Subscriptions are out, refills are in
bluepnume.medium.com
bluepnume.medium.com
Now when you "subscribe" to WhizBang online, go to Privacy and create a special credit card just for WhizBang. Give WhizBang a fake name and address as well, and don't use your "regular" email. Create some spares on ProtonMail or some other low-friction service.
When WhizBang goes to verify your credit card, your fake name & address are not checked. You can give them whatever you want.
Your purchase will appear on your regular credit card records. If you want Privacy to use a fake seller, you have to pay for that.
When you want to cancel WhizBang, you just close their credit card. They will get a Decline when they go to charge it, and they'll eventually cancel you. You can go through their official cancellation process, if you want to.
This works. It's what I do.
Looking at their site, privacy.com doesn't seem to handle 3DSecure or any other DSP2 level of authentication. Has anyone recently succeeded making payments with that in the EU ?
Of course if you give your actual credit card number/CVV etc. but with a fake name it will get refused by your issuer.
No, it’s the same here. If you signed up with fake credentials with the intention of breaching the contract, it could be fraud.
Q: So, Mr. Defendant, when you signed up for this service, did you intend to pay?
A: Yes
Q: And did you pay?
A: Yes
Q: But eventually you cancelled the credit card?
A: Yes
Q: And why did you do that?
A: I was tired of the service, and they made it almost impossible to cancel.
At that point, the prosecution drops the case.
But hey, if you want to keep paying for a shitty service you don't want anymore because you can't jump through all their hoops... well, you do you.
I didn't see anything about EU compliance in the relevant news (and it was relatively big news for such a quotidian change). Possibly the number of people with useless gym etc. memberships after corona was the last straw - these were often 2-3y autorenewing contracts, for fairly large amounts.
My strategy: Fire off an email to whatever billing email is on there, say "I will not be renewing this insurance", and cancel the direct debit. They will try to charge, send a couple letters, and it's all safe to ignore because I've stated my intent to cancel in time.
Q: But eventually you cancelled the credit card?
A: Yes.
Q: Despite your contractual obligation to pay?
A: yes, but they made it impossible to can...
Judge: You must only answer the question.
Contracts can be unconscionable or otherwise illegal.
Q: But eventually you cancelled the credit card?
A: Yes.
Q: Despite your contractual obligation to pay?
Defense counsel: Objection, your honor. Leading the witness.
Judge: sustained
Want to try again?
You're right about one thing, though; it's much briefer. All the lawyer says is "Objection. Leading." They do it so much that they don't waste words like on TV.
So in at least some civil cases, one side can request a jury trial. I'm not sure in which ones.
And no, the judge is not going to say "you must only answer the question" if you answer that way; "when did you stop beating your wife?" doesn't actually work in a court of law.
Regardless, even if you did have a contractual obligation to pay, but found it impossible to cancel (assuming you're allowed to cancel without penalty), you could pretty safely answer "Yes" to that last question, and then your own lawyer would then expose the whole impossible-to-cancel situation when it's their turn to question you. Court of law isn't this "haha, gotcha!" thing.
If there's an issue about whether a question is admissible, the lawyers argue it. If the judge decides it is, they just say "Overruled; answer the question."
That's why your lawyer will tell you to look at them before answering.
Agreed, someone would have to be egregious to attract prosecutorial attention. But for a civil judgement, using a temporary card with a fake name that is cancelled without notice (particularly if a discount was offered up front in exchange for commitment) is going to weigh in the plaintiff's favor. That, in turn, factors into e.g. credit agencies when considering taking such items off a report after the debt collector who bought it begins collections.
TL; DR This is a fine strategy. But try to cancel using the service's means. If they force you through loopholes, fire off an email and carry on. None of this is legal advice. But it does seem like the courteous thing to do.
https://www.internations.org/about-internations/
see the reviews complaining about them
https://www.reviews.io/company-reviews/store/internations-or...
Yes, in many jurisdictions, including the US, canceling your credit card does not change your obligation to pay. (Imagine buying a $10,000 physical product and the seller forgets to charge until the day after delivery, and you've canceled the card. You're not getting out of that.)
However, there is substantial friction in the American legal system. Of course, if they can find you, they will send a threatening form letter from a lawyer. If you're not experienced with the legal system, this seems scary. But: big whoop.
It costs $5k-20k to fully pursue a contractual claim. Nobody does this for small consumer purchases. (They will send you to collections, if they know your identity, though. But if they don't have good ID, they can't even attach to your credit score.)
Nobody is going to send a subpoena for your $15/mo subscription on a dead credit card.
These concerns are all frivolous and irrelevant for 99% of consumer purchases that charge in the tens of dollars per month.
In the American legal system, it is important to distinguish between what is possible versus what is practical. And exploit that difference whenever you can.
no thank you. I'd rather live in a world where we try to make it better not race to the bottom
Don't be naive about it, you have to be brave. There's always a chance someone betrays you, but it's a risk worth taking.
They're the ones exploiting our "contractual obligation" to keep paying them despite no longer wanting the service. They deserve absolutely everything that happens as a result of their abuse. We won't apologize.
Canceling a credit card or charging back a charge for a prepaid service you aren't using is not immoral or evil by any stretch of any real moral code.
The entity charging you would need to report your missing payments to a credit agency. And to do that generally they need your social security number.
For the most part, you can be reasonable sure that unless you gave them your social security number they will not show up on your credit report.
It doesn't guarantee the vendor will win a final judgement but no court is going to prevent them from tracking you down.
evidence for that, please?
There are numerous advantages to a privacy.com number besides cancellation:
* you're sure that your real credit card will not leak out when (not if) they get hacked.
* You get notified every time the card is charged (or declined).
* You can set dollar limits so they can't pile on other charges.
* You have a complete record of all the charges on that card. You know that no other vendor can use it.
So refusing a privacy.com card, if they can even do it, would be a consumer-unfriendly act.
But of course no merchant is going to go through the effort and expense to do all this, unless you owe them a decent chunk of change. A couple months of a $15/mo subscription likely doesn't clear that bar.
If privacy.com doxed their users for some random company, that would ruin the whole purpose of their service...
Unknown. Do you have some evidence of that?
And you'd be surprised how some services continue to charge you (and give you the service) if your card stops working. I've had it happen several times when cards expire (due to messy post office service, it's a mess to renew here, plus I often forget to actively go and personally get the new one in time).
Also, this sounds like a great opportunity for privacy.com to have a lucrative side business of bulk-selling the real customer data to collections agencies - or maybe just open up a collections agency themselves. How much do you trust them?
So? As long as this doesn't happen, it's still practical.
Might as well say "this would stop working if credit services cease following a societal collapse". Sure, but it's not an actual issue for the foreseeable future.
If a large percentage of customers did this, then there would be pressure on legislators to crack down on it, but the compromise to emerge would be that online services ALSO have to make it as easy to cancel as it was to join.
I am curious if the card #s I can get directly from Citi might work but haven't tested it out. Those are a pain to generate compared to privacy.com though.
I know they can detect that you're on a VPN; at least, one of the popular ones. I'm not sure about obscure VPN services.
However, they make good care to know the real identity of they buyer, so you'll (mostly) be aware you're getting into that hot water.
Would you know if it works with credit cards not from the US?
How does it deal with transactions in other currencies?
I can’t classify this one. Kinda sounds like an IRC wire fraud joke that some kid actually tried.
I stopped pirating stuff as soon as they would sell it to me, but it was because downloading music was a full-time job and I had stuff to do
I will continue to do this for businesses that wanna try evil subscription cancellations.
Works great and you can set a date for it to lock itself after to block charges, they even suggest it as a use case for stopping trials from charging you, etc. It generates a card per website and you can replace it as many times as you want all for free.
Anyone else using this awesome service?
I get pet food on subscription. Chewy sends me a notice my order is about to ship. I can skip or cancel if I want.
Shopify on the other hand is hostile. I have a small store there I've deprioritized. They have a $9 / mo inactive plan, where they keep your stuff but customers can't buy. If you want to stop paying, they delete all of your stuff & domain: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/your-account/pause-deacti...
That and we have a subscription box from Meowbox for them as well. We used to get treats, but they didn't like the majority of them so it's just toys now.
I use it for toiletries and other routine consumables at home. Amazon trucks are going to be on the road anyway; may as well save my car trips for actually interesting trips.
You have to be very disciplined to get as efficient with Amazon. It's probably not really possible.
As a real example: my subscriptions are on a 2 month cycle, and get delivered roughly on the 3rd, which gives me until the 26th of the preceding month to make changes. On the 24th they send an email with all the prices that will be charged if I don't change anything. With almost no friction, I can change or cancel anything up until the 26th.
Personally, I'd like to see them move to a model where it's completely free until you have 100 sales, then you have to upgrade or something. That would encourage more people to use/try it, plus give them a chance to actually see success and start their small business, rather than fail because they're running out of money for their business.
You get an email and you remember you wanted to add something, and you go ahead and buy it.
It’s a fine line.
In France, a new law was just passed to fight against unsubscribing hell, called "3-click unsubscribe". It is due to come in effect at the beginning of 2023.
It basically says that if the business offers an "easy online subscription", then it has to offer an "easy online unsubscription" option. This doesn't apply to companies who only take subscriptions by some other means. However, it does apply to a subscription taken by other means if it's also possible to subscribe online.
Google Translate source: https://www-tf1info-fr.translate.goog/economie/abonnements-e...
It’s absurd that this is a feature, but alas.
Just to be extra sure, I subscribed through Apple. The "cancel subscription" always worked and I never had to send any letter or spend any amount of time on the phone.
If I hadn't been aware of the Apple loophole, they wouldn't have gained my as a subscriber.
I'm not sure of the status of any current rulemaking, though. The current chair of the FTC has made it clear she is willing to take on "dark pattern" practices such as this.
The equipment will be old and the clientele mostly giant men, but they'll spot you and what is lifting weights but some metal? Does it need to be new?
For example running , swimming , climbing, and general indoor sports are all activities that some gyms offer.
But in all seriousness, the Y is probably where I'd go if I needed that. They usually have favorable terms.
Climbing gyms kind of run the gamut. I was actually pretty delighted to find that the one I had been a member of, when I moved during Covid, actually never reactivated by subscription when they reopened, so when I nervously called to cancel, expecting them to have some ridiculous requirement, I didn't even have to cancel at all. They hadn't been billing me in the first place.
If you want to run, go outside. Even in fairly unpleasant weather, I think that's generally a better experience than a treadmill. And if you want strict measurements and not to worry about being hit by cars, go find a local high school or college and they almost certainly have a track that is sitting unused often enough for community members to run at. That's how I used to do it when I still ran.
You had to send a certified letter to headquarters.
I usually attempt to cancel the "legitimate" way as well. No collection agency has ever called me. But hey, do what makes you comfortable.
Do you have some special skills that I don't know about?
> Credit cards become invalid in the normal course of human activity
Yes, but it doesn't mean you aren't liable for the charges that get placed on them.
> I usually attempt to cancel the "legitimate" way as well
It seems like you don't actually do it all the time then.
You insist "this can't possibly work." That's funny; it's working for me. Maybe you should try it out?
Or keep paying. It's up to you.
It doesn't come up often, because most places charge you before providing a service. For example, if you have a NYT subscription, and it goes to renew and your credit card has been turned off, you don't actually get your NYT subscription. No services rendered, no accrued charges.
However, if your gym bills your credit card at the end of the month of your membership, then you are still obligated to pay it, even if your credit card has been disabled, because the service has been provided.
Are gyms usually post-paid? Every one I've been a member of (admittedly only 3) has been pre-paid.
does that actually happen? Most places make you pay up front, at least one month's worth, even if they subsequently bill at the end of the month.
In any case "No services rendered, no accrued charges." is actually the case I'm talking about. You pay a month's worth, then forget about the monthly renewals, and they love to keep billing you anyway, but surprise, surprise: the CC declines. At that point, you can decide if you want to keep paying or not. Which is how it should work.
With all due respect your tone made it hard for me to deal directly with your point. But, maybe you only had that tone because I poorly expressed my understanding.
Many years ago I was a YMCA gym member, and I canceled without any fuss. More recently I was a member of the boxing gym around the corner, and I needed to cancel due to an injury (not sustained at the gym!), and they even waived their policy of requiring 30 days notice to cancel. (I also just realized I wasn't going often enough to justify the membership, and could save money by just paying the drop-in fee whenever I wanted to go.)
I do wonder if COVID has made this a bit less bad; my partner was a member of a different gym for a while, and they were good about keeping her membership paused, even after they reopened for in-person classes, and then weren't sketchy about her eventually canceling.
A brand name gym may offer a competitive and value added service at branch via equipment offered or rent bargaining, or financing of such, or network effects or being part of a larger organisationIt is simply a rent seeker that happens to be a gym. Some may seek to be this and the above, with varying degrees of flexibility in having both cakes and eating them.
Don’t ever move to Europe. This is standard practice across the board there. One thing North America does well in comparison is customer service.
I've had my own experiences with gyms being hard to cancel. But in principle if I want an easy cancellation then I'll go month to month. If I have a 12 month contract I'm not going to cry if they resist when I want to cancel early...
Perhaps this needs to be thought of as part of a larger communications strategy - who here is part of a SaaS that sends regular 'marketing' emails to existing customers? :)
Maybe the defaults (boiled down, the provided examples appear to be "opt-in" if you're not in, and "opt-out" if you are in) are designed to streamline the process so conversations are ignorable so that's okay?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something! I definitely want to hear stories of this model working in the B2B space.
I got this email for a charge of $50 on K-Mart, 20 years ago! Incredible. There actually still are K-Marts, but the closest one to me is 60 miles away.
Anyhow, they said "it's too late for us to garnish or do anything else with this, but here's how you can clear it up." So no threats.
First of all, I was pretty sure I didn't have a $50 charge with K-Mart 20 years ago, and in any case... 20 years!! They didn't offer any data on what it was. So I sent them all to the Spam folder.
Amazingly, they sent one every day for two months. When I finally looked in the Spam folder, there they all were. They just wouldn't give up.
Finally, I figured out that they were assuming I was someone else with a similar name. I answered the email and said "I'm not him." The emails stopped.
This should be illegal. If you can easily sign up online, it should be possible to cancel online just as easily.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Financial_Protectio...
How long can gyms, cable companies, cell providers etc keep customers hostage with cancellation policies like this? I mean it has been forever but c'mon!
If your business doesn't provide value to your customers then you should not milk them like this... you should start providing value or cut your losses and treat them well so they will still hopefully recommend you to a friend that actually needs whatever you are selling.
They are hoping you have some excess weight you never use and it’s free profit for them
They have a Pay-As-You-Go ($2.25/lb + $12.95*/order, $30 minimum) and the subscription offering ("Rinse Repeat"). They make it impossible to price compare these offerings, as the subscription offering is charged per "bag" not by pound weight, but they do give you a guesstimate figure: $1.39/lb based on their most expensive subscription tier (very YMMV, as the "bags" hold different weight based on the clothing materials).
* The website misleadingly lists the Service Fee as $7.95, and then throws in the "Health & Safety Fee" into a list of other optional fees while making it non-optional in the small print. Essentially making the Service Fee $12.95 with deceptive dark patterns for good measure.
I don't know why, or when I signed up for it.
This is the second time it's happened, so I gave up and kept it. I do order from Amazon enough that it matters, I guess. It's scummy as hell, but effective. I'd much prefer a model like the one mentioned in this article.
But it's also a really great deal 14.99/month for free faster shipping, books, movies, music, etc...
I don’t use Prime’s content features and the handful of Amazon orders I make a year usually get free shipping anyway.
I’ve definitely accidentally signed up for Prime and the confusing screen is always a reminder that I should try buying my [whatever] elsewhere. Sometimes it works and I find an alternative, sometimes I find the opt out button and finish my purchase. But their scummy tactics have probably pushed a few $k in annual purchases off Amazon for me.
There are two buttons, and the huge bright one is "Yes" or something (constantly changing), referring to whatever crap (Prime, credit card, rush shipping) thet are pushing in the big interstitial ads you are ignoring.
Amazon isn't worth the bother anymore. You can almost anything worthwhile somewhere else better.
Amazon was founded and run by proud Objectivists, so the ethics they have might not match yours.
Most big-box stores have horrible stock and their online systems are pretty lackluster, including shipping times.
I don't use Amazon to find what I want to buy - I know what I want to buy (for the most part) before I even begin to look at Amazon. Too many crap brands to rely on Amazon's search features.
With prime I have to manually select the shipping speed to get it the fastest.
Without prime, it defaults to faster shipping that you pay for. You have to manually select slower shipping to get the advertised "free super-saver shipping"
I'm genuinely confused by your take here.
That being said it's been a while since I did the signup flow, maybe it's gotten way worse, do you have an example?
Agreed. Similarly, if DoorDash could stop automatically setting a high tip on all my orders, that'd be great, thanks. I always give a tip, but it's rarely as high as the app auto-suggests, unless I have a tiny order.
I have no idea about what is expected for a tip every time I travel to the US. Don't get me started on "mandatory tips"
It's awful. A good rule of thumb for waiters/waitresses is 15% minimum tip unless they're awful, 18% if they're good, 20% if they're amazing. The idea being that larger bills usually mean more food and/or more work for them. But for delivery drivers, in my opinion, it's the same amount of work whether I order $10 or $40 in food, especially if that amount is artificially inflated by app service fees, so I give all my app delivery drivers the same tip.
I've done the math before and it's ridiculous that a tipped employee, due to a lower minimum wage, can literally be starving in poverty while employed, with no regulations preventing that. Our country needs to fix its regulations in this area, but until it does, employers should be offsetting the problem, not customers. Or, hell, if they really can't bring themselves to pay their employees fairly, they should at least offset the tip amount by lowering the service fees. The other day, I ordered two subs. Two sandwiches, nothing more, not even any sides or drinks. It was $40 with a $3 tip. Literally more than double the price of the food.
What I'm saying is, I tip because I understand there's a problem, but I don't overtip because I also understand it's the employers' responsibility (if the government won't handle it) to deal with the problem on behalf of their employees, not the customers'.
Show me the real amount up front. Charge me the real amount. Pay them the real amount. Deal done.
It's really not that hard. I don't mind them getting paid what they need to get paid, but it should already be baked in.
Always thought it would be quite nifty if you could make a site like this for third-party services. I might see my 2 audible credits on there, and decide I've got enough, or need more. Or maybe apple could offer a free month - so I might pause my netflix. Could even combine stuff (free $10 Dominos credit added for each month of Netflix after month 12 etc).
Whole current system of every service having their own UI, is just a pain. Worked out paying for stuff works better then you can just stick it all on the same card - so why not manage it all from one place as well?
1) Things go out of stock too much if it's a little more specific. 2) Prices are very sporadic and unstable. A subscription should be relatively predictable - with the exception of the obvious price inflation over time, but I'm talking month-to-month.
When you subscribe to something it doesn't "lock in the price" - prices go up and down month-to-month.
On the amazon side, there seems to be a bit of flex built in, when they'll still tell you the item is in stock, and tell you the price before the re-buy kicks in.
A lot of the items I "get told are unavailable, would I like to go with the alternative?" are still available, just for a higher price.
i.e. I think a lot of the "annoyance" is actually amazon bulk negotiating on your behalf. If say P&G decide to raise their price on their detergent, amazon has the power to decide whether 90% of their customers swallow the increase, or they all find an alternate brand. My guess is that amazon decides not to provide P&G detergent to a few hundred thousand subscribers in a month, that helps 'focus' the P&G rep in getting the price back down the next month.
If I were in that situation, I suppose I would open a new account just for that purpose, turn off overdraft, and transfer money into the account as needed.
1. You get a virtual card number to use for subscriptions
2. We detect recurring charges
3. We send you a text 24h before any refills
4. If you reply 'skip' we block the next charge, if you reply 'cancel' we cancel the card entirely
So the gym just lets them collect a balance and then threatens to send the bill to collections if it's unpaid.
Another time, I had a service continue to try to bill me monthly for 2 years. I just let it keep saying "your order is about to ship" and "there was a problem with your card". Eventually, they found a way to charge me (I'm really not sure how) and had an order go through, after which I cancelled through an option buried in their website.
So I will (again?) remind people that there are lots of services that would make a lot more sense to pay for in the form of usage tokens instead of in the form om monthly payments.
But I guess that would mean missing out on sweet sweet revenue from forgetful customers.