Comment by mediaman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mediaman | Hacker News Reader

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To those arguing that legions of lawyers are going to track you down and sue you:

Yes, in many jurisdictions, including the US, canceling your credit card does not change your obligation to pay. (Imagine buying a $10,000 physical product and the seller forgets to charge until the day after delivery, and you've canceled the card. You're not getting out of that.)

However, there is substantial friction in the American legal system. Of course, if they can find you, they will send a threatening form letter from a lawyer. If you're not experienced with the legal system, this seems scary. But: big whoop.

It costs $5k-20k to fully pursue a contractual claim. Nobody does this for small consumer purchases. (They will send you to collections, if they know your identity, though. But if they don't have good ID, they can't even attach to your credit score.)

Nobody is going to send a subpoena for your $15/mo subscription on a dead credit card.

These concerns are all frivolous and irrelevant for 99% of consumer purchases that charge in the tens of dollars per month.

In the American legal system, it is important to distinguish between what is possible versus what is practical. And exploit that difference whenever you can.

This entire comment is waxing poetic about an imagined loophole that almost no one is actually relying on. If your credit card charge doesn’t go through, nearly every consumer oriented digital subscription simply revokes your access to the product. Neither side has any obligation to continue doing anything. There is no debt to collect on because nothing was delivered. There is no contract that was breached because the purchaser is not obligated to subscribe to future services.

It would make logical sense for it to function like that, but go ahead and test your theory. You will quickly find most places happily continue service for a while while sending bills and threatening collections. This is especially true of those services that are difficult to cancel.

I’ve done this numerous times without problem. It’s one of the great things about virtual credit cards.

The grandparent was not just about subscriptions, but about a solution to the privacy and easy to cancel issue ("just close"), with the parent comment being about issues with payments missed in that case, going beyond subscriptions alone.

And you'd be surprised how some services continue to charge you (and give you the service) if your card stops working. I've had it happen several times when cards expire (due to messy post office service, it's a mess to renew here, plus I often forget to actively go and personally get the new one in time).

But it can affect your credit score and can affect your ability to get future loans.

Please read the whole thread. That's been debunked multiple times.

> And exploit that difference whenever you can.

no thank you. I'd rather live in a world where we try to make it better not race to the bottom

it seems kinda unfair to look at cases where companies pull shady shit around preventing cancellation, hiding the options, making people spend an hour on the phone then blame the consumer for a "race to the bottom" when they use a workaround to make cancelling the flip of a switch (like it should be).

No one is saying Privacy.com like methods are, for lack of a better word, wrong. Go ahead and fight unethical behavior with your own unethical behavior. The concern is that, despite unethical behavior being legal, you being unethical back doesn’t void the contract.

Write us when you land in that fantasy.

Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.

Yes, but it's better to be good and be burned - knowing full well it could've happened - than to be evil to others.

Don't be naive about it, you have to be brave. There's always a chance someone betrays you, but it's a risk worth taking.

There is absolutely no way cancelling a credit card is evil or immoral. All they had to do was make it easy for us to cancel the subscriptions but no, gotta retain the consumer at all costs even if it means making their life hell until they'd rather keep paying than deal with the cancellation process.

They're the ones exploiting our "contractual obligation" to keep paying them despite no longer wanting the service. They deserve absolutely everything that happens as a result of their abuse. We won't apologize.

Oh, I entirely agree with you. I was referring to what the parent said, implying that you should be bad because someone else will beat you to it.

Canceling a credit card or charging back a charge for a prepaid service you aren't using is not immoral or evil by any stretch of any real moral code.

Could they not still send the debt to collections and ding your credit?

How is collections going to know whose credit to ding?

How does a lawyer know who to send the threatening letters to? This whole conversation exists on the assumption that you're not fully anonymous in this relationship.

You aren't fully anonymous. Privacy.com has your info. The vendor, or their bank, can easily determine you gave them a privacy.com number. A court will happily compel privacy.com to turn over your info if the vendor can show the most basics of an agreement between you and them.

It doesn't guarantee the vendor will win a final judgement but no court is going to prevent them from tracking you down.

> the vendor, or their bank, can easily determine you gave them a privacy.com number

evidence for that, please?

There are numerous advantages to a privacy.com number besides cancellation:

* you're sure that your real credit card will not leak out when (not if) they get hacked.

* You get notified every time the card is charged (or declined).

* You can set dollar limits so they can't pile on other charges.

* You have a complete record of all the charges on that card. You know that no other vendor can use it.

So refusing a privacy.com card, if they can even do it, would be a consumer-unfriendly act.

Presumably privacy.com knows your real identity, and presumably the privacy.com credit card number you give to the merchant can be traced back to privacy.com. From there the merchant is just a court order away from getting your contact info, and if you actually do owe them money, I don't think a judge would balk at that, at least not after the merchant has filed suit against you (as John/Jane Doe).

But of course no merchant is going to go through the effort and expense to do all this, unless you owe them a decent chunk of change. A couple months of a $15/mo subscription likely doesn't clear that bar.

> Presumably privacy.com knows your real identity

If privacy.com doxed their users for some random company, that would ruin the whole purpose of their service...

> presumably the privacy.com credit card number you give to the merchant can be traced back to privacy.com.

Unknown. Do you have some evidence of that?

Yes, this is what LAFitness and others do if you cancel the credit card.

I want to quit the gym!!

I don't buy it. What you say may be true if some small percentage of customers do it, however if this advice would start to become common knowledge, the amounts on the table change and so probably does the willingness to go after the customers.

Also, this sounds like a great opportunity for privacy.com to have a lucrative side business of bulk-selling the real customer data to collections agencies - or maybe just open up a collections agency themselves. How much do you trust them?

>What you say may be true if some small percentage of customers do it, however if this advice would start to become common knowledge, the amounts on the table change and so probably does the willingness to go after the customers.

So? As long as this doesn't happen, it's still practical.

Might as well say "this would stop working if credit services cease following a societal collapse". Sure, but it's not an actual issue for the foreseeable future.

The second paragraph is silly. Their business would collapse in a heartbeat.

If a large percentage of customers did this, then there would be pressure on legislators to crack down on it, but the compromise to emerge would be that online services ALSO have to make it as easy to cancel as it was to join.

Or if it's a pre-paid system, a payment failure implies automatic non-renewal until further actual is taken.

Exactly. Many options would be fair to consumers AND to merchants. Except the sleazy merchants.

Won't closing a card without cancelling impact your credit score as all the the declines pile up?

A decline by itself, especially to a cancelled or expired card will not impact your credit score.

The entity charging you would need to report your missing payments to a credit agency. And to do that generally they need your social security number.

For the most part, you can be reasonable sure that unless you gave them your social security number they will not show up on your credit report.

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