maybe banned from multiple providers: not really sure as i only found out years after the fact when i wanted to use this particular vendor for something else.
Wouldn't a contract that locked you into paying a certain amount per month for a set time essentially be a loan? Are those reported as liabilities on the companies balance sheet? Seems like they are trying to have it both ways.
Predatory services should be avoided. It seems more likely that predatory services would be aggressive about collecting.
I use a Revolut card exactly that way, and it made my life so much easier. No need to phone someone between 8:30 and 9:45 on the first Saturday of the month to cancel subscriptions. No risk of paying for a month extra or lose access for a week after in-subscribing (all of this happened to me). So there are real benefits to this approach.
Now, I use Revolut because I like my online purchase to be completely isolated from my main bank accounts, but both my French and my British (traditional and old-fashioned) banks offer the same single-use virtual cards for a modest fee. So filtering by issuing bank would not be really effective.
I don’t know if these cards have numbers that can be used to recognise them, though, but I never had any trouble using them.
To be fair, though, even without the subscription thing, it’s a useful element of defence in depth when buying stuff online: how secure a random e-commerce website is becomes much less relevant if they haven’t a working card number in the first place.
Genuine question, I don't know how it works with credit cards. But you can't "cancel a contract" by voiding a direct debit authorization (where you allow a company to charge your bank account directly) and expect everything to be fine, so I would assume that also applies to credit cards?
On attempting to cancel - by stopping use of the service, by trying to cancel on the website, by emailing them, by calling them during your work hours and sitting on hold for an hour of my time that's worth more than the entire value I got out of the service, and recording the 2 minute interaction with the 'customer service' agent, by calling again the next month after they still didn't cancel, by escalating to a supervisor and recording that interaction, and getting billed again - it often turns out that it's impossible for mere mortals to cancel.
In that case, cancelling by changing your credit card number is reasonable. Yes, there's a small chance they'll chase you to collections and attempt to harm your credit score if you do actually owe something (if they shipped you something physical, for example), but often they just drop it.
Which is good in my book. Being forced into auto-renewing subscriptions is nonsense and takes advantage of consumers.
They'll send the collection agency after you for the missed payments till the end of the contractual agreement, which for most gyms is 3 to 12 months! Gym chains here are absolutely predatory.
The same goes for any other kind of subscription too like, telcos, etc.
- cancel subscription using the same method I used to sign up (if it is broken - that is not my problem)
- cease providing them money
I would consider it as preventing fraud by scammers that make harder to cancel subscription than it was to create it.
Doing both is fine (and I do the same), but only removing the payment method does not invalidate the subscription contract, right?
I would not assume it to be invalid form of terminating subscription, I would also not assume that it is valid if someone has not even tried official unsubscription method.
The network may disallow the behavior but networks are slow to regulate and in theory are consumer focused.
I once had a trial with a company and added my Privacy.com card that would expire in a day. I've canceled that trial and forgot about it. Then some time later I had to use the same company, but I've totally forgotten that I had an account with them (I've also changed the email I use). Anyways, privacy.com suspended my account because using their cards to get trials over and over again is against their ToS.
Your only recourse would be filing a complaint with Visa, and hoping they investigate, but "google closed my account" is not gonna be something that's super high on their priority list to investigate, I'm guessing.
This hasn't been my experience. I've had Grubhub refuse to accept a privacy.com card for buying a gift card.
They discontinued it with the rationale that they didn't need it anymore because their fraud prevention worked well enough by itself or something.
0 - https://www.banktech.com/core-systems/mbna-offers-single-use...
Another thing I've noticed is some apps (for example Allset) are blocking virtual phone numbers, for the same trial-abuse issues
I wouldn't rely on this feature unless the virtual card had the same BIN as the non-virtual card.