It might not be as fast as one would like, but it usually does the trick.
I'm not sure what my threshold is for reporting a company to a bureaucratic institution in hopes for resolution, but I think it would have to be very high.
It's just unfortunate that mailing a physical letter is such a pain.
It could be worse: it was only 4 years ago I needed to cancel my HVAC installation with Sears Home Services and invoked my right to cancel the contract under WA law - and Sears required me to send an actual telegram (yes, the old-school, hand-delivered, all-caps short text messages) to their head-office address. I used this company: https://www.americantelegram.com/timedatestamp.php - to send it (and yes, it worked and I got out of the contract). But wow. I don't know how this can possibly be legal as it places an unnecessary undue burden on consumers unless there's some archaic legal carve-out for telegrams specifically?
In France you can send a registered letter from the post office's website for just a few euros. Upload your PDF, they print it, deliver it and email you a receipt when it's done. For a little more you can request a signature from the recipient. Since they keep a copy and record, it acts as a cheap form of notarization and is valid for many legal purposes.
So, if a company allows the client to create a contract by phone or Internet, it should also be easy to cancel it the same way.
no such thing exists; having to go to court at all is an expensive hassle
I’ve never heard of such a law before, but if one exists, it would be individual state law since corporations are incorporated at the state level. Do you have a link for this?
Correct. My understanding is that every state has an equivalent law. I can't give any citations really, though - my own state (WA) buries the responsibilities and requirements for registered business' registered or agent addresses in multiple separate sections in the state law website.
Nothing against php but I love it when technology from different centuries comes together.
As best as I can tell, Zipcar seems to be a shell of a company barely still functioning.
Yeah, Vodafone ... still sending invoices which deny I cancelled my contract half a year ago.
edit:grammar
In Germany usually your contract says it will automatically extend for a year unless cancelled. This basically makes your contract open ended with cancellation option, which you need to exercise if you want to cancel. You can also cancel your contract in case the other party change anything related to it.
There's nothing wrong with that, you just need to read what you sign. And it's a common practice, not a surprise. If you want to be sure your contract will not extend, you can always hand over the cancellation request at the time of signing the contract.
I don't understand what distinction you're trying to draw there. It definitely feels as though the contract is automatically being renewed. Contrast with what I view as "a mere extension" - you contract for two years, and then after that two year period is over, it extends on a month-by-month basis and you can cancel at any time.
>There's nothing wrong with that, you just need to read what you sign.
This is a silly argument. The idea that large businesses and individual customers are equal has been disproved multiple times. It's like arguing that the American and European health care systems are equal. I can't modify the contract to have a fair and reasonable cancellation terms. But the business doesn't need to have unfair and unreasonable cancellation terms to provide a competitive product. It's just that they can say "These are the terms on which we will do business. Accept them, or accept the equivalent terms from another business."
In Germany, consumer rights basically don't exist and the playing field is heavily tilted towards big business.
I actually worked for a company that implemented an AI to try to recognized those email to automate the cancellation process (there was still a human at the end to validate the cancellation to avoid false positive).
Only after that, should a divorce occur.
The prenup is hardcoded.
https://youtu.be/BBm8GqMNwXUThat simple formulation is easier. “It must be as easy to cancel a service/subscription as to sign up”. Able to sign up online? Then it must be possible to cancel online
Gotta be careful with online service accounts though. Doing charge backs actually violates their terms of service and will probably get people's accounts banned/deleted. Not a good idea to do a charge back on something like a Steam account with over $2000 spent on it. The woes of DRM...
Their refund policy is generous. If you haven't played the game for less than 2 hours, you can get a refund, no questions asked. Normal customers generally don't need to apply chargebacks because of this policy.
Credit card thieves however, make purchases that are charged back eventually. Steam goes thermonuclear on such accounts, reducing the incentive for credit card fraud on their store.
Maybe in cases where the fraud is proven. After the consumer buys tons of stuff on an online store, the company shouldn't be able to just delete their accounts unilaterally just because of one chargeback. There's a huge power imbalance here and consumers need protection.
> Their refund policy is generous.
What they offer is the bare minimum really. And they had to be condemned by a court of law in order to implement that policy. They also suffered zero consequences for years of consumer exploitation with their sales plus lack of refunds strategy in order to trap impulsive buyers. It's not a coincidence that Steam sales became a lot less generous after the refunds policy was implemented.
For example, your Chase card pays Piracy.com. Some vendor makes an unauthorized charge on your Privacy card. Now you have to deal with Privacy's policy instead of your bank's policies to dispute
They can still send your account to collections or ding your credit record, but you can still refuse to pay; ultimately the only way they legally force you to pay is by going through the courts system but I expect that if you have documentation of your (unsuccessful) efforts to cancel the case should be in your favor (which is why this will never reach the courts in the first place).
Because legal consumer protections in the US are not very strong, and if you are wronged, you are instead supposed to go to arbitration, or file a lawsuit.
I shouldn't have to "cancel my gym membership". I just stop giving them money and my keycard stops letting me in. I shouldn't have to remain eternally vigilant with my credit card statements lest someone keeps pulling money from it, that simply shouldn't even be something that is possible.
So bizarre. This kind of one-way certainty is what I like about cash and thus Bitcoin. For example, it's kind of win-win that more shady websites (file lockers, mega.nz, porn, etc.) tend to use Bitcoin because it's also a weight off your shoulders.
I mean, I know it's a dreamland. It could come about if contracts between businesses and consumers are basically regulated into standardisation as they should be.
EDIT: looks like they settled for $1.25 million, a ridiculous salon on the wrist when their take home was many many times that
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/aol-settles-cancellations-suit/
There may have been other suits... this one was limited to NY?
1. To make it difficult and frustrating to cancel by wasting the user's time. 2. To allow the company the opportunity to haggle the price of the subscription down, convince you not to cancel, or worse, upsell you on other services.
I can totally foresee some kind of Google Duplex detection in the future intended specifically to ensure that they're wasting the time of a human, not a pile of linear algebra in a Google datacenter. Or perhaps they play legal games with two-party consent states to try and find a way to sue Google into not offering the service.