your bank account slightly more difficult.
Charges come through as "Apple" (or some variation) without indicating what the purchase was for. They also roll charges together so they're not hitting your bank account multiple times in a short period.
It's not a lot of work to go into your apple account and compare the invoices to your bank account to see what the charge was _actually_ for, but it was a pain in the rear when our credit card was stolen and used by the thief to Nickle and Dime us for 5-10 dollars here and there over the course of 6 months.
I tend to agree, with a caveat. If you have a family Apple account and one of your family members has a subscription, you do not have visibility even though it is your credit card getting billed. So for a complete picture you have to log into each of your kids' devices to see if they have an active subscription.
It seems to be done for privacy reasons, but I don't agree with how they handle it. I should be able to see all charges going to my Apple account credit card no matter which sub-account originated them.
You can actually see this information on reportaproblem.apple.com now. Has recent charges by each family member and tells you if a subscription will renew.
In my online credit card account, I can expand each purchase and "show digital receipt" to get information about what app/subscription it was for. For all App Store purchases, Apple will also email the account that made the purchase (even if it's me) to let them know the purchase details were requested. That seems reasonable to me--the payer knows what the payment was for, and the purchaser knows the info was accessed.
Even if Apple's fees were 5%, there would be companies that would prefer a custom subscription system because they could save one cent per transaction and track the customers better.
True, but they still have the '8 day free trial then £59.99 a year billing' for some apps. My wife installed a design app she wanted to try out, forgot to cancel and was stung last week. For such a high purchase price that feels to me like there should be addition verification step before charging.
Especially since the app was terrible and the reviews were full of people who were similarly charged and unhappy.
What is bonkers about that? Apple let 2 consenting parties enter into an agreement and provides a single interface to cancel that agreement whenever you want from their pocket without talking to anyone. I struggle to think of a better setup.
One of the most nefarious instances of this I have seen is a "online mental health counseling" startup that was charging a non-trivial monthly recurring fee, even though it did not have any available appointments with a professional in the coming month. I had to call and haggle for half an hour on behalf of someone who signed up for the app, and only after putting in their credit card information was shown that there are no appointments.
Shame on the "startup", and absolutely disgusting that we as a civilized country allow scams targeted towards a vulnerable population to happen quite legally.
>Shame on the "startup", and absolutely disgusting that we as a civilized country allow scams targeted towards a vulnerable population to happen quite legally.
The truly dreadful part is that this is precisely the kind of thing that people with depression, ADHD, and a host of other psychological conditions are unable to deal with.
That's the whole point of those kinds of mental health startups. Get the credit card information of people who don't have the energy or organisation skills to ensure that they cancel it, and charge them according to the contract. It's basically like the gym thing, except instead of hoping you are rich enough or lazy enough not to cancel, they hope you are ill enough not to cancel.
Had a similar problem with Thrive Market. Non refundable subscription unless you chose yearly instead of monthly then the very specific item I wanted was out of stock (among tons of other things).
I was in a similar situation and extremely irate at first when they said refunds were not an option, but fortunately it appeared to be an issue with their automated scheduling system. Once talking to an agent they were able to link me to a provider that same day.
On the whole, it's actually been a pretty good experience over the last year. Trying to get similar counseling/medication locally was an absolute nightmare at the time... with Cerebral, everything happened super fast and the counseling I got seemed on point (ADHD/insomnia). They quickly pause/resume for when I'm out of the country traveling, no unapproved charges so far.
If I remembered their name I would 100% name and shame them publicly. Unfortunately it was a while ago during the peak of the pandemic, and I don't have any email records since I myself didn't sign up for them.
Can they loop in New York Times subscription? You have to _call_ them during business hours to cancel. When I was subscribed, I prompted myself to cancel when we had to change CC numbers (random fraud), so I finally called NYT to cancel. "You have to pay out first" -- no problem, I'll pay last bill right now and cancel. "Once you pay out, you have to wait two days before you can cancel it". WTF? Outright shady.
I've cancelled my NYT sub online, a year or two back. I keep seeing anecdotes like yours pop-up, though. I don't know if they have different policies based on billing address or something.
I remember distinctly because when I _first_ signed up, it wasn't an option. A year or two later they emailed something about "Look how cool we are, you can cancel with just a few clicks now!" as if it was something to be proud of, rather than just them finally using consumer-friendly practices.
Sometimes changing your billing address to somewhere in California can solve this. CA has a law saying that if you can sign up for a service online, you need to be able to cancel it online immediately, and be able to do so through either a “prominently located direct link or button” on the website or a preformatted email that the consumer can send to terminate the subscription without taking any further steps.
Can you just change your billing address to an arbitrary location like that? CC payments require matching address at least, or zip code. I guess if you weren't receiving any mail from the entity it might not matter in practice but it seems odd.
I feel ya, but there is worse: in France to cancel most services (mobile plan, bank accounts...) you need to send a registered mail. Suffice it to say, living abroad, there is a bunch of services I literally cannot cancel because of that. To close a mobile account, I recently had to cancel the credit card, then ignore emails from the debt collection agency they hired, for them to finally close my account.
> Suffice it to say, living abroad, there is a bunch of services I literally cannot cancel because of that.
Nonsense. Send your registered mail online with la poste. It has the same legal value. I'm not saying that requiring registered mail isn't shitty, but letting this go to debt collection is making things difficult for yourself with no good reason.
It's why I find it hard to take the "woe is me, why won't anyone pay for real journalism" pleas seriously when it feels so irresponsible to trust these companies with your credit card details. And this isn't a new problem to the internet, it was also the case with "delivered to your local store" subscriptions in the past
I sometimes feel bad for spending time searching archive links for onlinenews publications but seeing how they treat paying customers I feel better now.
Some of these services I'm interested in enough I'd be willing to pay for a few months to try them. But magazine subscriptions and comcast have trained me to avoid these kinds of relationships like the plague. They aren't usually that expensive but the potential hassle sours the whole deal.
I literally canceled my gym membership by cancelling my credit card. It was easier to update a handful of services on autopay than go through their daedric rituals of submitting cancellations by fax 90 days in advance.
Years later my wife and I signed up for the same gym. She was later able to cancel by talking to someone in charge and crying about it.
I did not realize this until I cancelled a card that I'd had for 15-20 years, much longer than any others, because I'd switched to another card from the same company (AMEX) and wasn't using that old card anymore. My score went down quite a bit, and I was so upset at Amex for not telling me when I was trying to cancel that old card. I would have just kept it and not used it.
If you close a particularly young card, it can also bring your score up if the others are older. Last I looked it used an average for the age of all your credit lines.
I still have a membership to Planet Fitness from 5 years ago that charges to my account every month
while I had no problem signing up online, you can only cancel your membership in person at your "home" location, or by sending them a certified mail letter formally request cancellation (which I have tried and failed apparently because I never heard back)
I now live on the other side of the country, so it feels ridiculous to spend money on a flight ticket just to cancel a gym membership
worse, Planet Fitness requires you provide bank account/routing number for payment, so there is no way to cancel payment unless I switch bank accounts
Contact your bank and explain what's going on. They may have a way to block Planet Fitness' auto charge. Your bank should be sympathetic and they control outflows.
After a while, PF will drop their auto-charge because they won't want to deal with the rejected payment requests.
I hope I'm correct about this and I hope it helps!
I wonder if this is a franchise thing. I've moved states more than once and Planet Fitness has been one of the easier things to deal with cancelling. Done this a few times in different states. You should be able to go into any location and make that your new home location, and then cancel there.
They also let me use a credit card for payments too.
The contract requires you to send the letter to cancel, but it doesn't prohibit you from calling to discuss the matter. You have already cancelled in compliance with the terms of the contract, you don't have to hop on a flight to do anything.
I forget which gym but I sent them an email cancellation ("in writing") and they told me I had to come in. So I cancelled the card. They had some bullshit agreement with my bank where the subscription followed to my new card. So I cancelled the bank account.
Bank accounts don't need to be some terminal relationship. If they don't treat you right, leave.
Nothing is tough to cancel; just nuke the credit card and tell them to pound sand.
Never, ever, allow pre-authorized payments out of a bank account. At most, from a credit card. Use a throwaway credit card number if you have that available.
Never share your banking information other than credit card numbers with any vendor.
Whenever signing up to pre-authorized payments is optional, make sure it's easy to revoke before getting into it.
I only do such a thing for my cell plan, which is a monthly pre-paid thing. I can go in there and revoke it at any time. If you have it set on automatic, you get some benefits, like more gigabytes.
If post-dated cheques are an option, that's not a bad way to go. Young people should learn how to write checks. (I'm using both spellings cheque and check here on purpose.)
I pay condo management fees via post-dated cheques. I write them around half a year in advance or so. They cannot cash a cheque before the date written on it. You can ask for unused cheques back: they are physical tokens, using copies of which would be fraud.
Tip: if you're under forty, ask a baby boomer in your family for a run down on cheque writing and cashing.
You can't really rely on it, but if you ask your bank nicely, they might enforce it and wait to process a postdated check. My credit union says there's a $15 charge for a postdated order per check, so I'd rather save my money and provide the check later.
It's kind of like stale dated checks; the bank doesn't have to pay a check that's more than six months old; but you can't rely on it, the bank can pay that check and if they do, it will come out of your account; the bank has no duty to you to not pay stale dated checks.
They don't say it can never happen, but if a post-dated cheque is prematurely cashed, it's a problem, and you can complain about it to have the payment reversed. You should complain before the date on the cheque (after which it is more or less moot).
Readit News
I told them if you don't cancel it effective right now I am posting this dishonest predatory practice on every social media and review site in town, as well as telling all of my friends I met in here what you are doing, and asking them to please quit in protest. I'll also be doing a credit card chargeback, and a small claims court case to recover the time it takes me to deal with all of this. I will also take action to recover my back membership fees, because they repeatedly failed to maintain equipment in a usable condition, so I didn't get what I paid for. They did concede, and canceled it immediately.
May this email serve as your notice to revoke the ACH/Bank Access/Debit Card authorizations of both the below primary bank account and debit card, from [company] effective today, [date]
[Bank Name] Checking Account x** Savings Account x** and Debit Card x**
Additionally, I am revoking withdrawal authorizations from any other accounts associated with my personal information, listed below
name: DOB: phone #: email:
I am also revoking your further access to my banking accounts and have already removed your authorization with the Bank directly.
THIS REVOCATION APPLIES FOR THE NEXT PAYMENT DUE DATE AND ALL FUTURE DUE DATES.
Kindly, I ask that your response to this email shall be confirmation of receipt and you agree it is at least 3 business days prior to any scheduled repayments or membership fee deduction.
Note that in accordance with 12 CFR Part 1005.10(c) (Regulation E) you MUST HALT PAYMENT.
FAIL TO COMPLY and I will submit a report to the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. Additionally, you will be responsible for any fees, including overdraft fees, incurred as a result of your failure to halt payment
It's gotten better, but on more than one occasion I've had to argue with my bank to honor my request to block the charges. I've had tellers say "Well, if you have a subscription with them, this needs to be allowed". No. As you say - my bank's obligation is to honor my account wishes, not be an arbiter of my agreements with third parties.
Better to use something like a Privacy card in the first place so you can revoke it on your own terms.
Not saying this answer isn't the way to do it, but it's not without additional collateral damage in some cases.
Even if it doesn't impact other companies, the company in question may refuse to do business with you in the future (which may or may not be of concern).
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Can you expand on what you mean by this?
My banks don't offer me some way to revoke authorization from the bank's website. Does this mean calling customer service and giving them a business name to disallow future ach debits from?
What do you do if they tell you no one got this email?
No, they'll just send it to collections, and now your credit is dinged for seven years because unless they violated their contract with you, you're still liable for the charges.
I had an experience like that last year. I was cancelling my broadband in UK with Virgin, and got a £280 disconnection fee. The person who informed me said I will have to pay it in my final bill. Then over a month later I got a call from someone who's task was to see if I need a new connection where I was going. I said no, I was leaving the country. He asked if there was anything else he could do for me. I said, "you could cancel that huge penalty fee I got.." And he was just like "Sure, no problem, done."
What does "disconnecting" a customer involve, anyway? I recall having to return equipment or face a penalty to cover costs (high, but still somewhat understandable), but I have never had to pay to get off a broadband contract.
The leadership of any company that does anything like this should be very consciously aware that they're mediocre leftovers of the professional world. Real leaders of real companies don't have to be predatory. It is a screaming confession of incompetence.
There's a certain toxic element of business culture that preaches dominance as a virtuous thing, ether overtly, or through dubious terminology/beliefs in ideas like "alpha males." It argues that if you aren't dominating someone, then they necessarily must be dominating you in this interaction.
It is an extremely reductionistic view that has trickled down into certain parts of Weird Internet, too.
It's a bit like the toothpaste consultant story.
I dont think it works as your described. Amazon is plenty predatory.
What happens is a company tries to see what it can get away with. If they don't get in legal trouble, and customers don't abandon them in droves, then other companies start doing the same. It becomes industry standard.
First, they tried to tell me I had to go back to the location I had originally signed up at in order to cancel. No phone cancellation options or anything. I guess if I had moved more than a few miles away, I'd be out of luck.
After some fighting, the closer location let me fill out a paper cancellation form. The cancellation form had a very clear section that showed "paid in full" and "$0 remaining due." Despite this, I got a bill a month later for my "final month." I refused to pay it, obviously. They harassed me, calling me daily. Only once I posted a poor review online did someone finally decide the $50 (or whatever it was) wasn't worth it.
They gym itself was a fine gym, but these billing practices are scummy scummy scummy. I refuse to sign up for any other gym (except maybe a local rec center) until there's more legislation to protect my consumer rights. The cancellation nonsense isn't worth my time.
Maybe you would since it's a local gym, but if it's a national chain credit card companies won't even let you initiate the chargeback whatsoever.
I had to go so far as to completely cancel my Amex account to get Lifestyle Fitness to stop billing me. American Express utterly refused to either chargeback, or deny future billings. To the point a new card number issued didn't even fix it. I was quite happy to sign a waiver that I'd take all liability.
This was after moving states, calling to cancel, and them saying I needed to fly in to cancel in person. Outright scam that the banks help enable.
I think first logical step is to legislate banks from enabling this. That should cover most of the problem without a wide ranging laws.
I think these kind of predatory cancellation things must be in part a generational thing, and these policies are so old they haven't responded to the times. Older people I know seem to expect it or be okay with it, but millenials and younger will tend to be outraged and refuse to do business with them on principle. America Online, Sirius XM, etc. were able to retain some customers by making it hard to quit, but I think turned away far more without realizing it.
The best part of this is that when you decide you are done, you simply do nothing and its all over. Sure, you will get some marketing text spam for a few weeks but that's about it.
I joined a small private gym that works on a monthly prepaid membership. Just pay for the month in advance, and you have access. Don’t pay? No access, no pressure, no worries. Leave for months at a time and come come back with no hassle.
them: "Sorry, there's nothing I can do, I simply can't help you!"
customer: "I'll be really annoying."
them: "I figured out how to help you!"
Then Covid hit, classes got cancelled; we still had to pay until end of September. This fine print is totally insane.
Isn't charging people for things you don't give them supposed to be one of those things that are illegal no matter what any contracts say?
I think another aspect of this problem is that credit cards don’t just let you mark a transaction as “don’t allow any more of these.” Of course that probably wouldn’t solve the problem. The gyms would probably just continue charging you and eventually send you to debt collection.
Ironically, they do almost all support this, you can mark any merchant as non-future-billable and prevent all future charges from a given merchant. Unfortunately, you have to call in and ask a phone rep to do it for you, most cards don't let you set this yourself.
They use some simple ML to figure out which are you recurring payments, place them in a separate folder for you to keep tabs on and allow you to unilaterally stop any “future payments like that”.
I mean on top of tech like virtual cards and chargebacks with a few clicks.
It seems so simple to implement I have no idea how its not a standard feature for banks these days.
They finally agreed to cancel remotely.
The entire system is quite abusive. You may try experimenting with "I don't give a shit", assuming your other ducks are in order. I have found it to be therapeutic.
- Companies need to choose at least one channel to work 24 hours a day seven days a week. - The consumer can only be transferred from an attendant once. - If the call drops, the attendant must return the call and complete the service, without the customer having to repeat everything again. - Phone calls with human service must be available for at least eight hours a day.
I'm a particular fan of the "mirror" concept, where cancelations/returna should work in the same channels and be as easy as the purchases/subscriptions.
Consumer laws here are surprisingly good in my opinion and I am also surprised on how little lobby power consumers have in developed countries, to be treated like they are, with all the black hat tactics companies throw at them.
One law I really liked was the "right to regret", meaning you can cancel a wide array of contracts within 7 days. For example, when booking a hotel online, no matter the hotel's cancellation policies, you can cancel a reservation within 7 days of making it.
They're called things like: "cooling-off law", "buyers remorse law", or "right to cancel"
Some examples: https://cal.lawsoup.org/legal-guides/consumer/contract-cance...
All of this while reporting record profits, trying to pr spin this, and throwing more money than lost with compliance at lobbyists who will lie and financially influence to the legislators.
The apple subscription generate a lot more support requests because a lot of customers are confused on how to stop the in app subscription. Unfortunately, the company can't stop the subscription, it can only be done by the customer through the app store, so instead of just being able to cancel it for confused customers who request it, they have to guide them to cancel it on their side which is a lot of work.
Charges come through as "Apple" (or some variation) without indicating what the purchase was for. They also roll charges together so they're not hitting your bank account multiple times in a short period.
It's not a lot of work to go into your apple account and compare the invoices to your bank account to see what the charge was _actually_ for, but it was a pain in the rear when our credit card was stolen and used by the thief to Nickle and Dime us for 5-10 dollars here and there over the course of 6 months.
It seems to be done for privacy reasons, but I don't agree with how they handle it. I should be able to see all charges going to my Apple account credit card no matter which sub-account originated them.
Especially since the app was terrible and the reviews were full of people who were similarly charged and unhappy.
Shame on the "startup", and absolutely disgusting that we as a civilized country allow scams targeted towards a vulnerable population to happen quite legally.
The truly dreadful part is that this is precisely the kind of thing that people with depression, ADHD, and a host of other psychological conditions are unable to deal with.
I was in a similar situation and extremely irate at first when they said refunds were not an option, but fortunately it appeared to be an issue with their automated scheduling system. Once talking to an agent they were able to link me to a provider that same day.
On the whole, it's actually been a pretty good experience over the last year. Trying to get similar counseling/medication locally was an absolute nightmare at the time... with Cerebral, everything happened super fast and the counseling I got seemed on point (ADHD/insomnia). They quickly pause/resume for when I'm out of the country traveling, no unapproved charges so far.
I remember distinctly because when I _first_ signed up, it wasn't an option. A year or two later they emailed something about "Look how cool we are, you can cancel with just a few clicks now!" as if it was something to be proud of, rather than just them finally using consumer-friendly practices.
Nonsense. Send your registered mail online with la poste. It has the same legal value. I'm not saying that requiring registered mail isn't shitty, but letting this go to debt collection is making things difficult for yourself with no good reason.
And by the way, a law has been enacted that will force business to offer online cancellation starting June 1st: https://www.tomsguide.fr/fin-des-lettres-recommandees-pour-r...
Years later my wife and I signed up for the same gym. She was later able to cancel by talking to someone in charge and crying about it.
just change it to a virtual card and then give the virtual card a budget of $1 and/or let it expire. or get a prepaid debit card with $1 left on it.
Dead Comment
while I had no problem signing up online, you can only cancel your membership in person at your "home" location, or by sending them a certified mail letter formally request cancellation (which I have tried and failed apparently because I never heard back)
I now live on the other side of the country, so it feels ridiculous to spend money on a flight ticket just to cancel a gym membership
worse, Planet Fitness requires you provide bank account/routing number for payment, so there is no way to cancel payment unless I switch bank accounts
After a while, PF will drop their auto-charge because they won't want to deal with the rejected payment requests.
I hope I'm correct about this and I hope it helps!
Try small claims court in _your_ jurisdiction. You can then present this in evidence.
And if you do, they will keep your membership active (for years) before reporting debt to the credit agencies.
They also let me use a credit card for payments too.
Bank accounts don't need to be some terminal relationship. If they don't treat you right, leave.
edit: It was Workout Anytime
Never, ever, allow pre-authorized payments out of a bank account. At most, from a credit card. Use a throwaway credit card number if you have that available.
Never share your banking information other than credit card numbers with any vendor.
Whenever signing up to pre-authorized payments is optional, make sure it's easy to revoke before getting into it.
I only do such a thing for my cell plan, which is a monthly pre-paid thing. I can go in there and revoke it at any time. If you have it set on automatic, you get some benefits, like more gigabytes.
If post-dated cheques are an option, that's not a bad way to go. Young people should learn how to write checks. (I'm using both spellings cheque and check here on purpose.)
I pay condo management fees via post-dated cheques. I write them around half a year in advance or so. They cannot cash a cheque before the date written on it. You can ask for unused cheques back: they are physical tokens, using copies of which would be fraud.
Tip: if you're under forty, ask a baby boomer in your family for a run down on cheque writing and cashing.
Man, I hate to be [citation needed] Guy, but I don’t think that’s true. A quick search only gives me this:
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/banking/postdated-check
I’d doubly-check that before relying on it.
It's kind of like stale dated checks; the bank doesn't have to pay a check that's more than six months old; but you can't rely on it, the bank can pay that check and if they do, it will come out of your account; the bank has no duty to you to not pay stale dated checks.
Here, I'm reasonably confident that banks will not cash a cheque before the date on it, other than if it slips through by clerical error.
My government recommends this:
https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...
They don't say it can never happen, but if a post-dated cheque is prematurely cashed, it's a problem, and you can complain about it to have the payment reversed. You should complain before the date on the cheque (after which it is more or less moot).