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Comment by ruph123 | Hacker News Reader

How is this legal? This always seemed like a weird "hack" to me. Just because your payment method does not work anymore, this does not cancel your buying contract. If they wanted to, couldn't they just sue you?

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You’re exactly correct. The payment obligation still exists through the contract for service; you’ve just disabled the means to automatically settle that debt. So the debt accumulates. Sometimes a company writes it off as bad debt and terminates it for non-payment, other times they sell it to a collections agency and ding your credit (e.g. gyms).

Oh wow... If that's not another dark pattern, hell I don't know how to call it. So no company out there would automatically cancel your contract if they aren't able to debit from you? How's that even possible? If I understood correctly the debt will increase indefinitely even let's say after two failed attempts to charge from you? Why is not that illegal?

Because you agreed to pay them and you’re reneging on your part of the agreement. If you want to terminate the contract, you need to terminate it in the way spelled out in the contract. If it states that not paying your bill automatically terminates the agreement, then your fine. If not, well, you can’t make up your own rules once the ink is dry.

What contract?

Did you sign a piece of paper promising to buy it for the next year? They do this even after 3 or 5 or 11 years of service after all, so even in the unlikely event there was a proper contract, your complaint is sort of moot.

Are you going to claim that it's a verbal contract? Those are rather narrowly defined. Telling your friend "Oh yeh, I'd buy one of those when you get one in!" isn't a verbal contract. At minimum, there's no mutuality going on here. They suffer no detriment from 1 in 10 zillion subscribers forcing a cancellation they made impossible in the first place. Verbal contracts should require, at least, that someone met you face to face and heard/saw you assent.

There's a strange cultural phenomenon going on in the modern world, where people believe that contract norms/laws govern things that they absolutely do not.

But I think technically the contract is being renewed, since it's on a monthly basis (except of course, if it's a yearly commitment like Adobe, but you are paying monthly).

Just cancelling the payment without any contact isn't legal, but if the company makes it hard for you to cancel that's already fraud and after that the contract is normally moot. (IANAL, by the way, and yes, there are enough obvious details being handwaved here that it doesn't matter anyway.)

But a company suing you to get monthly payments for future monthly services raises so many red flags that I can't imagine anybody even accepting getting involved with it.

Well, to be honest I actually haven't thought about it that much (about the legal consequences). But hey if you start looking for the cancellation of your subscription and you run into this rabbit hole, can't you just simply justify that is not your fault that company X is deliberately using an anti-pattern to keep you hooked and you wasted too much time looking for it and finally gave up?

Edit: Has anyone used this technique and got into legal troubles?

It's a nuclear option and you need to justify it, but having made good-faith efforts to cancel will cover you, as any company starting legal action will also need to explain their side of events and why they ignored your good-faith effort to cancel. This will also bring any of their dark patterns to light in front of a court which they definitely wouldn't want, so in practice you are fine.

I don't know exactly what would happen, but I assume they'd get a collection agency to harass you for it, or possibly sell the 'debt' to one. Suing you would be more effort than it's worth.

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