Talk:Forced Continuity

I’ve been caught out by this one. However it’s highly feasible as a user to give your credit card details for a credit check — as it ‘verifies’ your identity. But then of course it’s still a trick to get you on as a subscriber.

To cancel with creditexpert.co.uk, you have to call up as well, you can’t do it online. I was actually really surprised when I did call how easy it was to cancel it, there was no hard sell or pressure at all.

I can confirm I’ve also fallen foul of this one from Experian. To add insult to injury, they are government-recommended as a way to check your credit rating.

Having done work for both a porn site and an electronic cigarette retailer, I can say that the best way to get out of these subscriptions is to threaten to do a chargeback (and then actually do it if they don’t refund you). Chargebacks cost the merchant the cost of the refund plus around $60 in penalties, plus if they have too many chargebacks Visa will cut them off permanently.

This one is super-fun when paired with “sneak into basket”. That combo got me once when purchasing a download on a casual games site. Their competitor now gets all of my repeat business, which adds up to far more than what they got from my 1 month “premium subscription”. I didn’t bother doing the chargeback because I figured it was sneaky and underhanded but probably not illegal. Next time (if there is one) I think I’ll explore that route; I didn’t realize it was so painful for the scammers. :)

It doesn’t have to be illegal for you to do a chargeback. Especially for subscription-based websites, there is no reason not to issue refunds to unsatisfied customers. You need to try to get a refund first though before doing a chargeback.

Which is why its a good idea to cancel (+replace) your credit card at least once a year. That way you can reset the ones you want to continue with – and prevent ones that you don’t

I had this same issue once with Love Film in which I took out a trial with them and after the trial (and all films returned within date) I was still charged a monthly fee.
I can’t believe that people are allowed to be ripped off for a trial on something they are told is free!

Note – they also require you to call to cancel – no way of doing it online.

Pretty painless to cancel though, but still…

Doesn’t just about every website with a free trial do this?

Apple’s MobileMe uses this technique as well.

They advertise a “free 60 day trial” and then on the 2nd step of their registration form they ask you to submit your Credit Card details.

I was done over badly by Streamload (Mediamax) – I bought a years subscription (in advance) on PayPal and after that year was over, I discovered I had been signed up for a further year without permission. Turned out when I originally subscribed, the checkbox “Keep subscribing” had been checked (not by me) and PayPal could do nothing about it. Bear in mind I had now paid for a second year in advance, but because I had unchecked the box (keep subscribing), Streamload then locked me out of my account and pocketed the money. I think that is fraud.

Well known from MobileMe (Apple)…

I got caught on with this one when I signed up for Amazon Prime.

FreeCreditReport.com does this too. After a month or so they started charging me 11 dollars a month, then 13 dollars a month. I had been charged $50-something dollars by the time I noticed and they wouldn’t refund me. My roommate called and they refunded him though.. Maybe I’m just too mean on the phone :P

Weight Watchers Online is another offender. Signed up and paid for 3 months. After that they continue to bill me monthly, for absolutely nothing of benefit.

eHarmony does this. Someone above noted that MobileMe supposedly does this. Haven’t had this problem, but the protip is to buy the boxed copy of MobileMe from Amazon. $50 to $70 a year, instead of $100. No credit card needed, then, either.

One easy way of avoiding this is to use one-time card numbers. All three of my credit cards (Discover, Bank of America MasterCard, and a Citibank MasterCard) offer them easily via a web-based tool. Just use that. Then if you forget to cancel a trial membership, or they try to auto-renew you, you’ll get a nice “your credit card failed” message. Then the ball is in your court regarding whether to give your actual number (or generate a new one-time use number) or just say bye-bye!

Along the same vein, you can also generate disposable e-mail addresses (Yahoo Mail has them built-in, or you can go to a third party provider (just do a search for “disposable addresses”).

I use pre-paid Mastercards from a local gas station for all my online porn transactions. It’s hard to be re-billed when the card doesn’t even have a name attached…

go ahead and add classmates.com. not only is it crappy information about your school classmates, but they roll you over and re-up your subscription without notification. sneaky text in your account preferences allow them to do this.

I think you could include the scam that is freecreditreport.com here as well. People are led to believe they are getting a free credit report, when really they are signing up for an ongoing service that autobills and does basically nothing.

Also, Realtytrack, as real estate industry site, does something similar. As part of the sign up for free trial, an advertiser inserts a deceptive step into the sign up process, where by you think that the step is a piece of the Realty track registration, when really it is signing up to pay for a separate, meaningless website creation service.

http://www.archives.com/ does this. They combine it with over-selling what they have actually have access to.

I actually think Amazon handles this ethically with their “Amazon Prime” trial. At any point in the trial you can go to a pretty prominent item on your Account page, and then click a pretty prominent button that says “Do not renew my subscription”. You still get to continue your free trial period, and then it’s done.

emusic.com does this as well. The only notification I got was from PayPal, saying that I authorized another payment.

Britannica also have a 6 month trial subscription that requires credit card details to be entered. Last month I have just activated one after I bought and installed their DVD for my kid’s PC. I have yet to see if I will be notified or reminded to opt out. We’ll see in 5 months.

Xbox Live is a well known example. Personal story: I actually called a week before my 1-month trial ended (thus before Microsoft took the liberty of renewing my subscription), and they STILL renewed my subscription. It was allegedly due to a ‘bug’ in their system but like we all know when we’re trying to troubleshoot problems: ‘if I am having this problem, there has to have been plenty of people before me with the same problem.’

@Dino Digital

Yeah, Love Film got me too I’m afraid!

They do say that you can always unsubscribe from their ‘temporary’ membership when you first go for the free trial. However, they don’t have the decency to tell you when your free trial is nearly up and leave it up to you to remember to cancel the card payment.

NFL now excels at this practice too: They sent me an email mentioning nothing of payment, offering a free trial of their Game Pass HD coverage. When I went to “cash in” on that free trial I discovered that there was a little text indicating that I’d be charged 240$ automatically (!) after the trial had run out… Wow.

A good rule of thumb is that if something is a “free trial” and they ask for your creditcard info, you are going to get charged.

I agree with the comment above that Amazon Prime isn’t a good example. They clearly state that it is a trial *subscription* and offer very easy ways to cancel. This is fortunate, because they are getting your CC info anyway.