This seems like a great credit card benefit. CC's offer all sorts of "cash back", "insured against loss/damage", "miles", and other things to attract customers. How about a "no hassle cancellations service". How about: "Switch your monthly Comcast bill to pay through us, and cancel any time with one quick call or do it online!" CC company gets a nice stream of monthly charges out of it.

I completely agree. Cancelling a service should be as easy as asking the bank to block the payments. The problem will solve itself.

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...

Steam is justified in doing it.

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.

Their refund policy is only generous in US terms - they were sued into implementing it by the Australian consumer protection agency.

> Steam is justified in doing it.

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.

Sony does this big time.

Privacy.com offers this. You just generate an isolated card for the merchant and close it after cancelling.

That's not legally sound. They can claim to have still been providing the services you contracted for (whether you used them or not) and get a court judgement against you.

How so? The cancellation request has already been made in writing. This just adds protection against the merchant continuing to charge you.

If the merchant attempts to continue to charge you, it's because they have some argument that they're authorised to (e.g. they didn't receive your cancellation request). Getting a credit card charge you can dispute gives you more visibility and makes it easier to show good faith.

I could see this having problems for credit dispute.

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

Yes, disputes have to be done through Privacy from what I understand. See: https://support.privacy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360012288114-H...

I would prefer this to any cash back scheme they can cook up. I would rather the card company didn’t take a significant share of the purchase and run as lean as possible. I’m sure that I am in the minority viewpoint here though.

And then watch Comcast or the gym send your bill to collections.

In most cases you can. If you've taken reasonable steps to cancel in good faith and the merchant is uncooperative then canceling the payment is the logical next step.

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).

> So why can't we simply refuse to pay?

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.

Nonpayment doesn't usually terminate contracts. In fact it may be a breach.

Good luck with that. Many banks will charge you to stop recurring payments, for one thing. I actually cancelled an entire credit card once to get rid of a gym membership.

That we don't have this sort of control over our finances (or need to opt in to some special feature one bank might have) is one of our society's most ridiculous failings of the regular joe.

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.

Abandon pull payments systems. Instead introduce push payment systems. You create an account, they say "include 54623UCHAB54U in your reference", you push some money in and voila, it's activated. Then next month you don't and voila, it's deactivated. Then later on you push money in it's reactivated.

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.