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Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

If the business simply doesn't offer click-to-cancel, so you haven't actually canceled your subscription, how could you successfully claim the payment was made fraudulently? The law doesn't mandate that you can unilaterally exit any agreement, it mandates that businesses have to offer an easy way for you to do so.

The example of a yearly subscription paid monthly should make this obvious. You can't exit this arrangement after 6 months and expect to simply not pay the remaining 6 months, as the contract was for a whole year. All this law does is force the business to make it easy for you to cancel any auto-renew for a second year. But if the business doesn't do that and you dispute a payment, how hard do you expect your bank to work to figure out if this payment was for a part of the original contract, or for an auto-renewal you should have been able to easily canceled, but haven't?

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Have you ever actually submitted a credit card dispute? It's like a little miniature arbitration. You can submit whatever documents and justification you want.

My point would be that the argument would be clear. It stands to reason that a business cannot consider an unlawfully collected payment to be legitimate. If you can demonstrate that you attempted to give them notice of cancellation and they ignored it unlawfully, then that's your justification that the payment wasn't authorized. You can, of course, revoke authorization to collect payment anytime you want.

This is a really common kind of dispute that businesses have with credit card users. Typically, their response is that the user did, in fact, authorize it because they agreed to a variety of terms that mandated this and that for cancellation, and so on and so forth. In essence, if they can get the user to admit that they gave the original authorization, their argument would be that it was never withdrawn because the user previously agreed to some T&C buried definition of how cancellation would be defined.

The counter to that, of course, now, is new, which is to say that those terms are unlawful and thus negated. It seems completely sound to me as a strategy.

By my understanding, the new law says "a business must offer a way to cancel a subscription that is at least as simple as creating the subscription, and in the same medium".

However, if a business fails to do so, and the only way they have to cancel your subscription is via, say, a notarized letter, I don't see how you can convince your bank that you tried to unsubscribe unless you have sent such a notarized letter.

That's not how the burden of proof works. In a credit card dispute the merchant needs to have there be no ambiguity that you did, in fact, authorize the transfer of money to their account and that the authorization is still in effect. The absence of evidence means you win.

Typically, the way it would work is that they would say, "You authorized it," and you would say, "Actually, I didn't authorize that payment. I only authorized the prior payments. I never authorized the subsequent ones because I logged in to their site and attempted to cancel, but they did not provide me with a means to do so."

To which they could say no your initial authorization should also apply to these subsequent charges because that cancellation method is not one we accept. In the past, that defense could work. Your NEW counterargument would be: Sorry, but they cannot rely on and profit from unlawful behavior.

Their part of the proof is simple - they can prove that you signed a contract to receive service. They keep offering this service. It's then up to you to claim that you attempted to resign from this contract. How would you prove this? It is you who are claiming you attempted to close the contract.

The contract as you signed it might well contain a clause that explicitly says you have to perform arcane rituals to stop the subscription: now you have to have the bank analyze the law in your place of residence on whether the contract itself might be illegal. I do not live in the USA and don't have experience with the credit card dispute system, but I personally doubt that this level of legal analysis would be performed by the bank for your, free of charge even.

I have no doubt that you would win this in court, by the way.

> I do not live in the USA and don't have experience with the credit card dispute system

Obviously.

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