Using Zipcar may damage your credit

Re:Using Zipcar may damage your credit by jboydyhacker on Sunday September 19, 2010 @05:42PM (#1707033)

Wow this attitude is really offensive. If I want to auto renew a contract it should be something I willfully decide to do--not something that is auto-default. Then to presume that this guy gets his credit score hurt and potentially will have trouble getting loans and a mortgage all because some company is so insecure about the value of the service it provides that it has to trick consumers into renewing?

If your service is good, people will renew automatically. Given the proliferation of online services, it is absolutely impractical for people to keep track of many dozens of expiration dates.

There should be a federal law preventing this behavior. It's dishonest and a very bad practice. Zipcar should be held liable for any damage to this lad's credit. GRRR

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Re:Using Zipcar may damage your credit by randallsquared on Sunday September 19, 2010 @06:33PM (#1707132)

If I want to auto renew a contract it should be something I willfully decide to do

But in the contract, you already agreed to let them charge you every month. I don't know the wording, but it probably doesn't say "as long as this card is active". This wasn't a case, if I read correctly, of automatically renewing when he hadn't agreed to that, but of him promising to pay until he cancelled his account, and then admittedly attempting to defraud zipcar by neither paying nor canceling.

There should be a federal law preventing this behavior. It's dishonest and a very bad practice.

To be clear, do you mean the practice of agreeing to charges you have no intention of paying? ;)

I agree, though, that we desperately need contract reform. Maybe contracts which are not individually executed by at least one person on each side should be advisory only, or something. What with the uncertainty surrounding TOS, EULAs, licenses, and 20 pages of fine print, they nearly are anyway, in practice.

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Re:Using Zipcar may damage your credit by jboydyhacker on Sunday September 19, 2010 @07:04PM (#1707173)

To be clear, I mean the practice of opting into a renewed contract automatically. If you sign up for a year, and you want to sign up for one more year automatically, the decision to opt in should be something that you willfully do--not something that is written into a contract. There is no practical way for people to manage 20 different auto renewals. If your service has value they will sign up for it without being tricked into it by some slimeball legal wording.

oh and you can write a contract to do a lot of things--doesn't mean they all should be legal.

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