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Comment by UIUC_06 | Hacker News Reader

Go to Privacy.com. Register and give your real credit card. Don't get the $10/month subscription for "real" privacy, unless you really don't want a record of your purchases.

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.

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To those arguing that legions of lawyers are going to track you down and sue you:

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.

> 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

it seems kinda unfair to look at cases where companies pull shady shit around preventing cancellation, hiding the options, making people spend an hour on the phone then blame the consumer for a "race to the bottom" when they use a workaround to make cancelling the flip of a switch (like it should be).

No one is saying Privacy.com like methods are, for lack of a better word, wrong. Go ahead and fight unethical behavior with your own unethical behavior. The concern is that, despite unethical behavior being legal, you being unethical back doesn’t void the contract.

Write us when you land in that fantasy.

Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.

Yes, but it's better to be good and be burned - knowing full well it could've happened - than to be evil to others.

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.

There is absolutely no way cancelling a credit card is evil or immoral. All they had to do was make it easy for us to cancel the subscriptions but no, gotta retain the consumer at all costs even if it means making their life hell until they'd rather keep paying than deal with the cancellation process.

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.

Oh, I entirely agree with you. I was referring to what the parent said, implying that you should be bad because someone else will beat you to it.

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.

Won't closing a card without cancelling impact your credit score as all the the declines pile up?

A decline by itself, especially to a cancelled or expired card will not impact your credit score.

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.

Could they not still send the debt to collections and ding your credit?

How is collections going to know whose credit to ding?

How does a lawyer know who to send the threatening letters to? This whole conversation exists on the assumption that you're not fully anonymous in this relationship.

You aren't fully anonymous. Privacy.com has your info. The vendor, or their bank, can easily determine you gave them a privacy.com number. A court will happily compel privacy.com to turn over your info if the vendor can show the most basics of an agreement between you and them.

It doesn't guarantee the vendor will win a final judgement but no court is going to prevent them from tracking you down.

> the vendor, or their bank, can easily determine you gave them a privacy.com number

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.

Presumably privacy.com knows your real identity, and presumably the privacy.com credit card number you give to the merchant can be traced back to privacy.com. From there the merchant is just a court order away from getting your contact info, and if you actually do owe them money, I don't think a judge would balk at that, at least not after the merchant has filed suit against you (as John/Jane Doe).

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.

> Presumably privacy.com knows your real identity

If privacy.com doxed their users for some random company, that would ruin the whole purpose of their service...

> presumably the privacy.com credit card number you give to the merchant can be traced back to privacy.com.

Unknown. Do you have some evidence of that?

Yes, this is what LAFitness and others do if you cancel the credit card.

I want to quit the gym!!

This entire comment is waxing poetic about an imagined loophole that almost no one is actually relying on. If your credit card charge doesn’t go through, nearly every consumer oriented digital subscription simply revokes your access to the product. Neither side has any obligation to continue doing anything. There is no debt to collect on because nothing was delivered. There is no contract that was breached because the purchaser is not obligated to subscribe to future services.

It would make logical sense for it to function like that, but go ahead and test your theory. You will quickly find most places happily continue service for a while while sending bills and threatening collections. This is especially true of those services that are difficult to cancel.

I’ve done this numerous times without problem. It’s one of the great things about virtual credit cards.

The grandparent was not just about subscriptions, but about a solution to the privacy and easy to cancel issue ("just close"), with the parent comment being about issues with payments missed in that case, going beyond subscriptions alone.

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).

But it can affect your credit score and can affect your ability to get future loans.

Please read the whole thread. That's been debunked multiple times.

I don't buy it. What you say may be true if some small percentage of customers do it, however if this advice would start to become common knowledge, the amounts on the table change and so probably does the willingness to go after the customers.

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?

>What you say may be true if some small percentage of customers do it, however if this advice would start to become common knowledge, the amounts on the table change and so probably does the willingness to go after the customers.

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.

The second paragraph is silly. Their business would collapse in a heartbeat.

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.

Or if it's a pre-paid system, a payment failure implies automatic non-renewal until further actual is taken.

Exactly. Many options would be fair to consumers AND to merchants. Except the sleazy merchants.

I’ve done something similar in Germany, ended up getting a bill after 6 months of missed payments and a nice letter from a lawyer.

How did they get your contact information?

You think Germans have privacy?

Echoing the other responder: if you use a VPN, and don't give your real name & address, how are they going to find you?

If privacy.com gets a subpoena from a court, do you think they would just ignore it, or would they dutifully hand over any details of whoever owned that credit card?

That is illegal and depending on the type of service not possible. A delivered and received email constitutes due notice in many European countries (perhaps not all, not sure), which is likely to reach you. But if it is possible, I guess they couldn't, unless they are very determined and manage to force your VPN or CC issuer to disclose.

Proton VPN is based in Switzerland, so good luck with that.

That doesn't really mean much. You're better off having a VPN in an "enemy" state if you don't want them to give out your info.

To note, in EU most sites will have strong verification of your credit cards (at least since last year)

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.

Yes. Apparently this works differently in the US, but in any European country the ability to deduct currency is not governing the existence of an obligation of payment. That is determined by the (implicit) contract you agree to when subscribing to the service/product.

> this works differently in the US

No, it’s the same here. If you signed up with fake credentials with the intention of breaching the contract, it could be fraud.

I'm waiting to see someone get prosecuted for this "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.

At least in Europe, these sorts of dark patterns are very much illegal and I've never seen them in the wild (from Europe based businesses).

Prior to this year, German consumer contracts were even worse than American ones. Three years was the normal, with three month notice periods, limited cancellation windows, no prorated refunds, and just as many dark patterns.

Hadn't expected that from Germany! What changed? Here in NL the law requires that cancellation must always be possible through the same channels as signup, and I assumed this was due to a EU directive implemented everywhere.

I was flabbergasted that even NS (Dutch railway) tries this shit. I subscribed to one of their products through a simple webform, and to cancel I had to contact their webcare people in some kind of webchat. No thanks.

You're right! NS is the worst experience I've ever had. They also can't run trains worth a dime.

> Hadn't expected that from Germany! What changed?

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.

I have sometimes seen shitty things from insurance companies. Such as: "Your insurance is renewing on August 1st and you need to send us a filled 3-page PDF to this address in order to cancel it 30 days prior"

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.

Why is the prosecution asking about irrelevant things like that? Why doesn't it continue like this:

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.

The defense gets to speak too. Court isn't a video game.

Contracts can be unconscionable or otherwise illegal.

Actually, the dialog would go like this:

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?

Watch fewer court shows please. This wouldn’t happen during a cross examination.

Usually at this point I believe the correct procedure is that someone shouts “I’m putting the whole system on trial” and then everyone is forced to acquiesce.

I've been to actual trials, and yes it does happen.

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.

The verdict is given by jury in US. No jury is going to find you guilty for cancelling credit card after trying to unsubscribe.

They will if you go into court and act like a smug asshole. Also, bench trials with only a judge are very much a thing in the US.

Not if you request a jury trial. A jury trial is a constitutional right under sixth amendment

Only for criminal cases. Not civil, which these cases could be.

I'm not saying that's wrong, but I know that many or most patent infringement cases are tried in front of a jury. There are no criminal charges in those.

So in at least some civil cases, one side can request a jury trial. I'm not sure in which ones.

Yes. A jury trial can always be requested by either side. However, it’s up to the judge (or appeals courts) if the request is granted. The high stakes ones (that you hear about on the news) tend to have the request granted. My point was that they are only guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment for criminal trials. My wording wasn’t particularly clear about that.

In most cases, since these sorts of subscriptions are pre-paid (that is, you pay for the month of service at the beginning of the month, before the service has been rendered), you can truthfully answer "I had no contractual obligation to pay".

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.

Correct.

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.

Shouldn’t it be more like “it was my understanding that going through the process that took place constitutes a lawful cancellation of the service provided” or something like that? “Yes, but I thought it’s okay” sounds like a bit self incriminating.

Defense lawyers get to ask questions too, you know. They also get to object.

> the prosecution drops the case

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.

If only those businesses weren't trying to start off a relationship by acting in bad faith (eg, making it incredibly difficult to cancel your subscription)...

Strange then that this company based in Germany is full of these dark patterns

https://www.internations.org/about-internations/

see the reviews complaining about them

https://www.reviews.io/company-reviews/store/internations-or...

https://www.reviewopedia.com/internations-org-reviews

https://www.trustpilot.com/review/internations.org

One great feature of Privacy.com is that you can use pseudonyms rather than your legal name for making purchases. One "failure" mode I've encountered (twice!) is that if you accidentally reuse an old credit card account with a second service (eg. if you accidentally created a card for "donations" and use it at two different websites, or you create one for Ko-Fi or similar and it gets charged by multiple different "merchants" under the same service), the second transaction will fail. You'll get an email telling you the transaction was declined, but if you don't have email notifications enabled, it can get quite confusing why the payment isn't going through.

I generate free virtual cards with the Capital One Eno chrome browser extension

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 do and I love it! (except it stopped working on Safari and Firefox for some reason)

I’ve done this with Vivint and New York Times.

I will continue to do this for businesses that wanna try evil subscription cancellations.

This won't work for some agreements. Some have a legally binding duration, an arcane process to follow to cancel and legal teams to enforce this.

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.

I've been using relay.firefox.com for masking my email. I even pay the $1 per month because it's so convenient.

It takes true genius to come up with a scheme so clever that opportunity cost becomes irrelevant.

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

it doesn't always work though. Some companies can detect if you're using temporary credit cards and won't let the txn go through. Frustratingly it's often the ones that I would like to use it with the most.

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.

Interesting, I haven't seen that.

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.

The first 6–8 digits of a credit card number represent the issuer (IIN, see [0]). Merchants can perform a lookup of those first few digits to their own denylist. Citi’s IIN for temporary cards should (in theory) be the same IIN used to issue non-temporary ones.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_7812

> Privacy.com

Would you know if it works with credit cards not from the US?

How does it deal with transactions in other currencies?

afaik service is us only, it requires you to have card from us bank

Silent canceling of cards is evil. Just because it's easy and unenforceable doesn't mean that it's ethical.

It's no more evil than paying cash and making them ASK you to renew. Designing the service as a roach motel is what's evil.

but deliberately obfuscating way to cancel service thus incurring unnecessary cost for consumer is ethical?

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