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Comment by nivenkos | Hacker News Reader

It's just as bad in Europe! Signed up to O2 Deutschland - had to send a fax or send a physical letter to cancel.

This isn't "Europe", it's Germany. Germany is still well known for using fax for government and corporate communication, and there was heavy criticism for how the Covid pandemic was initially handled because faxing records was so common which meant they could not be easily digitized, collected and searched.

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]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID

You have to call or send a letter to cancel your subscription of the French newspaper LeMonde.

It's not just Germany.

I had this same issue with a number of French companies. Couldn't figure out why they weren't cancelling my contract despite repeated letters until someone told me you have to send the letter with proof of receipt otherwise they just ignore it.

Yeah, I live in Sweden now too.

I think Sweden is the exception here really though (and the other Scandinavian countries, and possibly the UK).

To me, that’s enough exceptions to not generalize about “Europe”.

This is not all of Europe, though Germany is known for this shenanigans (but on the other hand this gives you a confirmation of when you cancelled it if you send it Advice of Receipt)

That's illegal in Europe. You have to be able to cancel via the same means as you signed up. So if you can signup online then you must be able to cancel online.

> "That's illegal in Europe. You have to be able to cancel via the same means as you signed up."

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)

[1] https://ibb.co/r4LfK5F

Yes, beer52.com is atrocious for this also. I tried over a couple of weeks in lunch breaks and never got through.

Eventually I sent an email to some random customer support email I found complaining and they actually did it.

I subscribe to Der Spiegel (German weekly news magazine) and as far as I can tell it can’t be cancelled without e-mailing them.

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.

You could email them in English. Der Spiegel is large and international enough that it's reasonable to expect them to cope with that.

It probably depends on which country is handling your subscription. With a German address, they don't have to consider any request in any language other than German.

You’re probably right. I haven’t tried.

Europe is big. This is most definitely not illegal in Germany, in fact it is the preferred practice by anti-consumer companies.

A recently passed German law requires (among other changes) an online cancel button, however companies don't have to implement it until July 2022 unfortunately.

https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/wissen/vertraege-reklamat...

It sure as hell doesn't work like this for the newspaper Le Monde (in France). Sure you can sign/resign with Apple/Google but if you sign with e-mail, you have to mail a physical letter to resign (8Euros one with proof of delivery and all)

Source?

Here is the Dutch implementation, because it's the first I could find in English: https://business.gov.nl/regulation/automatic-renewal-subscri... As is says there "Consumers must be able to cancel their agreement in exactly the same way as they signed up for them."

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...

IIRC it's a law that is just a few months old.

That's not really a source.

It's a possible explanation for older anecdotes about having to cancel by fax.

There are 3 ways to cancel an O2 contract - (1) Online intimation + phone call, (2) Letter or (3) Fax [0]. Most routers (like Fritzbox) come with a fax function which you send an online fax [1]. O2 charges a maximum of 0.14 cents per fax page or free based on your DSL plan. Alternatively, you can also send a physical letter online (0.70 cents) [2].

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...

This was 10 years ago, it definitely wasn't possible by phone call back then.

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.

Which is ironic from what I understand to be a mobile phone operator. Clearly they don’t trust their own network

No, they just want it to be as hard as possible.

Although I was surprised how relatively big faxes are in Germany. I never had sent a fax before I was in Germany.

From nuclear power, to card payments, to online shopping - Germany is extremely conservative with regards to modern technology.

Faxes aren't that big either. I never liked them, never owned one, and I remember sending two faxes in my life. Maybe a few I don't remember. The last one was... to cancel a mobile phone contract.

Still better than waiting hours on a "support" phone line

It's not, because there's no real receipt confirmation.

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.

Yeah, but try to cancel an internet subscription here in Sweden…

I've always had it included in the BRF or rental agreement. Only 28 Mb/s mind...

You can send a signed letter and that should be legal proof

Probably no less than 90 days in advance too.

You can instruct your bank to stop the direct debit payments and they'll cancel your subscription.

You shouldn't say this to people like it's some obvious truth. There are many cases in which this action will land you in trouble due to it not being a legally valid termination of the contract (which of course may be different by country -- it's very common that cancelling requires an actual message to the other party).

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.

This makes sense if the contract indeed has a minimum commitment that hasn't been reached.

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.

The point of my comment was "this is not good general advice". The point of your comment seems to be "it can be good advice in some cases", which makes no sense to me. Obviously it can be good advice in that exact case where it makes sense, but it's not good general advice.

I'd argue it's good enough general advice and would apply to most online subscriptions as they typically have no minimum commitment. The ones with a minimum commitment would be the outliers and would require special treatment.

I agree with your point that you could get into trouble for violating your contract terms. I perhaps should have mentioned specifically about NYTimes which seem to have designed around people blocking the payments to cancel their subscription.

I had to do exactly that with o2 Germany. They continued to charge me after the contract expired. And they even tried to charge for the router that I actually sent back.

This was the whole issue though. I closed my bank account and moved country, and they delayed cancelling it and then chased me up on one month's payments for years - when I had no easy way of making payments in Germany.

In the end I paid it though, it was only 20 euros!

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