DoNotPay app waits on hold for you
techcrunch.com
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This feature automatically declines the charge when the trial finishes.
The app was free to download and I was immediately asked to enter my credit card on the onboarding flow. I was a bit annoyed but reluctantly entered it and figured I could cancel this before the trial.
Then I went to create one of these fake cards and got a notification that my actual credit card was charged $3. What? Turns out activating one of these fake cards automatically activated my free trial. I had no idea and was annoyed by this dark pattern, and even more annoyed I fell for it.
Then I tried to cancel and the only thing I could find is a chat bot that kept presenting the same options. Ironic that the article talks about bypassing a bot when they use one themselves to handle customer service.
After going through the chat of flow a few times I was able to cancel my subscription, but the chat it didn’t know how to handle my refund request. I ended up finally finding a form I could send an email to someone asking for a refund.
This app has dark patterns all over the place to trick you into paying for their products that save you money. I would not recommend it.
I don't trust a company that explicitly goes out of its way to avoid accountability to do something as sensitive as manage credit cards for me.
- "arbitrator provided by the American Arbitration Association"
- "[individuals] may elect to pursue their claims in their local small-claims court rather than through arbitration"
- arbitration care heard in your local county
- they pay for the arbitration fees
It's the same as online game store companies having binding arbitration, there are some cases where class actions would be detrimental to a company due to no fault of the company themselves.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/#11
Epic Games: https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/tos (they run a storefront for third-party games alongside their first-party games)
To go a step farther, waiving my right to a trial by jury and telling me I can go to a small claims court instead does not engender trust from me. That's not avoiding a class action, that's removing my ability to have a trial decided by my peers.
To go even one more step, I don't get the hate for class action lawsuits.
Class action lawsuits are one of the only really effective ways consumers have to punish companies that misstep. They're not perfect, and they often end up profiting lawyers more than consumers. But at the same time, suing companies is expensive, and companies bank on that fact. They commit small violations, counting on the fact that most consumers will realize that it's not economically feasible to file claims for a few hundred dollars.
Aggregating multiple claims into a single lawsuit (for all of its flaws), solves that problem. It's pretty much the only thing we have right now that helps solve that problem. We've seen that with Equifax, Verizon, Yahoo, etc... the class action lawsuits hurt those companies a lot more than any regulation or criminal probes or boycotts did. If high-profile mistakes like the ones these companies made anger you, there's potentially an argument there for making class-action lawsuits even more powerful, not less.
I get that our legal system in the US is messed up and expensive. I don't understand why the consequences of that have to fall specifically on consumers.
> They commit small violations, counting on the fact that most consumers will realize that it's not economically feasible to file claims for a few hundred dollars.
Maybe not feasible for your time in going through the hassle of filing a claim, but the point of small claims court is intended to be inexpensive. The fee should be under $100, but I understand that still might be prohibitive for low-income users.
> You agree not to bring or participate in a class or representative action, private attorney general action, or collective arbitration related to the Licensed Technology or this Agreement. You also agree not to seek to combine any action or arbitration related to the Licensed Technology or this Agreement with any other action or arbitration without the consent of all parties to this Agreement and all other actions or arbitrations.
Luckily Citi still offers the service. It also requires flash. However the feature is worth the inconvenience. I’ll run a small windows vm for the purpose if I had to.
For reference, they spend about $10B (billion with capital “B”) last year on tech projects: https://www.ciodive.com/news/bank-of-america-keeps-pace-with...
Question: when there’s a chargeback, does the customer|fraud victim’s bank lose out, or do they get a part of the chargeback fee that Visa/MasterCard levy into the merchant?
The one who loses out is the product seller's business (i.e. the company who processed the charged-back transaction, via their their merchant account).
IME, regardless of who is at fault and who perpetrated the fraud, and regardless of merchant sending irrefutable proof to the bank, the merchant account owner always loses out.
First it pays back the bank for the missing funds.
Secondly the business loses the value of the goods they shipped
Thirdly, the bank slaps a significant fraud fee on the business as well e.g. $35 penalty applied for every chargeback, which is where the bank profits from chargebacks (by never reviewing merchant submitted evidence in chargeback claims, and simply making the merchant business pay for the fraud plus penalty fee on top of that, every single time)
Were you actually charged, or was it an authorization?
You get the free trial, and then if your card charge doesn't go through, you don't receive further service. So you don't owe anything to anyone.
>> write legal letters to scare businesses out of overcharging you
This one actually concerns me a little. A lot of businesses use legalese to scare and overwhelm you, so it's great to have something to fight back. But there are also a lot of people out there who just game the system as consumers too - I'm a little concerned for Mom & Pop shops who will just end up being the victims here instead. Ultimately I don't think there's a perfect solution to the fact that dishonest, selfish people exist.
>> they’ll think ‘this could be made public and go viral and hurt our business
This might play out in a more complicated way. I have an app that records all my calls. I stop the recording immediately if it's a personal call. If it's a business I inform them I'm recording the phone call. Much of the time, that ends the call. The business was going to record it too, but now that they know I'm going to record it, they tell me they'll have to end the call and schedule a time to call back when neither of us records it, which I refuse to do, so I take care of business in writing, often in-person instead. Instead of making my over-the-phone business more confident, it just eliminates the phone as an option.
Why go out of the way to inform them? Whenever I hear “this call may be monitored or recorded,” I figure I’m being given clear consent to record the call in a two-party consent State.
When I do tell them, it's because I'm trying to achieve what is said in the article: I'm trying to disincentivize the bad behavior from happening in the first place. I want to cut the bullshit out immediately, not just be well-armed to shame them or take them to court later.
Regardless, I can't imagine a jury ever finding anyone guilty of breaking the law for doing this (if a company had the nerve to press charges). More relevantly, I would think that judges would be generous in allowing the recording as evidence in a civil suit, where there is discretion. And I'd imagine that in most states there would be room for judicial interpretation, since it's unlikely that a state has a specific law or appellate case that addresses this issue.
The message played at you doesn’t say anything about employer or employee. It simply says “this call may be recorded” so, great, then I can record it!
Sounds great!
The last time I had this working perfectly was with a Nexus 4 and I find that call recording apps do not work on newer phones I've bought since. Any suggestions? Android or iOS, I don't care which platform as long as it works well.
I used to set the app to only record incoming calls from callers not in my address book, and on several occasions it was a huge benefit to have these to refer to later.
Companies really do not like it when you email them recordings of their employee lying to you, and will go out of their way to make things right immediately when that happens.
I had called multiple times and was told that their QuickPay was irreversible and that it was fine to use it for commercial transactions. I accepted it for a transaction, the transaction got reversed and money taken out of my account and I was charged overdraft fees. Submitting the audio recording did not make a difference.
There's probably something in the fine print of your contract with them that lets them get away with whatever happened, but always escalate matters as it's pretty effective. Press them on social media, if there's arbitration try it or small claims court, and involve any local media or politicians that you can get on your side.
Basically, just be a huge pain in the ass and do not give up or go away until they back down. This can take a while and you must document everything, every interaction.
Looking back I probably should have transcribed it and highlighted the relevant parts to show the issue more clearly.
We'll be rolling out https://productive.app for cell phoe calls shortly, which has call recording and transcription built in.
Other than the ownership and convenience of searching through your own conversations, accountability is another focus (phone calls shouldn't be an enabling medium for shady businesses practices compared to non-ephemeral channels like texts and emails).
BTW, there is nothing wrong with intending to advertise. Op (and I) are looking for a call recording app, and you know if one that you can (hopefully) recommend. The fact that you profit if we use it doesn't make your suggestion that much worse
This company has consistently come out with some amazing products, really refreshing to see a tech company that seems to just purely be fighting to solve annoying problems that haven't been touched before. Also founded by a solid entrepreneur who is the son of Bill Browder who has done incredible work throughout the world advocating for legislation that will help eliminate corruption and who wrote a fascinating book (Red Notice) on his time as an investor in Russia. I won't spoil it but it reads like a thriller despite being nonfiction and is well worth a read.
I use my Chase Liquid card as the default card for any merchant that wants a card to automatically charge per month, or for any merchant that offers a discount for having autopay setup (one example of the latter case is T-Mobile where I get $5.00 off my bill Per month for just having a card on file for autopay). Merchants have gotten better at notifying me when my payment is due before actually charging me, so I actually perform one-time payments in these cases using my normal credit card that offers cash back.
Yes, this approach does not provide any additional privacy beyond keeping my intended payment method to myself. For anything more, I only know of privacy.com . However, this approach is sufficient for practically all of my needs.
[0] https://www.chase.com/personal/debit-reloadable-cards/starbu...
USAA gets this right, to your point.
I can't tell you how many times I've opened the App, started doing something in their "support menu" and been told "You need to call support for this, press this button", the phone starts ringing and even if I have to wait a few minutes, the person who picks up the phone already knows who I am, why I'm calling based on inputs from the Mobile App. They authenticate by sending a security code to the app. Hands down my favorite experience calling support is whenever I need to call USAA for something.
(Plus, despite being retired from the services for 12 years now, it is nice sometimes hearing "Good Morning Sergeant Torres". Takes me back to my days on the flight line in a strange way, heh)
This already happens via rewards programs that route you to quicker or better support agents if you're in a higher rewards tier, implying that you're worth more to the business.
Perhaps one can even obtain income or credit information, or glean it from the caller's address based on median income or home price history.
This is their job that they're being paid for. I'm not, and that makes my time more precious than theirs in this case.
I just used a recording the other day when Spectrum (shitty internet provider, formally Time Warner) tried to lie to me and I was able to re-listen to my previous conversation with them to catch them in the lie.
inb4: I live in a 1 party state and even so I rarely talk to a "real" person on my phone, it's only businesses and if they are going to have a recording then so will I.
http://money.com/money/4387657/donotpay-chat-bot-traffic-tic...
Ok, why should it be sued?