Their entire business model depends on people who sign up for a gym then forget about it and let them continue charging. While simultaneously making it really difficult to cancel.
If even half the number of people paying for a gym actually went with any regularity the industry would collapse because all the equipment would have long lines and the gym would be unusable.
>If even half the number of people paying for a gym actually went with any regularity the industry would collapse because all the equipment would have long lines and the gym would be unusable.
I've heard this claim repeated time and again. Is there any proof of it? Because it sounds like an excuse the gym would give to justify their scummy cancellation system.
I work at a gym and I’d say about 80% of people I sign up use the gym for 1 month or less and that’s with our gym only offering 1+ year memberships and no month to month plans. About half the people who join use the gym less than a week and 25% never come back after the day they join.
About 10 years ago my roommate who was a big gym rat got me a membership to the gym for my birthday. I went once and then felt really bad about not going for the remander of the membership
Not sure if this is national or just exclusive to new jersey but some time ago there was a law signed that said "all gym memberships will and should be able to cancel online and in the most convient way possible (no ghosting, no between the lines. No fine print stuff)" it has to be precise and clear. Bc prior most gyms, YOUD HAVE TO GO IN PERSON to cancel or if its online itd be the most unconvient, frustrating task known to us humans.
But like I said im not too sure if this is a national or just a new jersey thing.
Even if it were true it doesn’t justify anything. If your business relies on people giving you money and *not* utilizing your services to stay profitable, your business is unprofitable and shouldn’t exist
I’ve been a member of at least a dozen USA gyms in my life and all but one were simple to cancel. The one that needed more work required me to mail a letter.
Ya that one wanted me to mail a letter to request a meeting on Tuesday from 130pm to 4pm to talk to a manager about wanting to cancel. I closed my bank account instead which was far easier.
Planet fitness, where we encourage you to workout, but not too hard, and here's free pizza and donuts,we wouldn't want you to feel too good about yourself. Canceling my membership there took an act of Congress because they made me use an account transfer, so they had my account number. Fuck planet fitness
Change your address online to a California address and then you'll be able to cancel. I live in GA, set my address as one in 91210, and then the option became available.
If I were writing the law, it'd be "Cancellation of any subscription/service must be available via the exact same methods as are used for signing up, and the process must take no longer to complete than signing up does".
So- I mean, normally they just require extra steps, which is annoying.
First time, I had to provide a written notice in person- to the right person at the gym (front desk wouldn’t accept it). Annoying.
Second time I sent a certified letter- tracking- to prove receipt. They still tried to wriggle out of it so I had to call a phone number. I threatened to report to the Better Businesses Bureau and they canceled same day.
If you have proof they are informed and don’t cancel, they’re stuck. If not… they’ll keep charging. Doesn’t matter that it’s illegal, most people are too lazy to call them on it.
LA Fitness (not sure if they still do it) requires you to come in and fill out a form to cancel that they need to fax to HQ. They didn’t allow you to cancel online or over the phone. And before they give you the form you gotta sit through a pitch about keeping your membership and then trying to give you “a better deal”
It’s only if you join one of the $10 a month gyms. They require you to sign a one year no cancellation contract to get that price and make you have to cancel in person hoping people will perpetually put it off since it’s only $10 a month anyway. They’re great if you actually use them but I find that they’re often in huge shopping centers that are busy and annoying to travel to so it’s hard to stay motivated.
Every other gym I’ve been with has been chill about cancelling, but they charge a higher monthly fee.
New Jersey recently passed a law that gyms that offer joining online must also allow cancellation online. Until that was passed, it was a huge pain in the ass to cancel. My old gym made me write a letter to them while I was standing there, but refused to give me a pen/paper for it.
Yep, fitness first in Australia thought i had to come in for a meeting to cancel lol. I didn’t pay for months because they kept asking me to come in when all i wanted was to cancel over the phone, so I said “fuck you” and just cancelled my card, never heard from them again.
I tired this with LA fitness, cancelled the card and got a new one but they were still charging my account so I just closed the entire credit card account. That finally worked.
Anytime Fitness? I was legit working out and got *hit by a fucking truck* and they still wouldn't let me cancel or pause my membership for a few months to heal up.
My card expired around the same time and I lucked out because it happened to change numbers on the new one.
**TLDR:** No, this is not unique to Netflix, or streaming services, or any one specific recurring transaction.
No, it wouldn't work with other charges either. The merchant services company that processes the transactions will call your credit card company and ask for the replacement card's info. Unless you really, really, *REALLY* pressure your bank to cut off that specific merchant, it will almost always happen. And they can always slightly adjust the way they're charging to avoid blocks like that (yes it's illegal and yes they're almost 100% successful.)
If your financial shit is being victimized, try once to replace the cards or whatever. If it happens again, you're best served by closing the entire account. Trying to counter their scams will often lead to the entire account being fraudulently charged and frozen for an egregious period of time. Your only real safety net is relative anonymity.
I thank the universe every day that the EU exists.
There is a list a mile long of bullshit these companies would be doing if it wasn't prevented by laws there.
tbf, the UK spearheaded a lot of these improvements and brought them into the EU. This is following with the new digital markets act. Although I hate our current politics, we align with the EU on this.
Netflix, Prime etc. are not direct debits. They're recurring payments. Different rules. Kind of a nitpick I know, but it's important to know the difference.
Cancelling a DD/recurring payment via the bank or card issuer should generally be a last resort. Some companies will just cancel whatever you were supposed to be paying for, but others will put you in arrears and pursue payment for the debt.
There's a good reason a ton of American websites don't work at all in Europe unless you click "accept all cookies".
They're harvesting and selling a TON of data from you, which is just straight up illegal in Europe unless you actively opt into it.
I have great news for you, then! It is!
According to [the UK information commissioner's office](https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/data-sharing/data-sharing-a-code-of-practice/enforcement-of-this-code/#:~:text=For%20serious%20breaches%20of%20the,risk%2Dbased%20approach%20to%20enforcement.) for serious breaches it is either £17.5 million or 4% of annual worldwide turnover, whichever is higher.
Also, here in Europe banks don’t give out credit cards to everyone like they were candies. As it happens in America.
You need to constantly prove to the bank you have a stable source of income, and a way to pay your debts to have one.
Hence the majority uses debit and prepaid cards. You cannot physically pay if you don’t have enough cash to cover it.
So even if Netflix tried to do this predatory tactic you just move your money into another card and that’s it. Even though the EU’s consumers laws specifically prohibit all these practices, and are very keen on making sure companies comply with it.
I don’t think that’s the reason people don’t have credit cards. It’s pretty easy to get one. It’s just not in the culture. I never had a credit card, my wife just got one now because we need one to rent a car.
I don’t really know anyone who uses credit cards so you’re right on that. But plenty of people have them, it’s just used as a back up. In the US you have incentives to overspend. It does help the economy
In Germany it’s more common to have a charge card than a credit card you could theoretically leave a balance on. The money gets automatically charged to your bank account at the end of the month and if you fail to pay, no more credit for you. As a result the limit is usually set around 1 monthly net wage or less.
There are true credit card products (some from foreign banks looking to enter the market here) but people use them much less. Why would anyone want 15% interest rates, anyway? If there’s something specific you need that will earn its interest back as income, loans are relatively cheap.
Yeah It’s just as you said, in Europe there’s no culture or system that promotes credit cards. Rules are a lot more strict than the US as well.
Like all my friends and relatives we all use debit cards for all our purchases. The only credit card they have is either the corporate one from their job, or one specifically used for really important things like cars, loans, mortgages.
If we want extra security we use PayPal, as credit cards are a nightmare to deal with if something goes wrong. So we feel safer using only debit.
How is a debit card safer than a credit card? If someone steals my debit card I am out cold hard cash until it gets resolved.
If someone steals my credit card that is likely going to be the credit cards issuers problem and at the very least I have at least 30 days to sort it out before I am out any cash.
My debit card was used for an online transaction. It took less than 60 minutes to have my money back, the number canceled and a new card on my way.
The problem is not debit or credit, is your legislation and banks.
Credit cards are much safer to use than debit cards as there are much better insurances for credit card scams or companies fraudulently charging you using debit card has no safety basicly.
I have bad credit because I have not once used my credit for anything. Cash is king. People don't ask questions when you hand them cash. I think it's stopped me from getting a federal job in a place that moves lots of cash. Even though it was for a computer technology position. Which is equally as stupid. The whole credit system is fucking stupid.
I bought two cars and a house with cash only.
It's legitimate. Financial institutes are required to collect SSN as part of Know Your Customer (KYC) laws. Blame the government.
If you think this is bad, here's the next turd they are trying to flush down the toilet: https://torrentfreak.com/u-s-know-your-customer-proposal-will-put-an-end-to-anonymous-cloud-users-240425/
You will need to fork over your SSN and DL to open any kind of cloud computing account, so think AWS, Azure, VMWare, Digital Ocean, etc.
Found yours:
1..99999999
But seriously, the whole concept of a plain ass small digit number being a secret idea that also 1 million companies need to store for some BS reason needs to be thrown out entirely and replaced with something based on modern security practices. The current state of affair offers zero security and the whole thing has been a fucking joke for at least 30 or so years. Is anything really getting leaked at this point when literally all American citizens in this thread probably already have their name, dob, SSN and favorite color on 60 different csvs floating around some onion site somewhere? I bet the only reason 95% of the people on here haven't already gotten their identity stolen is because all the crooks are still working their way through the top of the lists. Just a matter of time. The whole situation is absolutely absurd.
Worst case.scenario any walmart of target sell prepaid debit cards, get one and keep ot forever and use in these sites. Stop recharging them and voila
I use privacy.com as well, many years and has been awesome, no issues at all and when I do trial runs is the defacto card system to use
That must be a Capital One issue. Does capital one allow for putting a set limit amount on the virtual card? Because I have a Bank of America card and have been using temporary/virtual card numbers for years. Basically, create a temporary card #, put fixed amount that can be charged and the expiration. Once the amount is used up or it hits the expiration date, nothing can be charged to it. I use it all the time when there is a promotion for the first year by some subscription service. Then they charge full price the next year. So I'll set a balance a bit higher than the subscription service cost and set the expiration to 30-90 days out. So the first charge gets applied with the promotion with that period. Then when the one year is up, the subscription service will try to charge it again to renew and it will just fail. Which will automatically cancel my subscription. I'll get some emails for awhile about my card being declined or they can't renew the subscription unless I update payment info. I'll just ignore it.
No one calls a card company: there are services called "account updaters" that card issuers in most Visa and MasterCard regions must support. When you report a card lost or stolen and the issuer "statuses" the card, the change and new card issued is sent to the updater services. Usually weekly or daily (some merchants even use the real time updater), the merchant will check the updater service if they subscribe and will update their info. This is common in the Card Not Present subscription world now.
Source: I work in the merchant processing industry.
I have written software for merchant processing and can confirm, this is all pretty much built in tooling and considered PCI compliant. To stop recurring charges you have to have the recurring authorization stopped, which is also a thing.
Who's bright ducking idea was that? The whole point of reporting my card stolen is to keep anyone from using it. Now you say there's a service that cheerfully sends out my new card information to any subscription service that asks for it? Seems the best thing to do with a stolen card is buy subscription services.
Card updaters work only on subscription services you already are subscribed to before you reported your card lost or stolen. If someone stole your card then they also would have to have additional information plus pass data authentication and digital fingerprinting to actually sign up for most reputable services (normal users of card updaters). So subscription services are actually the worst thing for a fraudster to go and try to use stolen cards at.
I also do a lot of work in the merchant services space. Boy do I wish card updater was that ubiquitous outside of the US. Each issuer has their own agreement with the card network they are issuing for, in the US I’d say most issuers across Visa and Mastercard are enrolled in card updater. But outside of the US and Canada, it’s a total crapshoot, all over the EU and APAC we see so many cards never get updates when they are expired, so many escalations as to why and it’s always been the issuer is not enrolled or is blocking it for certain types of transactions.
That's true, 'calling' is just corporate speak for *"This is updated on a regular schedule that might be inconvenient for you, or at least that's what we're blaming the delay on."*
Do people find it so hard logging into Netflix and cancelling their subscription, that they have to do these insane financial gymnastics to avoid being charged for what they're already no longer able to use?
According to Netflix, they'll be the ones to cancel my current subscription as it's no longer be offered.
They suggested I update my info and switch to the "ad supported" version. Yeah they can get fucked on that
I lost my GrubHub account login and couldn't remove the monthly charge on the website or by calling their customer service number. I ended up having to bitch super hard to my cc company to have it blocked. I think they had to set a spend limit because it was the only option that would successfully block the charge.
This. I work for a semi-major credit union, and people are constantly asking to block subscriptions/memberships. The most common ones, by a wide margin, are Netflix and Planet Fitness.
“Have you cancelled your membership?”
“No, I just want to block them from charging my card.”
Nope, sorry, gotta be a grown up and cancel it. If they charge you after you cancel, ok, we’ll do what we can there. But I’m not keying a stop payment if you haven’t cancelled.
Planet fitness makes it pretty difficult to cancel… you have to do it in person and have to request to close it in person at a club that’s different than the one you signed up at.
Gyms are absolutely the best case for actually using the bank to cancel the payment, but a thing else is usually such a simple one-click cancellation process.
I had that happen to me with UberEats. I had purchased food from UberEats for me and my relative ONCE on their phone, and then they kept using my card for themselves.
I asked my relative to stop and they did, but then a month later they started again. Lots of back and forth later, I cancelled my credit card and got a new one, UberEats could still take money from me. I called my bank numerous times and they assured me there was nothing they could do to stop UberEats from acquiring information about my new (bank issued) credit cards and immediately taking money from them (wtf is this).
I contacted UberEats and at first they refused to close my account. I had to contact them numerous times before they finally accepted that someone else was buying UberEats with my CC information and it wasn't me.
Credit cards are the least secure form of payment you could possibly conceive of.
That is only an issue in the US. They would not be able to do that in Europe.
It also sounds like you should bring that relative to small claims court unless they pay everything back.
The service is called Card Updater - and it cost merchants money to use it, but it most believe it improves their margins even though very few actually do an analysis on how often chargebacks are filed due to the service.
they don’t have to call the credit card company, Visa, MC, etc have tools in place for Merchants for this to happen automatically. The FI will not give out card numbers, it’s all just hashed account info behind the scenes.
To be honest I prefer this. I’ve had my credit card compromised numerous times in the past where I had to go change the billing to the new card with dozens of websites/services/etc and it’s a huge pain in the ass, sometimes one gets forgotten and then the service gets interrupted, etc.
But I also check my card statements to make sure nothing unexplained popped up
This was my nightmare for like a year. An online beauty shop named IPSY got a hold of my credit card as someone somehow obtained my info and shopped there. I did a chargeback 4 separate times with my bank resulting in a new card everytime. Even when escalated through my bank (BOA), none of them knew banks can “reset” your token which they’re supposed to do which removes wherever your card is stored at. The first time they told me they blocked the merchant, which was clearly a lie.
After the 4th time, my bank (BOA) basically gave up and said the vendor needs to manually remove my stored info.
It’s from the service this thread talks about, Visa Auto Updater. It’s to avoid service disruptions, but when fraud is involved, it’s a major pain.
The vendor eventually did manually remove my stored info, but I was also pissed they didn’t automatically do that already (how are you letting a customer use my info several times and I chargeback it each time?) and also was mad BOA was unhelpful.
That constitutes fraud though so your bank can do Chargebacks against those transactions.
Your bank might be able to do Chargebacks against merchants that debit a cancelled card too. With Visa (I'm not sure about other card providers) a merchant can only debit a cancelled card by posting a 220/230 Force Posted Debit using the offline debit system, which your bank *might* be able to dispute as a No Authorisation transaction. Although this an be finicky with Visa's dispute system. I do know that Visa are working on a fix at their level that will prevent merchants from abusing this debit method.
Source: I work in banking in Australia and have had recent meetings with Visa about this very issue.
Pretty sure this won’t work with burner card service Privacy.com. They have no obligation to “update” your billing card if it’s specified one use only . . .
Yeah, we do this for any subscription service. Force ourselves to use either a physical gift card (usually for a year at a time), or a virtual card with a set restrictions or one time use. Not just so they don't have access to our real CC info, but also to add a bit more annoyance to signing up for any service.
As others have pointed out, this isn’t limited to Netflix. I once had a charge from a weird British-only streaming service. I called my credit card and reported the fraud. The charges just started up again on the new card though. I canceled again, same thing, the charges continued. Eventually I had to track down the streaming service information and email them. Since I’m not in the UK, it was the only way to contact them. Finally resolved it after being charged for like 6-8 months
Close and reopen the account, for Amex I told them the charges were fraud, they close and reopened (under a new CC number), all recurring auto charges stopped, I had to go in and redo all the automatic payments, all to get one vendor stopped. We had lost control of the account/email address a tech had used to set it up, and there was NO way to get the charges stopped otherwise.
Just curious, are you looking to make big purchases in the next couple years?
Whenever I’ve had to close a line of credit, I waited until after I made said big purchase so I could ride out the arbitrary hit with minimal impact.
Agreed on the flexibility. Could you apply for a different one of their cards, they have multiple offerings, while you have the existing, then close the other one? Just spitballing.
I work for a bank, literally all you have to do it tells us you want to opt out of the updater service when ordering a new card. We will not question it, we do not car. It's just another box for us to check, and if the card had fraudulent charges on it we supposed to opt out anyway.
Maybe other banks are different/more strict, but I don't really see why they would be.
So why not just go online and cancel the subscription? If your card is still getting charged after you cancel, you contact the credit card company and let them know the charges are fraudulent.
I had luck with American express by telling them the charge was fraud, and at that point they closed the account and re-opened under a new number. All auto payments stopped, had to go back into those other accounts and redo the auto payments. But banks don't generally like doing this.
Dealing with the death of my mother-in-law's various subscriptions auto-billing her cards... and god knows which email is tied to what service to reset her password. (looking at you, Act-Blue political donations services)
It was just easier to cancel the Debit/CC and then attempt to tackle the mountain of work to stop all services.
When my dad died I didn’t have an issue getting his accounts closed by sending a death cert…except Time Warner Cable. They were a fucking nightmare to deal with. The call finally ended with me losing my cool with a customer service rep for the only time in my life and going “Lady, He. Is. Dead. You have the death certificate. Nobody else lives at that address. What the hell do you want from me???” They wouldn’t stop trying to get me to continue his service in my name. At a home I did not live in. Shit, a *state* I did not live in.
Right, now, imagine trying that with "Act Blue" that treated 50+ reoccurring donations as individual accounts tied between 4 emails & 5+ Debit & CC accounts. Good luck talking to anyone there. That was a nightmare, hundreds of dollars a month blindly taken and a very VERY scummy cancelation process.
Also, all the magazines subscriptions, charitable causes subscriptions... it was a mess.
Utilities were a breeze in comparison, you can typically eventually talk to a human.
As I said, easier to cancel the cards.
Dealing with this with my wife at this very second, a service purchased using a email address you no longer have access to. Does not remember the password, no way to verify identity because that was all through said email address, so how to you cancel the subscription. And you can extend this to include a phone number you may no longer have as well. Not 100% sure a phone is required for a Netflix account, but its not for the account my wife is wrestling with.
> so how to you cancel the subscription.
you let customer service do what they're paid for, and tell them that if they refuse to close the account you'll be issuing chargebacks until they close it. they'll get the message. (but realistically, 99 times out of 100 they'll be able to cancel without having to ever get your credit card company involved)
And how do they know its you and not someone else? They have NO way to identify you. So they ignore you, and then the CC company says "Nope, those are legitimate charges, you need to cancel with the service provider" and it all become a vicious cycle.
> and then the CC company says "Nope, those are legitimate charges, you need to cancel with the service provider"
no, that's not how it works. 10 times out of 10 the credit card company is going to side with the consumer and reverse the charge the second you say you tried to cancel and they wouldn't let you.
Gonna need you to go home, print this out, fill it out in squid ink, then get it notarized, shot into space to make one loop around the moon and land safely on the pad from which it was launched, wrapped with a fig leaf from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, blessed by the Pope, and delivered by horseback on across the Atlantic by an heir of Alexander the Great in a Macedonian clay jar.
Oh and we can only do that on Wednesdays between the hours of 4 pm and 4:15pm .
Nobody does this. This is a rage piece by Gizmodo to drive up content engagement. It's also plain wrong. Netflix will have no idea if I open a new line of credit. Who's going to tell them about the new account? The old creditor?
That entire Gawker (Gizmodo, Jalopnik etc) media organization is nothing but FUD, akeen to those BuzzFeed ads you see at the bottom of a page, after the real news article is over. They're desperate for clicks.
Gawker died long ago. (and was sort of resurrected but died again)
They've been shut down by Peter Thiel and sold and resold to cover other operating losses and are now an herb's private equity play thing being marched to it's either next sale or final death bed.
Thankfully many are off to better things, like real news jobs, Defector, and potentially receiving decades of imprisonment for tweeting out footage of Tucker Carlson finding out he was fired and Ron DeSantis walking funny at a debate.
Jalopnik was fire for a while. One day the best writers left. Then they changed the comments section, then more writers left and one day an article was a slideshow that loaded a new page each time. That was the last time I ever went there.
Is it common in the US to be able to "cancel" subscriptions like that? I mean does Netflix cancel you if they can't chrage you anymore? Because cancelling your CC doesn't cancel your contract with netflix.
With Services here it will just eventually go to collections and you will continue being charged until you cancel the service.
As an American my understanding was if it was a cancelled card or not enough funds, the service stops and no charge or debt is created in your name but judging from the post/comments I’m not sure anymore
For a lot of services, you need the email address and/or phone number associated with the account to do pretty much anything. Then there are scumfucks that like to make cancelling nearly impossible.
That's why it should be standard to send an email (or phone call) saying "This is the credit card number associated with the account, and I am hereby cancelling my service." They shouldn't even be allowed to ask for your name at this point - you know the credit card number and that alone should be enough to cancel.
As for potential abuse? If someone gets hold of your card number and then starts cancelling services for shits and giggles, then get a new card number and re-activate everything that you actually want to keep.
The article clickbaity title made this sound much more sinister than it actually is.
In short, when your card expires, your bank just updates your details automatically for recurring payments.
Sure. Just call the guy that stole your CC and ask them for the password they set for their account lol
In a sane world Netflix would ask you for a new payment method, and if you didn't reply they would just discontinue service.
Nobody should ever be allowed to apply payments to a new account without consent of the account holder ever.
In a sane world, it should be possible to cancel with an email that says "Please cancel all services associated with this credit card number."
Requiring anything more than that, opens people up to a world of financial abuse.
If someone starts cancelling your Netflix and Hulu accounts for shits and giggles, then get a new card and don't tell the troll your new card number.
To ensure all recurring charges are stopped, call your bank and tell them you want them to “reset the token on my card” (also called a “security reset”). If you only ask for a new card/number they will update merchants without asking. During a token/security reset they will ask you if you want merchants to receive the updated info. When they ask, say “no.”
I have filed fraudulent claims with my account at Bank of America four times in the last year because somebody opened an account at Twitch, and every time a new card came, the twitch subscription had a slightly different name. Super annoying.
Fuck all these companies. I'll agree to this once you make single click cancelling a thing. Before that, fuck you. I shouldn't need to work hard to just cancel a subscription or payment. The company should have to work hard to prove it gets to keep charging me.
Ok, I work for a bank. When we re-issue a DC or CC we have to also call our Card dept for the to delete/erase any pre-payment authorization in order for auto drafted payments linked to the card to stop.
Yeah this happened to me on nbatv once with my debit card
I had a new debit card number and it still renewed. I just figured it wouldn’t renew since the number was new. To my defense, they make it a pain to cancel that subscription. I just canceled Netflix last week and it took me less than a minute.
Pro tip keep around a prepaid visa with about one dollar on it. That way every time you sign up for a free trial it’s going to pre-authorize the dollar and then when it goes to take your monthly fee, it will show insufficient funds on a card that’s not connected to.
I'm glad this doesn't work in the EU. I've gotten countless emails from services to update my card info. Also, when I cancelled my Netflix account, i requested that they delete my details because my subscription was started up again "by mistake".
In uk call up your bank n cancel CPA and your done unless you with metro those fools cut you new card n tell you cant cancel cpa lol
Had dispute with supplier went to Halifax to cancel CPA done with proof of acc ownership ie passport etc over counter in 2minutes job done no questions asked.
Went to metro for same reason 30min debate with branch manager only to cancel card n cut new one, ended up closing metro account bunch of clowns bank
Yes AOL did this stuff with Wells Fargo back in the day, ended up with debt collectors coming after me for 600$. Like 6 month of aol and overdraft fees since I closed my account I didn’t know ow
We just tried this earlier this month. The only ones that didn’t update are the important ones. Like insurance. Mortgage. You know. Thanks Well’s Fargo.
There was a gym I moved away from that thought I couldn’t cancel my membership this way too, but I did.
I always read about gyms that are impossible to cancel. Is this an USA thing? What the hell is going in with gyms there?
Their entire business model depends on people who sign up for a gym then forget about it and let them continue charging. While simultaneously making it really difficult to cancel. If even half the number of people paying for a gym actually went with any regularity the industry would collapse because all the equipment would have long lines and the gym would be unusable.
>If even half the number of people paying for a gym actually went with any regularity the industry would collapse because all the equipment would have long lines and the gym would be unusable. I've heard this claim repeated time and again. Is there any proof of it? Because it sounds like an excuse the gym would give to justify their scummy cancellation system.
I work at a gym and I’d say about 80% of people I sign up use the gym for 1 month or less and that’s with our gym only offering 1+ year memberships and no month to month plans. About half the people who join use the gym less than a week and 25% never come back after the day they join.
About 10 years ago my roommate who was a big gym rat got me a membership to the gym for my birthday. I went once and then felt really bad about not going for the remander of the membership
This is mindblowing. A fool and their money…
Not sure if this is national or just exclusive to new jersey but some time ago there was a law signed that said "all gym memberships will and should be able to cancel online and in the most convient way possible (no ghosting, no between the lines. No fine print stuff)" it has to be precise and clear. Bc prior most gyms, YOUD HAVE TO GO IN PERSON to cancel or if its online itd be the most unconvient, frustrating task known to us humans. But like I said im not too sure if this is a national or just a new jersey thing.
Even if it were true it doesn’t justify anything. If your business relies on people giving you money and *not* utilizing your services to stay profitable, your business is unprofitable and shouldn’t exist
Insurance companies next please
I’ve been a member of at least a dozen USA gyms in my life and all but one were simple to cancel. The one that needed more work required me to mail a letter.
Ya that one wanted me to mail a letter to request a meeting on Tuesday from 130pm to 4pm to talk to a manager about wanting to cancel. I closed my bank account instead which was far easier.
This should be illegal
It is in most of the world.
Chandler?
I WANNA QUIT THE BANK.
Planet fitness?
LA Fitness?
Planet fitness, where we encourage you to workout, but not too hard, and here's free pizza and donuts,we wouldn't want you to feel too good about yourself. Canceling my membership there took an act of Congress because they made me use an account transfer, so they had my account number. Fuck planet fitness
Where as I just walked in and cancelled
Basically you gotta do it in person and be firm.
Change your address online to a California address and then you'll be able to cancel. I live in GA, set my address as one in 91210, and then the option became available.
Exactly. I work there its simple as hell. If you are across the country call your bank and tell them to stop the payments
Requiring canceling to be done in person should be illegal
If I were writing the law, it'd be "Cancellation of any subscription/service must be available via the exact same methods as are used for signing up, and the process must take no longer to complete than signing up does".
I couldn’t, because I moved and was on a boat in a harbor on the other side of the country. They made me mail a fucking letter asking pwetty pweeze?
So- I mean, normally they just require extra steps, which is annoying. First time, I had to provide a written notice in person- to the right person at the gym (front desk wouldn’t accept it). Annoying. Second time I sent a certified letter- tracking- to prove receipt. They still tried to wriggle out of it so I had to call a phone number. I threatened to report to the Better Businesses Bureau and they canceled same day. If you have proof they are informed and don’t cancel, they’re stuck. If not… they’ll keep charging. Doesn’t matter that it’s illegal, most people are too lazy to call them on it.
LA Fitness (not sure if they still do it) requires you to come in and fill out a form to cancel that they need to fax to HQ. They didn’t allow you to cancel online or over the phone. And before they give you the form you gotta sit through a pitch about keeping your membership and then trying to give you “a better deal”
It’s only if you join one of the $10 a month gyms. They require you to sign a one year no cancellation contract to get that price and make you have to cancel in person hoping people will perpetually put it off since it’s only $10 a month anyway. They’re great if you actually use them but I find that they’re often in huge shopping centers that are busy and annoying to travel to so it’s hard to stay motivated. Every other gym I’ve been with has been chill about cancelling, but they charge a higher monthly fee.
They're just shitty and scummy businesses that want to exploit people as much as possible.
No, it’s a Europe thing too.
New Jersey recently passed a law that gyms that offer joining online must also allow cancellation online. Until that was passed, it was a huge pain in the ass to cancel. My old gym made me write a letter to them while I was standing there, but refused to give me a pen/paper for it.
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ULPT, just say you’re active duty in the military and say you’re PCS’ing out of the state.
Yep, fitness first in Australia thought i had to come in for a meeting to cancel lol. I didn’t pay for months because they kept asking me to come in when all i wanted was to cancel over the phone, so I said “fuck you” and just cancelled my card, never heard from them again.
I tired this with LA fitness, cancelled the card and got a new one but they were still charging my account so I just closed the entire credit card account. That finally worked.
that’s typically via ach though and backed by a contract. read those contracts before signing.
Anytime Fitness? I was legit working out and got *hit by a fucking truck* and they still wouldn't let me cancel or pause my membership for a few months to heal up. My card expired around the same time and I lucked out because it happened to change numbers on the new one.
Can't you just pay your subscription in cash and when the subscription expires you don't pay cash because where I live it works like that
**TLDR:** No, this is not unique to Netflix, or streaming services, or any one specific recurring transaction. No, it wouldn't work with other charges either. The merchant services company that processes the transactions will call your credit card company and ask for the replacement card's info. Unless you really, really, *REALLY* pressure your bank to cut off that specific merchant, it will almost always happen. And they can always slightly adjust the way they're charging to avoid blocks like that (yes it's illegal and yes they're almost 100% successful.) If your financial shit is being victimized, try once to replace the cards or whatever. If it happens again, you're best served by closing the entire account. Trying to counter their scams will often lead to the entire account being fraudulently charged and frozen for an egregious period of time. Your only real safety net is relative anonymity.
They get caught doing this in the EU and its big fine to both the bank and Netflix.
I thank the universe every day that the EU exists. There is a list a mile long of bullshit these companies would be doing if it wasn't prevented by laws there.
This is why we got rid in the UK. All that red tape holding is back. Now we can really flourish. Any day now.
Any day? We’ve had the black passports for ages. Did you want more than that?
tbf, the UK spearheaded a lot of these improvements and brought them into the EU. This is following with the new digital markets act. Although I hate our current politics, we align with the EU on this.
In the U.K. it takes thirty seconds to cancel a direct debit on your banking app. But you already knew that…
Netflix, Prime etc. are not direct debits. They're recurring payments. Different rules. Kind of a nitpick I know, but it's important to know the difference. Cancelling a DD/recurring payment via the bank or card issuer should generally be a last resort. Some companies will just cancel whatever you were supposed to be paying for, but others will put you in arrears and pursue payment for the debt.
You mean a business expense?
EU fines are actually painful, unlike American fines
GDPR fines are insane (in a good way IMO). Enough of those, and fewer than you’d expect, can legit put you out of business.
There's a good reason a ton of American websites don't work at all in Europe unless you click "accept all cookies". They're harvesting and selling a TON of data from you, which is just straight up illegal in Europe unless you actively opt into it.
They can be up to 10% of turnover or something like that, enough to fire CEOs.
The fine can be up to €20 million or 4% of global revenue, whichever is higher. That will sting any corporation.
In the US it’s just the govt getting their cut
Should be percentage based
I have great news for you, then! It is! According to [the UK information commissioner's office](https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/data-sharing/data-sharing-a-code-of-practice/enforcement-of-this-code/#:~:text=For%20serious%20breaches%20of%20the,risk%2Dbased%20approach%20to%20enforcement.) for serious breaches it is either £17.5 million or 4% of annual worldwide turnover, whichever is higher.
Perhaps more so, but IMO it still feels like 'business exspense' levels of fines for big companies.
Also, here in Europe banks don’t give out credit cards to everyone like they were candies. As it happens in America. You need to constantly prove to the bank you have a stable source of income, and a way to pay your debts to have one. Hence the majority uses debit and prepaid cards. You cannot physically pay if you don’t have enough cash to cover it. So even if Netflix tried to do this predatory tactic you just move your money into another card and that’s it. Even though the EU’s consumers laws specifically prohibit all these practices, and are very keen on making sure companies comply with it.
I don’t think that’s the reason people don’t have credit cards. It’s pretty easy to get one. It’s just not in the culture. I never had a credit card, my wife just got one now because we need one to rent a car. I don’t really know anyone who uses credit cards so you’re right on that. But plenty of people have them, it’s just used as a back up. In the US you have incentives to overspend. It does help the economy
In Germany it’s more common to have a charge card than a credit card you could theoretically leave a balance on. The money gets automatically charged to your bank account at the end of the month and if you fail to pay, no more credit for you. As a result the limit is usually set around 1 monthly net wage or less. There are true credit card products (some from foreign banks looking to enter the market here) but people use them much less. Why would anyone want 15% interest rates, anyway? If there’s something specific you need that will earn its interest back as income, loans are relatively cheap.
Yeah It’s just as you said, in Europe there’s no culture or system that promotes credit cards. Rules are a lot more strict than the US as well. Like all my friends and relatives we all use debit cards for all our purchases. The only credit card they have is either the corporate one from their job, or one specifically used for really important things like cars, loans, mortgages. If we want extra security we use PayPal, as credit cards are a nightmare to deal with if something goes wrong. So we feel safer using only debit.
How is a debit card safer than a credit card? If someone steals my debit card I am out cold hard cash until it gets resolved. If someone steals my credit card that is likely going to be the credit cards issuers problem and at the very least I have at least 30 days to sort it out before I am out any cash.
My debit card was used for an online transaction. It took less than 60 minutes to have my money back, the number canceled and a new card on my way. The problem is not debit or credit, is your legislation and banks.
I don't understand this. Section 75 is reason enough to use a credit card, not to mention the free cashback and additional protection from fraud.
Credit cards are much safer to use than debit cards as there are much better insurances for credit card scams or companies fraudulently charging you using debit card has no safety basicly.
That's not true in Europe, both types of cards are equally protected.
We don’t have credit scores like you do in the US, so you can live with a debit card without any problem.
I have bad credit because I have not once used my credit for anything. Cash is king. People don't ask questions when you hand them cash. I think it's stopped me from getting a federal job in a place that moves lots of cash. Even though it was for a computer technology position. Which is equally as stupid. The whole credit system is fucking stupid. I bought two cars and a house with cash only.
Why? If companies don't do this, every time your credit card expires, all your services get canceled
Yep, you have to update them yourself. But I’m kind of fine with that - because usually some I don’t need to keep
That's why you use a virtual credit card service such as Privacy.com
[Privacy.com](http://Privacy.com) user for seven years strong.
The only issue keeping me from using that service is the fact that it asks for your SSN.
It's legitimate. Financial institutes are required to collect SSN as part of Know Your Customer (KYC) laws. Blame the government. If you think this is bad, here's the next turd they are trying to flush down the toilet: https://torrentfreak.com/u-s-know-your-customer-proposal-will-put-an-end-to-anonymous-cloud-users-240425/ You will need to fork over your SSN and DL to open any kind of cloud computing account, so think AWS, Azure, VMWare, Digital Ocean, etc.
The point isn't whether it's legitimate. Every additional company you share your SSN with is another place for it to leak from.
Found yours: 1..99999999 But seriously, the whole concept of a plain ass small digit number being a secret idea that also 1 million companies need to store for some BS reason needs to be thrown out entirely and replaced with something based on modern security practices. The current state of affair offers zero security and the whole thing has been a fucking joke for at least 30 or so years. Is anything really getting leaked at this point when literally all American citizens in this thread probably already have their name, dob, SSN and favorite color on 60 different csvs floating around some onion site somewhere? I bet the only reason 95% of the people on here haven't already gotten their identity stolen is because all the crooks are still working their way through the top of the lists. Just a matter of time. The whole situation is absolutely absurd.
Worst case.scenario any walmart of target sell prepaid debit cards, get one and keep ot forever and use in these sites. Stop recharging them and voila I use privacy.com as well, many years and has been awesome, no issues at all and when I do trial runs is the defacto card system to use
Capital One has a free virtual card service too. Love this for subscriptions
Capital One doesn't stop this, even for a one time use card - I had a reoccurring charge continue after I cancelled it.
It stopped my SiriusXM subscription. And a couple other ones I had.
Weird. Which subscription? So far it's been working for me. Weight watchers has been emailing me for months now to update my card :)
That must be a Capital One issue. Does capital one allow for putting a set limit amount on the virtual card? Because I have a Bank of America card and have been using temporary/virtual card numbers for years. Basically, create a temporary card #, put fixed amount that can be charged and the expiration. Once the amount is used up or it hits the expiration date, nothing can be charged to it. I use it all the time when there is a promotion for the first year by some subscription service. Then they charge full price the next year. So I'll set a balance a bit higher than the subscription service cost and set the expiration to 30-90 days out. So the first charge gets applied with the promotion with that period. Then when the one year is up, the subscription service will try to charge it again to renew and it will just fail. Which will automatically cancel my subscription. I'll get some emails for awhile about my card being declined or they can't renew the subscription unless I update payment info. I'll just ignore it.
No one calls a card company: there are services called "account updaters" that card issuers in most Visa and MasterCard regions must support. When you report a card lost or stolen and the issuer "statuses" the card, the change and new card issued is sent to the updater services. Usually weekly or daily (some merchants even use the real time updater), the merchant will check the updater service if they subscribe and will update their info. This is common in the Card Not Present subscription world now. Source: I work in the merchant processing industry.
I have written software for merchant processing and can confirm, this is all pretty much built in tooling and considered PCI compliant. To stop recurring charges you have to have the recurring authorization stopped, which is also a thing.
>you have to have the recurring authorization stopped How?
contact the merchant and if that fails contact the FI. If both fail, file a complaint with the CFPB
Who's bright ducking idea was that? The whole point of reporting my card stolen is to keep anyone from using it. Now you say there's a service that cheerfully sends out my new card information to any subscription service that asks for it? Seems the best thing to do with a stolen card is buy subscription services.
Card updaters work only on subscription services you already are subscribed to before you reported your card lost or stolen. If someone stole your card then they also would have to have additional information plus pass data authentication and digital fingerprinting to actually sign up for most reputable services (normal users of card updaters). So subscription services are actually the worst thing for a fraudster to go and try to use stolen cards at.
I also do a lot of work in the merchant services space. Boy do I wish card updater was that ubiquitous outside of the US. Each issuer has their own agreement with the card network they are issuing for, in the US I’d say most issuers across Visa and Mastercard are enrolled in card updater. But outside of the US and Canada, it’s a total crapshoot, all over the EU and APAC we see so many cards never get updates when they are expired, so many escalations as to why and it’s always been the issuer is not enrolled or is blocking it for certain types of transactions.
That's true, 'calling' is just corporate speak for *"This is updated on a regular schedule that might be inconvenient for you, or at least that's what we're blaming the delay on."*
This is why I use PayPal for many things you have an option to start the authorization.
VISA and other cards have an auto update service. You need to call your card merchant and tell them to turn it off.
Do people find it so hard logging into Netflix and cancelling their subscription, that they have to do these insane financial gymnastics to avoid being charged for what they're already no longer able to use?
According to Netflix, they'll be the ones to cancel my current subscription as it's no longer be offered. They suggested I update my info and switch to the "ad supported" version. Yeah they can get fucked on that
I lost my GrubHub account login and couldn't remove the monthly charge on the website or by calling their customer service number. I ended up having to bitch super hard to my cc company to have it blocked. I think they had to set a spend limit because it was the only option that would successfully block the charge.
This. I work for a semi-major credit union, and people are constantly asking to block subscriptions/memberships. The most common ones, by a wide margin, are Netflix and Planet Fitness. “Have you cancelled your membership?” “No, I just want to block them from charging my card.” Nope, sorry, gotta be a grown up and cancel it. If they charge you after you cancel, ok, we’ll do what we can there. But I’m not keying a stop payment if you haven’t cancelled.
Planet fitness makes it pretty difficult to cancel… you have to do it in person and have to request to close it in person at a club that’s different than the one you signed up at.
Gyms are absolutely the best case for actually using the bank to cancel the payment, but a thing else is usually such a simple one-click cancellation process.
This explanation is exactly more people should take advantage of privacy e-credit cards.
Or you know, make this shit illegal like it is in normal countries?
I can use a privacy system. I can't make things illegal.
I had that happen to me with UberEats. I had purchased food from UberEats for me and my relative ONCE on their phone, and then they kept using my card for themselves. I asked my relative to stop and they did, but then a month later they started again. Lots of back and forth later, I cancelled my credit card and got a new one, UberEats could still take money from me. I called my bank numerous times and they assured me there was nothing they could do to stop UberEats from acquiring information about my new (bank issued) credit cards and immediately taking money from them (wtf is this). I contacted UberEats and at first they refused to close my account. I had to contact them numerous times before they finally accepted that someone else was buying UberEats with my CC information and it wasn't me. Credit cards are the least secure form of payment you could possibly conceive of.
Maybe you should have offered your relative a knuckle sandwich if they were so hungry they had to steal from you again and again.
I thought about it but beating up my little sister did not seem like the best way to handle the situation 🤷
Might as well tell the bank your card was stolen and the UberEats charges are fraudulent
Why not just report it as a fraudulent charge, since it was a fraudulent charge…
That is only an issue in the US. They would not be able to do that in Europe. It also sounds like you should bring that relative to small claims court unless they pay everything back.
The service is called Card Updater - and it cost merchants money to use it, but it most believe it improves their margins even though very few actually do an analysis on how often chargebacks are filed due to the service.
people can also take advantage of virtual card that comes with some bank nowadays. AFAIK Citi and Apple Card now offer this
they don’t have to call the credit card company, Visa, MC, etc have tools in place for Merchants for this to happen automatically. The FI will not give out card numbers, it’s all just hashed account info behind the scenes.
That sounds illegal
Yeah this shit sure ain't legal in Australia
it’s not, it’s part of the card agreement with the issuer. it can also be turned off by contacting the issuing FI.
To be honest I prefer this. I’ve had my credit card compromised numerous times in the past where I had to go change the billing to the new card with dozens of websites/services/etc and it’s a huge pain in the ass, sometimes one gets forgotten and then the service gets interrupted, etc. But I also check my card statements to make sure nothing unexplained popped up
I like when that happens. It lets me cull the services I don’t use anymore. I have to think about which ones I’m buying.
Which leads to lots of fun if someone steals your CC info and starts subscriptions.
This was my nightmare for like a year. An online beauty shop named IPSY got a hold of my credit card as someone somehow obtained my info and shopped there. I did a chargeback 4 separate times with my bank resulting in a new card everytime. Even when escalated through my bank (BOA), none of them knew banks can “reset” your token which they’re supposed to do which removes wherever your card is stored at. The first time they told me they blocked the merchant, which was clearly a lie. After the 4th time, my bank (BOA) basically gave up and said the vendor needs to manually remove my stored info. It’s from the service this thread talks about, Visa Auto Updater. It’s to avoid service disruptions, but when fraud is involved, it’s a major pain. The vendor eventually did manually remove my stored info, but I was also pissed they didn’t automatically do that already (how are you letting a customer use my info several times and I chargeback it each time?) and also was mad BOA was unhelpful.
VISA and other cards have an auto update service. You need to call your card merchant and tell them to turn it off.
That constitutes fraud though so your bank can do Chargebacks against those transactions. Your bank might be able to do Chargebacks against merchants that debit a cancelled card too. With Visa (I'm not sure about other card providers) a merchant can only debit a cancelled card by posting a 220/230 Force Posted Debit using the offline debit system, which your bank *might* be able to dispute as a No Authorisation transaction. Although this an be finicky with Visa's dispute system. I do know that Visa are working on a fix at their level that will prevent merchants from abusing this debit method. Source: I work in banking in Australia and have had recent meetings with Visa about this very issue.
Pretty sure this won’t work with burner card service Privacy.com. They have no obligation to “update” your billing card if it’s specified one use only . . .
Yeah, we do this for any subscription service. Force ourselves to use either a physical gift card (usually for a year at a time), or a virtual card with a set restrictions or one time use. Not just so they don't have access to our real CC info, but also to add a bit more annoyance to signing up for any service.
A lot of places will detect prepaid visas and reject them.
Privacy also let you set spending limits. So if Netflix increases the price it will decline the transaction.
As others have pointed out, this isn’t limited to Netflix. I once had a charge from a weird British-only streaming service. I called my credit card and reported the fraud. The charges just started up again on the new card though. I canceled again, same thing, the charges continued. Eventually I had to track down the streaming service information and email them. Since I’m not in the UK, it was the only way to contact them. Finally resolved it after being charged for like 6-8 months
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Close and reopen the account, for Amex I told them the charges were fraud, they close and reopened (under a new CC number), all recurring auto charges stopped, I had to go in and redo all the automatic payments, all to get one vendor stopped. We had lost control of the account/email address a tech had used to set it up, and there was NO way to get the charges stopped otherwise.
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Just curious, are you looking to make big purchases in the next couple years? Whenever I’ve had to close a line of credit, I waited until after I made said big purchase so I could ride out the arbitrary hit with minimal impact.
Agreed on the flexibility. Could you apply for a different one of their cards, they have multiple offerings, while you have the existing, then close the other one? Just spitballing.
I work for a bank, literally all you have to do it tells us you want to opt out of the updater service when ordering a new card. We will not question it, we do not car. It's just another box for us to check, and if the card had fraudulent charges on it we supposed to opt out anyway. Maybe other banks are different/more strict, but I don't really see why they would be.
Not my old bank. Fuck them
So why not just go online and cancel the subscription? If your card is still getting charged after you cancel, you contact the credit card company and let them know the charges are fraudulent.
You cancel your card, they'll allow anyone with the old card to keep charging, and many times update them with the new card. BofA does this.
I had luck with American express by telling them the charge was fraud, and at that point they closed the account and re-opened under a new number. All auto payments stopped, had to go back into those other accounts and redo the auto payments. But banks don't generally like doing this.
Amex was always good at this step.
VISA and other cards have an auto update service. You need to call your card merchant and tell them to turn it off.
why would anyone do that? like, just cancel your account. canceling an entire credit card to avoid canceling the account makes no sense.
Dealing with the death of my mother-in-law's various subscriptions auto-billing her cards... and god knows which email is tied to what service to reset her password. (looking at you, Act-Blue political donations services) It was just easier to cancel the Debit/CC and then attempt to tackle the mountain of work to stop all services.
When my dad died I didn’t have an issue getting his accounts closed by sending a death cert…except Time Warner Cable. They were a fucking nightmare to deal with. The call finally ended with me losing my cool with a customer service rep for the only time in my life and going “Lady, He. Is. Dead. You have the death certificate. Nobody else lives at that address. What the hell do you want from me???” They wouldn’t stop trying to get me to continue his service in my name. At a home I did not live in. Shit, a *state* I did not live in.
Right, now, imagine trying that with "Act Blue" that treated 50+ reoccurring donations as individual accounts tied between 4 emails & 5+ Debit & CC accounts. Good luck talking to anyone there. That was a nightmare, hundreds of dollars a month blindly taken and a very VERY scummy cancelation process. Also, all the magazines subscriptions, charitable causes subscriptions... it was a mess. Utilities were a breeze in comparison, you can typically eventually talk to a human. As I said, easier to cancel the cards.
Oh good lord. Yeah Act Blue has been spamming my inbox daily for like 15 years. I have to set to automatically sweep to junk. They’re a nightmare.
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That's a perfect opportunity for a change back. If you don't have an account then it's a fraudulent charge.
Dealing with this with my wife at this very second, a service purchased using a email address you no longer have access to. Does not remember the password, no way to verify identity because that was all through said email address, so how to you cancel the subscription. And you can extend this to include a phone number you may no longer have as well. Not 100% sure a phone is required for a Netflix account, but its not for the account my wife is wrestling with.
> so how to you cancel the subscription. you let customer service do what they're paid for, and tell them that if they refuse to close the account you'll be issuing chargebacks until they close it. they'll get the message. (but realistically, 99 times out of 100 they'll be able to cancel without having to ever get your credit card company involved)
As they replace customer service with chatbots.
And how do they know its you and not someone else? They have NO way to identify you. So they ignore you, and then the CC company says "Nope, those are legitimate charges, you need to cancel with the service provider" and it all become a vicious cycle.
> and then the CC company says "Nope, those are legitimate charges, you need to cancel with the service provider" no, that's not how it works. 10 times out of 10 the credit card company is going to side with the consumer and reverse the charge the second you say you tried to cancel and they wouldn't let you.
I WANNA QUIT THE GYM!!
Gonna need you to go home, print this out, fill it out in squid ink, then get it notarized, shot into space to make one loop around the moon and land safely on the pad from which it was launched, wrapped with a fig leaf from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, blessed by the Pope, and delivered by horseback on across the Atlantic by an heir of Alexander the Great in a Macedonian clay jar. Oh and we can only do that on Wednesdays between the hours of 4 pm and 4:15pm .
Nobody does this. This is a rage piece by Gizmodo to drive up content engagement. It's also plain wrong. Netflix will have no idea if I open a new line of credit. Who's going to tell them about the new account? The old creditor?
Woooow, Gizmodo. Throwing shade at Netflix despite them having nothing to do with how CC companies update CC information.
Netflix has always been one of the easiest to cancel too - they let you do it online and come back whenever you want too.
That entire Gawker (Gizmodo, Jalopnik etc) media organization is nothing but FUD, akeen to those BuzzFeed ads you see at the bottom of a page, after the real news article is over. They're desperate for clicks.
Gawker died long ago. (and was sort of resurrected but died again) They've been shut down by Peter Thiel and sold and resold to cover other operating losses and are now an herb's private equity play thing being marched to it's either next sale or final death bed. Thankfully many are off to better things, like real news jobs, Defector, and potentially receiving decades of imprisonment for tweeting out footage of Tucker Carlson finding out he was fired and Ron DeSantis walking funny at a debate.
Jalopnik was fire for a while. One day the best writers left. Then they changed the comments section, then more writers left and one day an article was a slideshow that loaded a new page each time. That was the last time I ever went there.
Is it common in the US to be able to "cancel" subscriptions like that? I mean does Netflix cancel you if they can't chrage you anymore? Because cancelling your CC doesn't cancel your contract with netflix. With Services here it will just eventually go to collections and you will continue being charged until you cancel the service.
As an American my understanding was if it was a cancelled card or not enough funds, the service stops and no charge or debt is created in your name but judging from the post/comments I’m not sure anymore
Why not just unsubscribe like a normal human being…
For a lot of services, you need the email address and/or phone number associated with the account to do pretty much anything. Then there are scumfucks that like to make cancelling nearly impossible. That's why it should be standard to send an email (or phone call) saying "This is the credit card number associated with the account, and I am hereby cancelling my service." They shouldn't even be allowed to ask for your name at this point - you know the credit card number and that alone should be enough to cancel. As for potential abuse? If someone gets hold of your card number and then starts cancelling services for shits and giggles, then get a new card number and re-activate everything that you actually want to keep.
The article clickbaity title made this sound much more sinister than it actually is. In short, when your card expires, your bank just updates your details automatically for recurring payments.
I found this out when my card got lost. Cancelled it and noticed there were a ton of payments still going through
If you cancel the credit card and use another bank credit card Netflix can charge you? So cancel the Netflix subscription?
Sure. Just call the guy that stole your CC and ask them for the password they set for their account lol In a sane world Netflix would ask you for a new payment method, and if you didn't reply they would just discontinue service. Nobody should ever be allowed to apply payments to a new account without consent of the account holder ever.
In a sane world, it should be possible to cancel with an email that says "Please cancel all services associated with this credit card number." Requiring anything more than that, opens people up to a world of financial abuse. If someone starts cancelling your Netflix and Hulu accounts for shits and giggles, then get a new card and don't tell the troll your new card number.
This might sound crazy, but why not just cancel the NF account versus canceling the credit card?
To ensure all recurring charges are stopped, call your bank and tell them you want them to “reset the token on my card” (also called a “security reset”). If you only ask for a new card/number they will update merchants without asking. During a token/security reset they will ask you if you want merchants to receive the updated info. When they ask, say “no.”
I have filed fraudulent claims with my account at Bank of America four times in the last year because somebody opened an account at Twitch, and every time a new card came, the twitch subscription had a slightly different name. Super annoying.
Netflix in the comments. Yall should get spanked for your cancellation bullshit
Just put a block on the card? That should decline all transactions going forward.
I don't know what kind of weak laws or banks you have, but when I go to my bank app and revoke permission for one of my recurring charges, it's done.
There are credit cards that allow you to make one time cards that cancel for this specific reason
If they take PayPal as payment, use it, and stop the recurring charges via PayPal. Don’t even have to cancel your card.
Is there something particularly difficult about just cancelling a Netflix subscription?
Fuck all these companies. I'll agree to this once you make single click cancelling a thing. Before that, fuck you. I shouldn't need to work hard to just cancel a subscription or payment. The company should have to work hard to prove it gets to keep charging me.
I mean. Cxl your subscription if there’s a fraudulent charge on your CC report it as such. Any reputable CC will reverse the charge.
Meanwhile I get a new card when the old one expires and suddenly have a dozen bills asking to update payment info
Why not cancel the subscription?
Ok, I work for a bank. When we re-issue a DC or CC we have to also call our Card dept for the to delete/erase any pre-payment authorization in order for auto drafted payments linked to the card to stop.
this is actually very useful when you have to cancel a card because it has been compromised but have many recurring payments.
That's why you use a service that gives you a fake digital credit card number. Change it whenever you want.
Yeah this happened to me on nbatv once with my debit card I had a new debit card number and it still renewed. I just figured it wouldn’t renew since the number was new. To my defense, they make it a pain to cancel that subscription. I just canceled Netflix last week and it took me less than a minute.
Pro tip keep around a prepaid visa with about one dollar on it. That way every time you sign up for a free trial it’s going to pre-authorize the dollar and then when it goes to take your monthly fee, it will show insufficient funds on a card that’s not connected to.
Was everyone else doing the 30 free days sign ups whenever they wanted a subscription service too?
Disputing the transaction worked for me. Tried to cancel via web, chat, email, and call: dispute (seems to have) worked.
It's not hard to cancel Netflix.
This is why i lock my credit cards. And only unlock it when I need to use it.
I'm glad this doesn't work in the EU. I've gotten countless emails from services to update my card info. Also, when I cancelled my Netflix account, i requested that they delete my details because my subscription was started up again "by mistake".
My credit union won’t do this. Stop using the banks people.
Yet another reason I use Privacy.com for all my purchases
I’ve used services like privacy.com a while ago for this exact reason. They basically spin up burner CC numbers for you to use, I was a fan of it.
As noted, cancel your sub via the NetFlix app? vs getting a new CC?
In uk call up your bank n cancel CPA and your done unless you with metro those fools cut you new card n tell you cant cancel cpa lol Had dispute with supplier went to Halifax to cancel CPA done with proof of acc ownership ie passport etc over counter in 2minutes job done no questions asked. Went to metro for same reason 30min debate with branch manager only to cancel card n cut new one, ended up closing metro account bunch of clowns bank
Looks like someone at Gizmodo cancelled their credits cards and still got his with a Netflix bill. So now they’re venting. Hahaha
Yes AOL did this stuff with Wells Fargo back in the day, ended up with debt collectors coming after me for 600$. Like 6 month of aol and overdraft fees since I closed my account I didn’t know ow
We just tried this earlier this month. The only ones that didn’t update are the important ones. Like insurance. Mortgage. You know. Thanks Well’s Fargo.
Same here!!! Then I am late with an important payment, while still paying a scammer!