I seriously thought that I had signed up for a phishing site ...
I still find it insane that the "normal" way to pay for goods and services is to pass full details of your payment card, sufficient to make any future payment, and just trust the merchant. Surely the sane way is you generate some token they can redeem against, but you can e.g. expire it or modify it.
It thankfully is now more of a thing of the past, but it used to be the case in the UK at least that places would take a telephone card payment, where you recite your card number, expiry date etc. So not only can they make any future payment they like, there is even no durable record of them having these details.
Folks just don't seem to realize: you make a reasonable effort with the vendor, and then go straight to your credit card company.
I caught a restaurant "helping" themselves to a very healthy tip for delivery; I'd tipped in cash. The owner repeatedly professed that he didn't know how to issue a refund and offered cash.
He was playing stupid because he didn't want to deal with the transaction fee, nor did he want a paper trail of his fraud; I strongly suspect he was doing this to other people, too. Warned him three times and three times he said, gosh, he had no idea how to issue a refund to my card.
I asked for just the fraudulent tip back and my credit card company reversed the entire charge. So not only did he lose the tip, he lost the cost of the food and he got dinged with a chargeback fee. He also lost my weekly pizza order.
Still though, it's a weird system. Instead of giving someone just enough permissions to spend my money, I give them permissions to spend all of it, with some other party reimbursing me if that goes awry (and I notice).
> Instead of giving someone just enough permissions to spend my money, I give them permissions to spend all of it
If a tire fails while operating within its speed regime and before five years from manufacture, then it is to be reported to the DOT (US Department of Transportation). This usually only happens if the police are reporting on a fatal accident - most common citizens neither know that this option exists nor how to report it. If enough reports of a specific brand or type of tire come in, then the manufacturer (or importer) must provide proof of the testing done and pay some fines.
Many of the cheap Chinese tires are out of business (read: have changed business names) far before this critical last step could ever be reached, assuming that any reports were filed at all.
I get a nearly instant alert, sometimes before the payment terminal has displayed "accepted", that there's been a charge on my card.
Also, at least in the US, debit cards have similar fraud rules to credit cards (ie you can chargeback) but the time period is much, much smaller. A week, I think.
I strongly urge you to not use your debit card and use a credit card wherever possible. Aside from better protection, any fraud or mistakes are not involving real money, but credit.
Ended up cancelling the account I was so frustrated, lost a customer of 10 years.
Completely outrageous business practices if you ask me.
It's definitely frustrating to cancel, and this is a good ruling that will help make it easier, but it's still your responsibility to do so.
Ironically there are far more complaints about cloud providers shutting down entire business operations because of a late payment here on HN. Perhaps you should consider this more thoroughly instead of escalating a single unfortunate anecdote into a strawman argument against how business billing works.
Why can't everything be simple and easy? Maybe somebody needs to pass a law to make it so.
On Direct Debits in the UK, the merchant just charges me whatever. This is for things like utilities and phone bills, so I don't have major trust issues, but still it irks me.
Which I guess why many businesses prefer Klarna or other payment processors. You login with your bank account and then wire the money to them, instead of them pulling the money. Then, no chargebacks are possible.
In any case, the banks seem to be very good at refunding direct debits in cases where the merchants appear to be abusing them. My ex once noticed after several months that her gym was still charging her even after she'd cancelled - the bank made it very quick and easy to claim back all the extra payments!
That's kinda how Blik payments work in Poland. They generate one time code that is used to purchase goods, you also have to confirm it on your device(usually a banking app).
That code is one time use and expires after 2 minutes - and it can be safely told out loud. You also get transaction details before you confirm it on your device.
Expanding this system to a token that allows recurring subscription would be pretty convenient.
in EU (well, at least in my country, France) a payment without 3dsecure is extremely easy to chargeback.
In Sweden, sending a fax or physical letter to a government instance or private companies rather than an e-mail is more or less unheard of, unless they for some reason need a physical paper with your signature on it (I've heard this happen with customs, for example), but in almost all areas of society this has now also been replaced with Bank-ID, which is digital.[1]
It's not just Germany.
I think Sweden is the exception here really though (and the other Scandinavian countries, and possibly the UK).
Unfortunately I don't think that's true. I'm looking at you, beer52.com! [1]
(And yes, they were doing this long before the UK left the EU, and are still at it today)
Eventually I sent an email to some random customer support email I found complaining and they actually did it.
This is unfortunate because although I can read German, I can’t write or speak it, so figuring out how to write that e-mail would be a headache.
Edit: Thanks to aboalarm.de, which I learned about from this thread, I have learned the correct formula to use:
> Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,
>
> hiermit kündige ich mein oben genanntes Abonnement Ihrer Zeitschrift fristgerecht zum nächstmöglichen Zeitpunkt.
so if I do ever decide to cancel, this thread has been quite useful.
https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/wissen/vertraege-reklamat...
It's based on an EU directive, but a recent one so not all countries have it live yet. More details on the EU directive and the German implementation starting next year: https://www.mofo.com/resources/insights/211006-new-two-click...
Your comment below says that there is no receipt for confirmation. O2 provides a default PDF form on their website which to fill for termination. The letter explicitly states that "o2 should send you a written confirmation of cancellation". It is illegal for O2 to be in receipt of a letter and not send a confirmation. I am sorry if that happened to you!
Don't get me wrong - the auto-renewal of contract practices in Germany are predatory for the consumers. Recently, there has been a change in law that forces providers to extend contracts by 1 month instead of 1 or 2 years.
[0] https://www.o2online.de/service/kuendigung/
[1] https://en.avm.de/service/knowledge-base/dok/FRITZ-Box-7490/...
[2] https://www.deutschepost.de/de/e/epost.html
[3] https://static2.o9.de/resource/blob/498264/12cd6ca6ee17a02b9...
Hopefully it'll get better. I also had a terrible experience with Vodafone in the UK, charging the higher rates for data usage with no warning.
Although I was surprised how relatively big faxes are in Germany. I never had sent a fax before I was in Germany.
They ended up chasing me for 3 years over 20 euros when I moved to the UK. At least here in Sweden, credit checks aren't really a thing thankfully.
One specific example is if your contract has a termination period, which is pretty common, at least in my part of Europe. If you simply stop paying, you are denying the other party N months of revenue (your cancellation period) that you are contractually obliged to pay. You are now defaulting on your payments and will likely pay additional fees.
But if the contract has no minimum term (or it has since passed) and you've made a reasonable effort to attempt to cancel with no success, it'll now be on them to recover the money through legal means which would require them to explain to the court why your cancellation attempt was ignored, demonstrating their bad faith in the process. That's not something they want to do.
In the end I paid it though, it was only 20 euros!
Also, if you ever worked in a large corporation, they have a lot of means to track incoming mail ("Posteingangsbuch") and for an enterprise to try to pretend not to have received a letter would require maldoing by a lot of employees (who usually are not commited to giving false statements in court for their employer).
This is definitely not the case for websites or apps and I'm pretty sure what the NYT is doing wouldn't amuse German consumer protection agencies.
Works somewhat
There are currently two ways to sign up for the New York times online, one is via the website and the other is via a subscription from the various app stores(an in-app-purchase).
To unsubscribe from the website-based subscription requires a call to NYT’s customer service based in New York which have limited operating hours- here they’ll try their best to convince you not to unsubscribe after waiting in a phone queue.
However if you chose to subscribe through an IAP then you simply browse to your active subscriptions and press a button - far simpler and on par with how easy it was to sign up.
Making subscriptions difficult to cancel is not new in any industry, NYT’s behaviour here isn’t unique, or even the worst example. I use it as a demonstration that even reputable companies use these tactics.
This is one of the reasons why certain businesses loathe IAPs, (regardless of the cost). When providing your details to a business there is a lot of added potential for lock in, follow-on marketing, increasing the cost at irregular intervals and selling your information to 3rd parties.
I say "regardless of the cost" because many types of digital goods have minimal costs to provide them. For example a 15% or 30% cut of such purchases is negligible when selling an in-game currency because there is no genuine cost for providing that currency. Even if the app store charged 0% instead of the 15% or 30%, the business would still be missing out on using your personal details for all of the other valuable ways they can extract money from you/your data.
To use Amazon as an example - I receive extreme levels of spam for the custom email address that I use with Amazon, many vendors I have purchased from have immediately on sold my contact information.
I feel the success of small developers relies on IAP, it means I can purchase from them without needing to trust them - the app stores do a good job of reviewing the app for malware and if the app doesn’t live up to expectations it is trivial to get a refund from the various app stores.
Fortunately the card they have expired last December.
That said, when I last had an interaction with them about a subscription, I did the whole thing via a 24/7 online chat. A far better and more convenient experience, if one that still lacks the simplicity of a simple ‘unsubscribe’ button.
I did this the last time WSJ decided to jack my rate to something obscene.
I mean, I really appreciate the articles but I haven't been able to follow as closely as I wanted.