You Should Report Companies That Make It Harder to Cancel Than to Sign Up

Photo: sebra (Shutterstock)

Few companies make it difficult to sign up for their services. In fact, many make it way too easy to enroll, offering free trials, discounts, and other enticing perks to prospective customers. However, what’s really scummy is when those same companies make it damn near impossible to cancel your membership.

This isn’t just my opinion; the FTC agrees if a company offers one method to sign up for a service, they should offer that same method for canceling as well. You should not be able to subscribe to a platform with just a few clicks, but then have to sit on the phone for hours as a sales rep tries to convince you to stay. That’s wrong.

A lot of companies use this tactic in the United States, especially news outlets and publishers. According to the American Press Institute, only 41% of publishers surveyed offered an easy way to cancel a subscription online. The New York Times is guilty of this practice, as are plenty of local and national papers throughout.

Luckily, times are a’ changing. The FTC announced last year it would be cracking down on companies that made it more difficult to cancel their services than to sign up for them. As Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, says:

“Today’s enforcement policy statement makes clear that tricking consumers into signing up for subscription programs or trapping them when they try to cancel is against the law ... Firms that deploy dark patterns and other dirty tricks should take notice.”

With this announcement, the FTC makes it clear companies must abide by three pillars:

• Make all pertinent financial information clear, such as the total cost of the product being sold and what cancellation deadlines are in place before a customer will be charged.
• Make sure the customer has given consent before charging them for said service.
• Most importantly for this article, companies must give customers easy and simple cancellation steps. Cancellation methods should be just as easy as methods used to sign up for the product.

Even with these rules in place, plenty of companies are still using scummy tactics to make it difficult to cancel services. When you come across this type of behavior, you can do something about it: Report the company to the FTC.

To do so, head to https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/#/ and fill out a report. After you do, it won’t only be shared with the FTC, but also with over 3,000 law enforcers throughout the country.

It’s too soon to say how fast or effective these reports will be in changing corporate behavior. It’s also unclear if the FTC will target specific industries while leaving others alone. Publishers are a clear offender here, but so are many gyms, offering easy sign-up packages while trapping customers in memberships they cannot cancel. Hopefully, the FTC makes it easy to cancel all types of subscriptions and memberships like this, forcing companies to find other (possibly ethical) methods for keeping customers on board.

  

from Lifehacker https://ift.tt/vNU6DiF

Related Items