Ragingbull.com to pay $2.4M for bogus earnings claims, subscription charges | Hacker News Reader

Ragingbull.com to pay $2.4M for bogus earnings claims, subscription charges

ftc.gov

142 pointsindus74 comments

http://web.archive.org/web/20220311012859/https://www.ftc.go...

> The order will also require the settling defendants to provide consumers with an easy method to cancel their subscriptions and require them to get express, informed consent from consumers before signing them up for a recurring subscription plan.

If it is decided that cancellations weren't being reasonably "accepted", costing customers money, then why aren't all customers automatically due back the money that was unlawfully taken from them from the date they tried to cancel? If they didn't have express, informed consent from consumers before "signing them up" for a recurring subscription plan, how did a contract exist between them at all? Does this not mean that all money they took was fraudulent in these cases?

Because this is the problem. Cancellation usually takes place the moment you give them (or reasonably try to give them) notice of cancellation [whether they want to accept that or not]. You don't owe them any more money from that point, and if they say you do, then that should be considered fraud. Therefore they should automatically owe you any further money they took (whether by automatic payment or under duress by threat of hurting your credit record).

This seems like a thief has been caught, told not do it again, but is required to return only a fraction of goods they stole, and not even to the people they stole it from.

This is true, but it's also very common in America. Businesses get a lot of deference. E.g., we have a whole category of deceptive language businesses are allowed use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery

This reminds me of a letter I got from Sirius XM in the mail after purchasing a new vehicle that said if I do not call to cancel within 7 days after getting the letter that I automatically accept their terms of service. Imagine being able to send letters to people that say if they don't respond or do anything that they are agreeing to something.

Yeah WTF. Respond with a letter that says they need to respond within 7 days or they owe you $10 million. There is a 50/50 chance no one even reads it for a week.

Not a bad idea. Maybe I should say if they respond they owe me $1m, but if they don't then they owe me $10m.

That sounds like they had an agreement with your dealer to get notified on every sale, so maybe there was something in the purchase agreement.

No, there was nothing in the purchase agreement about it.

Is it reasonable for customers to file civil suits against the company?

Oh, that's nice. I was following this case [1] for some time. Raging bull is a stock picker letter subscription service.

Their books were laid open in the court case. IIRC they were easily raking in $10M in 2020. The $2.4M isn't more than a tax.

The most striking thing in this whole case is Jason Bond's early testimony (I think it was Jan-Feb 2020) that he didn't go into the business to trade stocks, but to make money teaching others to trade stocks. After seing Tim Sykes (IIRC) make huge profits from subscriptions. There's some evidence that he's a net loser in trading, presented by a forensic accountant.

On top of that, there are some heart-breaking testimonies from customers about "they made it sound so simple, and when I lost money, I bought in to the next level subscription."

There was a receivership and order to halt operations a year ago, but it only lasted a couple of months. I was very disappointed the FTC couldn't find more to shut this operation down. It doesn't seem like a business the world would miss.

[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18719211/federal-trade-...

Wondering when this comeuppance arrives for Motley Fool, and their ambitious claims and mathemagical claims of returns on their clickbait ads

I avoid any pains that have to deal with subscriptions because I use Privacy.com [1]; it allows one to create unlimited "burner" cards, with the ability to create spending limits per card, or vendor-lock in per card. Never had an issue.

[1] https://privacy.com

FYI, not being able to be charged is not the same as not owing them money.

Most sites will just automatically cancel your subscription if your card fails without an explicit cancel. But the real slimebag ones will keep it going and sell the debt to a collection agency.

What're you supposed to do at that point, anyway? This happened to me, and I just contested the debt and got it wiped out. That was like 10 years ago, though, and I'm guessing the credit agencies are a lot less willing to side with human beings nowadays

Can you take someone to small claims court for claiming you owe them money, in order to not pay?

I’m mildly upset right now because The State of California is doing this to me.

I moved out of California on 7/10, and my vehicle registration expired on 7/14.

The Vehicle Registrations Collections office sent a “Demand for Payment” to my new address because my registration is past due. I have to call to contest.

How can they charge me money for something I never wanted or legally needed?

I think it's reasonable for a state to assume you're going to renew your registration. That assumption is true in most cases, and greatly streamlines things.

What's the alternative? Don't ever assume that any resident wants to renew, but silently start accruing fees and potential criminal charges that'll be levied when they inevitably realize they forgot to re-registry, and do so months late? Sure that may be technically legitimate - the onus is on the resident, after all - but it'll lead to a ton of unnecessarily pissed off people.

Assuming the call they want is simply to confirm that you have moved out of state, I think that's a reasonable ask.

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Aside: Wisconsin sends multiple reminders before registration is due. It can be via mail, or email. And there are late charges, but only $10 or so (applied by the DMV - driving without registration is also a criminal issue that police can enforce separately if you're driving on public roads).

I thought it was a pretty good system.

PA doesn't assume you want to renew. If you don't send the money in, you won't get a registration card and can be fined if you get pulled over.

Thankfully, no other state does this

I don’t have mine automatically renew. I had to go online and submit a renewal.

FYI you can do this with Applecard as well

Is there a dedicated way to create a temporary card number or do you do this by requesting a new number (that replaces the one you had before)?

> Sorry, www.ftc.gov is down for maintenance. It will be back up shortly.

Here's a Google cached version:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

Subscriptions have become such a massive consumer pox over the past few years. It's the new de facto way to scam people out of far more value than you provide.

Sometimes, it works if you set your VPN to a server in California, because of a law requiring services to offer a means to cancel it online, if the customer signed up online. [1]

Also whenever I have the option to do so, I sign up for subscriptions with PayPal. It's super easy to cancel recurring subscriptions on PayPal.

[1] https://www.consumerprotectionreview.com/2021/11/california-....

Do you actually get a different web interface with a cancel option if you signed up using a California VPN? I find that really hard to imagine.

> Also whenever I have the option to do so, I sign up for subscriptions with PayPal. It's super easy to cancel recurring subscriptions on PayPal.

Is this like with expiring credit cards, where you just let it lapse (which it's my understanding does not automatically get you off the hook—you just hope it's not worth the company's time to pursue you), or is there actually a mechanism automatically provided through PayPal to cancel subscriptions?

At least in the US the expiring credit card method actually no longer works. It was changed a few years back to automatically roll subscriptions over to the replacement card. I cant imagine how many people got tricked into keeping on subscriptions when that was silently changed.

Some US credit card providers provide virtual account numbers, allowing you to obtain separate/unique card numbers tied to a specific credit card, and can have short expirations, or be revoked early.

There are also some services that provide these virtual cards tied to debit cards or bank accounts. I haven't tried these types of services since I prefer the protection of credit cards, which often offer significant points or cash back rewards.

Yes. I had an old cellphone account that kept getting charged after my credit card expired. Had to go in person to cancel, as I have long since forgotten my online account password.

> Some US credit card providers provide virtual account numbers, allowing you to obtain separate/unique card numbers tied to a specific credit card, and can have short expirations, or be revoked early.

Yes, this is what I was referring to by expiring credit cards (I was very unclear, sorry). But does this method actually work? I thought you were still liable for the charges, just very unlikely actually to be hounded for them.

Yeah, it won't remove any contractual liability. Many companies will just cancel/pause a subscription on a failed payment until a valid payment method is added.

I usually use these virtual numbers if I had concern that there could be a database leak from the company, or if I felt that there was a chance that they would not follow my cancellation instructions.

If the banks are tracking subscriptions, can we terminate the subscription from them instead of dealing with shady companies employing these dark patterns? Is this a recourse consumers have?

> If the banks are tracking subscriptions, can we terminate the subscription from them instead of dealing with shady companies employing these dark patterns? Is this a recourse consumers have?

I suspect that, to the extent it happens, it's less the banks keeping track of it in advance, and more that the bank sees a new recurring charge coming in to the old account and decides to roll it over to the new one.

This is why I try to move all my subscriptions inside of apples app store management system. Easy management of subscriptions in a central location. One click unsubscribe.

I would love a central 3rd party service that could manage subscriptions across the web - ping me if you want to build it with me.

And yet streaming music services have largely replaced simply buying music. (Ditto for video.) So YMMV.

Subscriptions for streaming, for news or data feeds and for software are three different things. Streaming is basically giving me access to whatever music I want from their catalog whenever I want. I know what I will be getting and I'll get it when I want it.

For news of for software it's more like paying a subscription and I have no idea if they will keep on giving me reliable useful news and improving their software or not. It used to be that I payed for the software if I liked it, and when they make a new release they have to get me to pay for it again if I want the bug fixes or new features. With news it used to be that I could just stop buying or reading whenever I wanted and I didn't have to navigate anti-patterns to save my money.

As a consumer I'm happy paying for streaming services but I feel I'm being held captive by software that makes me pay for a subscription. I'm constantly looking for an alternative to the latter and when I find it I cancel immediately.

It seems pretty clear at this point that subscription pricing just works better for software. If you go through the old model, sales/customer acquisition never ends. You constantly have to convince previous customers to repurchase. While if you go down the subscription path, you acquire the customer once and then simply have to continue to provide value to keep them.

I think in the end the user probably gets a better deal as well since the software ends up being much better and they always have the latest features.

When you are a power user the value is undeniable. Things like Github/Gitlab, Office, Photoshop, etc provide way more value than their subscription cost. Where I think its at its worst is for things you hardly use. I don't want to pay a subscription fee for an app I use once a month.

> You constantly have to convince previous customers to repurchase.

This is a good thing. It forces businesses to earn their revenue, not just rent seek.

> I think in the end the user probably gets a better deal as well since the software ends up being much better and they always have the latest features.

Completely disagree. Rent-seekers have no reason to improve their products because their users have to pay even if they do nothing.

You can't just sit around doing nothing and expect to keep customers. Competitors will catch up and beat your offering.

What subscriptions mean is more money spent on development and customer support, less money spent on advertising and sales teams. Because the real money is in continually making the customer feel they are getting good value.

I can't say this is true of any subscription I have ever had.

I'm fine with software subscriptions if I'm a regular/heavy user. The problem is if it's an occasional thing that I need to access data/do a very sometimes task.

Would love to see something like this for Adobe as well!

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1489901640777973768.html

I don't think this is as egregious as this person seems to think. A 1 year commitment paid in monthly installments, is exactly how a lease works.

There are good reasons for leases to have minimum terms: a landlord has significant fixed costs around turnovers. That does not apply at all in the case of Adobe. It's just a hack to make their price gouging look more reasonable.

That's why they have minimum terms, but not why they charge rent monthly and not as a lump sum at the start of the lease. They do that for the same reason Adobe created this billing scheme.

> "Should you cancel after 14 days, you'll be charged a lump sum of 50% of your remaining contractual obligation and your service will continue until the end of the month's billing period"

Is basically hidden. So if you forget to cancel the subscription by the end of the 7-day trial, you end up paying 50% of the annual subscription from what I understand from the website

https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/#/

And every newspaper

or just NYT for starters, in my experience. i mean it's super disgusting how shady they are, for such touted journalism

I guess their numbers show it is a net win, but I'm not a subscriber solely on the basis that they don't let you cancel easily.

I heard horror stories but I managed to cancel pretty easily back when I did, just did it online.

Can't do it online nowadays, last verified early 2022, and have to phone some number during particular hours.

Depends on where you signed up. At least in California, you must offer cancellation online for anyone who signs up online.

And The Economist.

Much as I dislike Adobe for moving this way, some of the comments on that page are misleading in themselves.

"Tiny grey text" - it's not that tiny if I can read it from the thumbnail provided.

"Really hard to read" - dark grey on white isn't hard to read. It's easier to read than the "summary" line of a HN comment (runnerup 10 minutes ago | parent | context | flag | on: FTC cracks down on hard to cancel subscription of ...)

And they do state up front before you click buttons to move forward "after 7 days, a fee will be charged to cancel", etc.

I think it's _onerous_ to charge a "50% of balance" cancelation fee, and excessive, but not fraudulent.

And not hard to cancel. Just onerous.

They shouldn't be using monthly price marketing and language when they don't actually offer a monthly plan. It's intentionally misleading, and I cannot find any other SaaS or tool that uses this kind of misleading marketing or pricing mechanics.

What? They absolutely do offer monthly plans. They _default_ to an Annual plan, which is described in two flavors, "Annual plan", and "Annual plan, paid monthly", but they absolutely do offer straight monthly plans:

https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html - any click on the "Plans and pricing details" would show that.

You overlooked the part that it's a one-year minimum commitment, which was by design.

Interestingly, this is a site I saw (more than once) promoted by HN users on threads that discussed investing as an individual. It gave off immediately sketchy vibes as a Malkiel-acolyte, I tend to be skeptical of individuals who claim to generate long run alpha in general - let alone someone willing to sell this magic sauce. Based off the settlement, it sounds like unfortunately a large number of people were taken and for likely not insignificant funds. I hope this is where the buck just gets going, rather than where it ends.

> promoted by HN users

Other than this article, I can't find any evidence the community has ever discussed it.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&query=ragingbull.com&s...

I will see if I can find an archived comments page containing the reference because I'm extremely confident there was at the very least one extensive comment chain discussing it - I know a couple of discussion threads on the broader topic of individual investing in general got nuked due to obvious promotional spam/other flamebait topics. I know it was brought up on a discussion regarding robo-advisors in the last few months; I'll dig more aggressively and see what I can pull up.

Here's at least one time it was discussed that doesn't show up in that search (which I would think it ought to):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25916905

It doesn't match the description either, but I can't/haven't ruled out there are others. But I would agree that this doesn't appear to be regularly discussed on HN, and I'd speculate this bug/imperfect performance from Algolia is due to this term being rare in the corpus of HN comments.

This shows up in the search as the second result (this post and that comment are the extent of it).

> doesn't appear to be regularly discussed on HN

It's literally never been discussed until today.

> speculate this bug/imperfect performance

That's just misdirection. This very topic is currently visible in results hours after being posted.

> promoted by HN users

I know we have a strong faith in being surrounded by serious people here on HN, but I'm sure there are at least a small percentage of accounts who are people with a desire to influence the crowd (whether paid shills or not).

Seriously, what does it cost a manger at RagingBull or anywhere else to have 2 or 3 accounts with enough karma not to get flagged as new, to chime in on some thread about trading? They could easily have a well-seen comment (comments here number in the hundreds, not tens of thousands like on Reddit) and influence a fair number of wealthy tech people.

Heck, if I saw three different users agreeing with each other on an HN thread about some product, I'd definitely be curious.

I have to remember myself how much of what I see is manipulation, even on a site like HN.

As I said above, given that the article(s) in question had loads of comment chains being deleted for promotional material and other low quality content, I wouldn't be surprised.

Is the page down or is it because I’m based outside the US I get a 404?

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/03/ftc-knock...

I'm in the US and receive a 404 too, my guess is moved or taken down for some reason.

I suggest signing up for subscription services using virtual credit cards instead. There's a service called Privacy (https://privacy.com/) that provides those. You can set up limits and expiration dates. I find it safer.

I used a Privacy card to sign up for a Scribd trial to get access to one single PDF that was technically in the public domain but not accessible anywhere else online. That was almost a year ago, and they still try to charge my card for $9.99 every 5-10 days.

I think the more important bit here is that the earnings reported weren’t typical and in many cases appear to be completely fake. The subscription model is egregious, and probably illegal in most states, but that’s not the main problem.

Please go after the NY Times next, its impossible to cancel with them

Those were exposed for years, here is the person that brought them down, you can check in the comments there some details posted by lawyers…

https://www.tradingschools.org/ragingbull-com-jason-bond-jef...

America Online mastered the subscription cancellation pain. Lots of people are retired on golf courses today because of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com