Off topic but I still cannot unsubscribe from NYT online after signing up online. I have to call in during their business hours. I thought CA passed a law prohibiting this dark pattern.
I had to call and pitch a fit to get them to at least stop sending papers (to my old address, I don't live in the USA any more) and give me a prorated refund. They were completely shady and untrustworthy, I'll never do business with them again.
To their credit, they refunded me when I complained about this.
Personally I think it should be illegal to renew annual subscriptions without some kind of reminder that the bill is coming up, or an opportunity to cancel at some point, especially if you never even used the service. Heck, I might go so far as to say that annual billing should not be allowed.
"Your payment method will be automatically charged $4.00 every 4 weeks for the first year ($1.00 per week).
It will then be automatically charged $17.00 every 4 weeks thereafter, starting on (date) ($4.25 per week).
Your subscription will continue until you cancel. You can cancel anytime."
In your case, you may not have checked a box, but I'd be shocked if there wasn't similar language saying that you were opting in to a recurring payment. (It's not as if they're making you read a 5000-word EULA - it's right there front and center on the page in my case.) Not to mention that this is pretty standard practice across subscription-based businesses.
I do think it is good form for subscriptions to give customers advance notice of when their subscriptions will renew, though, and most don't. I would go so far as saying that I wouldn't mind if this was a requirement.
What really bothered me was they took the payment method itself as an indication that I wanted a different type of subscription. Check? 1 year subscription. Cash? 1 year subscription. Credit card? oh ho! You obviously want to subscribe from now until the end of eternity! And yes, they told me on the phone that my use of a CC was indication that I wanted to autorenew and that there's not a way to pay with CC that doesn't autorenew (at the time I spoke with them in early 2018).
Basically to the NYT: "because of the payment method you used, we are able to keep billing you" = "you must want us to keep billing you!" and that is complete bullshit.
May I ask how you subscribed? I agree it's pretty shady to offer multiple payment methods side-by-side with different terms, but I also haven't seen a lot of online merchants accepting cash/check.
I should have made it more clear that auto-renewing seems like the default specifically for subscriptions made online through the web or an app.
The process is usually painless, since the card issuer has a financial incentive to screw over the vendor. Some credit card companies will even block charges from a company moving forward.
One of the credit reporting agencies (Experian?) started charging one of my cards without permission. I don’t know how they even got the number, so I did this.
The credit card company operator said a double digit percentage of the call center load was blocking that particular credit agency, and did it with no further questions. I have no idea why they weren’t kicked off the processing network for elevated fraud rates.
This is a good strategy though in the future. I can show proof I tried to cancel by phone/online to my credit card company.
edit: chat took 30 minutes from start to cancel. mostly dead air. when the chat starts they also asked for a phone number (which i never gave, so it wasnt for ID confirmation) but i instead just entered 'NA'
That pattern is something I'd expect from Sirius XM or Lifetime Fitness, and the fact that they did it too was a little surprising.
Someone else here said this can save you money this way, but the salesman I got came back at me with an offer to stay for the same price I was already paying.
Between them not complying with CA law (I'm a resident of CA) and them showing me ads when I pay them, I decided to end my subscription for good.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/04/californias-new-online-can...
Also - the reason they do that is so they can offer you a radical discount that isn't "published" to keep you from canceling. I did this a few weeks ago and saved more than 50%.
They did win though, I ended up subscribed for a few months more than I wanted to.
Bank of America used to, but they discontinued that feature a few months ago, saying that with electronic wallets such as Apple Pay and similar that do not disclose your card number to the merchant there is no longer a need for virtual CC numbers.
I've got a couple Capital One cards and their virtual numbers are quite convenient. They are created from their Eno browser extension. Invoke Eno on the checkout page of a site, and it lets you pick and existing virtual card or lets you create a new one for that site.
I use it on Firefox, but recently the Eno extension disappeared from the Firefox extensions store, and they no longer list Firefox as a supported browser (although existing installations continue to work). If this is permanent it will not be as convenient for Firefox users--they will have to use Chrome to create new virtual cards, which they can of course still use in Firefox.
On your account pages at C1 you can view your virtual numbers, suspend them, and delete them but you cannot create new ones. That has to be done through the Eno browser extension.
I have no idea what Citi's virtual card system is like.