Comment by Danjoe4 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Danjoe4 | Hacker News Reader

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Revoking ACH authorization is an effective tactic. The CFPB dictates that if you give 3 days notice, companies are obligated to honor this. If they charge you afterwards, your bank will be more than happy to reverse the charge. To be clear, this doesn't void the contract you have with them, you're simply revoking their privilege to charge your payment method. If they want your money they'd have to take you to small claims. Here is a sample email which I've used many times to great effect:

May this email serve as your notice to revoke the ACH/Bank Access/Debit Card authorizations of both the below primary bank account and debit card, from [company] effective today, [date]

[Bank Name] Checking Account x** Savings Account x** and Debit Card x**

Additionally, I am revoking withdrawal authorizations from any other accounts associated with my personal information, listed below

name: DOB: phone #: email:

I am also revoking your further access to my banking accounts and have already removed your authorization with the Bank directly.

THIS REVOCATION APPLIES FOR THE NEXT PAYMENT DUE DATE AND ALL FUTURE DUE DATES.

Kindly, I ask that your response to this email shall be confirmation of receipt and you agree it is at least 3 business days prior to any scheduled repayments or membership fee deduction.

Note that in accordance with 12 CFR Part 1005.10(c) (Regulation E) you MUST HALT PAYMENT.

FAIL TO COMPLY and I will submit a report to the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. Additionally, you will be responsible for any fees, including overdraft fees, incurred as a result of your failure to halt payment

> To be clear, this doesn't void the contract you have with them, you're simply revoking their privilege to charge your payment method.

It's gotten better, but on more than one occasion I've had to argue with my bank to honor my request to block the charges. I've had tellers say "Well, if you have a subscription with them, this needs to be allowed". No. As you say - my bank's obligation is to honor my account wishes, not be an arbiter of my agreements with third parties.

That is fucking bizarre that bank personnel would even try to argue with you. Why would a bank want their customers to be ripped off by shitty subscriptions?

Unfortunately, "ACH authorization" is a collective delusion, as there is no technical mechanism in the protocol to prevent ACH pulls.

Better to use something like a Privacy card in the first place so you can revoke it on your own terms.

It's not a delusion. From a legal perspective, the bank treats actions which are authorized by you and actions which are not differently. If you enter into an agreement that says you're authorizing entity X to charge you based on a contract and they charge you, the bank is likely to side with them, and tell you to go sue them if you want your money bank. If the bank knows that you did not authorize the ACH transfer, they're supposed to reverse the transaction.

Bits have color, no matter what us software engineers think: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

Am I missing some context here? This seems to not be related to the grandparent comment at all, to me.

>there is no technical mechanism in the protocol to prevent ACH pull

Nothing in the protocol, but many individual banks have their own in-house ways of failing the pull.

There doesn't have to be a technical mechanism. There is a legal one.

Are there privacy cards that work? I find that once a recurring charge is established and tied to an account it's very hard to cancel, surviving expired cards or even canceled card numbers.

I think they're referring to privacy.com specifically, which should give fully cancellable virtual cards. Or so I heard.

citi, capital one, and others call it “virtual cards”. They allow you to set charge limits and exp date. I always choose the current month + 1 for expiration and for charge limit, $1 more than the anticipated charge

Or just get you dinged for $200+ of fraud and they will refuse to do anything about it.

Does this refer to privacy.com, or something else?

Privacy generates a valid CC # with protections you set up (one-time use, monthly maxes, per-charge maxes, etc).

You can revoke a subscription in PayPal.

The mechanism is when the bank authorizes or denys the ACH pull.

It is common for gyms to only accept ACH

Some companies report this type of thing to consumer trust worthiness services (similar to credit bureaus). Other companies use these services to gage customer risk before initiating new service so you can effectively get yourself blacklisted.

Not saying this answer isn't the way to do it, but it's not without additional collateral damage in some cases.

Even if it doesn't impact other companies, the company in question may refuse to do business with you in the future (which may or may not be of concern).

> and have already removed your authorization with the Bank directly

Can you expand on what you mean by this?

My banks don't offer me some way to revoke authorization from the bank's website. Does this mean calling customer service and giving them a business name to disallow future ach debits from?

And people actually reply to that?

What do you do if they tell you no one got this email?

You mean what do you do if someone knowingly lies in order to continue fraudulently charging you for something? Sounds like a crime to me.

But more realistically, at that point you've already filed a claim with the CFPB so who cares what they say? It will get settled one way or the other.

We live in a world of spam filters. Email is not a reliable delivery system. "I didn't see it" is always plausible when dealing with emails.

This would be a super duper feature add to a company or service that learns all your subscriptions and helps you cancel them.

> If they want your money they'd have to take you to small claims.

No, they'll just send it to collections, and now your credit is dinged for seven years because unless they violated their contract with you, you're still liable for the charges.

I've let a few things go to collections over the years. Comcast disputes, etc. Never really saw any impact from this. Total charge-offs probably around $1000. Not once have I had an issue getting financing or mortgage.

If you are intending to pay cash for everything, you don't even need a credit score. No one cares about who you are or what you did when you walk in the door with a bag of cash in each hand.

Ive never heard of gyms doing that. Is it real? They are not a lender and are not lending money to you, so I don’t see how they can affect your credit report. There’s no credit involved.

Anyone actually have a credit report with an unpaid gym membership in the report?

There is credit involved, because the contracts are worded such that's, say, a 12 month contract paid in monthly installments. The credit is the outstanding balance vs. if you had paid for the full year in cash up front.

Your credit report is answering one question: How good are you about paying for things you've agreed to pay for.

Seems unlikely - collections only want to work with bills large enough that their odds of payment make it worth talking to you. Collectors never gives full price, they pay the person you owe some smaller amount, and when you pay they collect the difference.

There are levels of collections though the first is for things where they expect you will pay, you just need a payment plan (some medical labs don't do billing in house, they always sell it to collections), so collections will buy the bill for the pull price minus $50 (or some minimal amount in that range): since most people are going to pay collections just needs to setup the details for which $50 is a fair price. At the other end there are bills that they know you are not going to pay, collections will buy the a multi-thousand dollar bill for $1, and see if they can get any form of payment at all out of you.

Anyway, the bottom line is for a gym you are never going to owe enough that it is worthwhile for collections to touch it.

I had a book from college that went missing. Paid 100 at start of semester. Supposed to return it at end.

99 dollar ding on credit. Hundreds of calls from hundreds of numbers about it. Took years to finally block all the numbers.

Beyond abusive.

Worked on collections software for XX years. I definitely knew of a few clients that collected on behalf of gyms.

You'd be surprised what gets sent to collections. I recall one client that collected on behalf of a fried chicken restaurant.

I don't think they can do this- generally credit is tracked by social security number (in the USA). If you don't provide them with one, they will not be able to report you to a credit bureau.

Do you have a source, because I'm pretty sure that's false — they can use a combination of other identifying information such as name, birthdate, and address.

If you're dealing with a (normally small) company that generally takes care of their customers, an email like this as a conversation starter is just going to make the customer support reps lives miserable and make them not want to lift a finger for you. Save this for the companies that really deserve it.

This isn't about service reps, it's about you. Sometimes you have to look out for yourself. This is hardly being abusive to service reps so they can suck it up and deal with it.

You should care about how you treat others. When a simple "hey, can you help me cancel my subscription?" would suffice, there's no reason to make threats and go to the extreme.

Feelings do not trump laws. If those reps are miserable working at a company knowingly employing deceptive or predatory tactics, they should find employment elsewhere.

I literally said save it for the companies that deserve it... Did you fail to read my entire comment?

A decent person cares about being decent towards other human beings.

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