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Comment by bennylope | Hacker News Reader

The NYT at least lets you use PayPal. When I wanted to cancel I couldn't even get through to a rep, so I just switched my payment method to PayPal and then deauthorized the recurring payment from PayPal.

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So much this. I LOVE paypal as a user because of it. All my subscriptions go through it and if it isn't offered via paypal, I'll reconsider.

I love to see a list of all my subscriptions with the ability to unilaterally cancel my subscription at any time via PayPal... I never even contact the companies I 'unsubscribe' from... I simply remove their access to my paypal.

Just be careful with this. Some companies will treat this as if it were a bounced check and keep your debt going.

I wouldn't put it past they NYT to do it. They could say that for privacy reasons the billing department can't view the last time you were logged into your account, and boom, they can argue that if they didn't pursue payment, you could be getting features from your paid account for free.

Most recurring billing APIs provide some sort of notification or query about the status. They could reasonably do "for each payment we got yesterday, extend the expiration date of the associated account."

Sure. They could also let you easily cancel online. But they don't want to. And if you refuse to pay for a subscription contract you entered, but didn't cancel, you owe them.

That sounds pretty unlikely to me.

I've done it to 40-50 internet companies.

My experience is internet companies don't collect debt the way you describe. It's the offline companies that do (ISPs, gyms, utilities, banks, etc)

Edit: they also need to inform you before sending your debt for collections, giving you time to get it right with them before any credit score issues. Seriously, people are so worried about keeping their promises to companies that don't reciprocate that concern. Most companies just deal with the consequences of breaking the rules. Why shouldn't we apply the same to them as their users?

From a legal perspective, would it be enough to send them an e-mail telling them that you no longer want to subscribe to the services before pulling the plug?

Probably depends on whether you email an appropriate address?

It really doesn’t. You wouldn’t even need the email. If this ever went to court the NYT wouldn’t win. Judges are human beings, not computers, and they consider circumstances. All you have to do is demonstrate intent, and not use the service so they can’t argue you received benefit without making an attempt to cancel.

Do you have an example of this?

I'd imagine this is in the Paypal terms when the company chooses to integrate with them and that 'debt' isn't enforceable

Does PayPal allow that? If they are smart, they'd put into their ToS that in order to use PayPals subscription feature to receive money, you have to agree to let people cancel through it and honor this.

Other than PayPal monetizing your payment history, sure it’s great. Apple makes it even easier.

This is tangential, but on the topic of PayPal and privacy, this article is interesting about PayPal and HIPAA: https://simple.icouch.me/blog/is-paypal-hipaa-compliant-revi...

Short answer: if privacy matters, PayPal is a non-starter. I don’t want news publishers to have my information either. I know publishers like to howl and whine about “owning the customer relationship,” but unless they allow Apple for subscriptions, I won’t subscribe. I don’t need to be constantly reminder if their “special offers.”

If privacy matters, any credit card is a non-starter: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-an...

Pretty much any credit card mines your purchases. PayPal isn't special in this regard.

What is the alternative? Is, what do informed people do instead of using credit cards or PayPal to buy things? (I assume stripe is the same)

Checks, ACH, wire transfers. Bank to bank, for free or very low fee (compared to transferred amount, like 20 bucks to transfer $$$$ with 1 day settlement for a wire transfer)

iDeal- basically money from my bank account to the bank account of the person I'm doing business with. Instant, free and no Sillicon Valley dipshit middle men parasites.

cash?

Pretty sure Chase and banks do the same.

I'd also like to add that despite the negative publicity PayPal gets from the merchant side, it's also preferred over credit cards by merchants for better handling of "disputes".

Some consider paypal to be archaic, but it's bleeding edge payment tech when placed alongside traditional credit cards.

As someone who did millions of $ via PP as merchant, I can say the experience is great as a consumer usually but really stinks as a merchant. We had a far higher fraud rate on PP than CC and it was a high price to pay really. Especially because after enough users chargeback or dispute, even though it was very clear they were just scamming us for free product (you could very clearly see it as they did not even tried to hide it; they knew PP would side with them), they would not go in discussion but just block our funds for 30-90 days. Lovely as a startup to have 400k usd blocked for 3 months...

To be fair the manner in which you were defrauded for product sounds like it can also be easily done with credit cards. That being said, I'm pretty sure PayPal can also be hit with a chargeback from credit cards, which they pass to you.

Had it happened with a credit you'd not only have your funds immediately blocked for 90 days, you also get hit with processing fees regardless of if the customer was scamming you or not.

But the blocking of the funds, unlike with Cc, were the non chargebacked funds so our rolling cashflow. With Cc we only lose that one customer payment and that is it. PayPal blocks the entire account. That is very different.

Regular cc merchant accounts will do the same if they believe their risk threshold has been met and this will vary depending on your merchant bank. But I do think that PayPal's threshold is much lower than most due to the higher level of fraud and the fact that no human being seems to work in their customer service and risk management departments. It's all bots, all the way down.

Years ago I used PayPal to pay for an on demand server that was advertised to be ready within an hour. Twenty four hours and zero servers later, I had already gone to a competitor and asked for a refund. The company refused and PayPal sided with them. American Express sided with me. I closed my PayPal account forever that day.

Now we have even better tools available for subscriptions. Check out privacy card.

The privacy card privacy policy isn't very comforting. I assume its partially boilerplate but it did keep me from signing up a while ago

In my experience with credit cards they almost always side with the customer for small charges, and for extremely large charges (and if you're a big enough company) they side with the merchant. I had case where free credits were offered for a cloud provider, but they decided to bill me anyways. Chase decided to validate the charges, and it was clear through multiple calls each agent was making things up about why it was validated (They would give different reasons anytime, from how I worded "free credits"). In the end the cloud provider admitted to the mistake and ended up siding with me, despite chase siding against me (they're supposed to be on the consumer's behalf). So I think in your case Amex probably didn't even consider or evaluate the terms of the sale—they just refunded you because it was within some parameters. This of course can work for or against you depending on the situation.

You are probably right. It was a small amount. I would be surprised if the charge back approval wasn't completely automated. But at least they side with the consumer some of the time. PayPal was just straight up "nope, we don't care that they didn't deliver the product at all".

The OP’s conplaint is actually that paypal sides with the consumer too much, enabling fraud. If I wanted it’s fairly easy to do since paypal pretty much refunds on request if you show you return something, and by something it literally means anything, including an empty box.

The disputes system is horribly inefficient. Reqarding fraudsters is worse than simply losing the money to mitigation efforts, as reqarding them incentivizes them too!

Right now payment processors are fairly detached from the negative repercussions, so they basically encourage customers to do chargebacks or disputes.

I've recently paid for a VPN subscription using BitCoin. When you do BitCoin there is no auto renewal and I consider it to be a good thing.

EDIT: s/now/no

It's a pita for the service provider who is implementing the subscription logic, but as the customer it's pretty sweet.

Isn't the logic the same as a gift subscription? Just at the payment stage you send them to BitPay instead of Paypal?

The main difference is customers will send the BTC a few minutes too late, and then it turns into this situation where it has to be refunded. This used to be an extra step when using Stripe for BTC payments (they have since stopped supporting BTC payments completely)

Which provider?

It was PIA - PrivateInternetAccess. I first tried ExpressVPN and for privacy I'd recommend ExpressVPN because they located in a place with no data retention laws. However PIA has port forwarding support and that is crucial for my case.

Both support payment via Bitpay. ExpressVPN returned the money no problem after I've discovered that they don't do port forwarding.

I'm using IPredator. They give you a dynamic IPv4+v6 address and you can pay with Bitcoin.

I'm sure there are many more, but Mullvad is one VPN provider accepting bitcoin payments (as well as cash).

Mullvad has been great. Very easy to setup and they do not take any of your personal details. Instead of a user/email and password, you get a random account number that is used to track your payments and authenticate you.

This reminds me of a service I signed up for once years ago, can't even remember what it was, but I had no idea how to cancel it and it was direct to my card instead of PayPal.

What ended up happening was I went to the "Edit payment info" page and just entered my card number as 4242 4242 4242 4242, which is a Visa testing card number.

It authorized it as valid and I never dealt with the company again.

You realize this can constitute fraud, right?

Can you explain that, surely fraud requires you to gain something by deception; stopping paying for a service you are no longer using is neither acquisition nor deception.

Agree. I wasn't using the product and nobody's identity was being stolen. If a court ruled it as fraud (nobody has tried suing me yet) I would be surprised. The business is at fault for using dark patterns to try and social engineer away my money.

By the way, your karma just reached 12345 so that means you've achieved HN Gold status. Congrats! Now never post again and stop receiving votes so it can stay that way.

number of people that will go to jail for doing this: 0

the only fraud here is your advice

This is the same reason I pay bills via my bank bill pay rather than giving EFT access to the folks who send me bills. One point of control, and the bank is invented to help me with payment issues rather than throw up roadblocks.

Yeah, it's not all peachy there either. I made the same assumption till I went to the bank to "block" a service-provider that kept insisting on billing me. They "blocked" the service-provider from charging me for 3 months, then they were apparently obligated to let it through because they could only do it for 3 months. At which point, the service-provider just back-charged me for those three months and continued anyways.

I mean I actually have the bank send checks. Is that how you had that set up?

Do you not need to worry about the mail getting lost?

No, mail service is pretty good.

That's what I thought too, but then I got Informed Delivery and saw some envelopes never arrive...

Mine always arrive eventually, sometimes just not on the day the email is sent.

I've seen that happen too, yeah.

I figure the folks owed money will follow up with me, and have never had that happen.

Yeah this is why I'm quick to use paypal. If I can't cancel it online I'm just going to deauthorize that shit.

That's all kinds of stupid. You might retain some cash in the meantime and feel better about "sticking it to the man," but the reality is you entered into an agreement and from both legal and corporate perspectives, you're defaulting and committing fraud. Is it right? No, not at all. Do I hate that it works this way? Absolutely. But sticking your head in the sand and pretending everything is fine is a great way to get screwed. Enjoy it while it lasts; it's only a matter of time before you defraud the wrong corporation who will bend you over a barrel and show you the 50 states. I've worked in my fair share of customer service and customer loyalty departments before and I've talked to enough people who had no idea their debt had been sold to a collections agency to even pretend that your approach is the right approach.

If a company wants to face the worst Streisand effect they've ever experienced they can go ahead and try to put me over a barrel because their shitty sales tactics make it incredibly difficult to cancel their service.

It should be illegal.

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