Comment by graypegg
6 days ago
Can’t this lead to pretty bad credit checks? Absolutely not defending the practice at all, but companies that charge an annual subscription paid monthly (like the leeches at Adobe) are generally allowed to report the cancellation as a delinquent account IIRC.
Yes, this only solves for them not being able to continue charging you, they would still be within their rights to continue to accrue debt in your name and report it to the credit agencies in this case, utterly ruining your credit and ultimately inundating you with calls from bill collectors.
Thanks for bringing this up. I wasn’t aware this could happen, but it hasn’t happened to me yet. I’m a bit afraid to continue doing this now.
That's when you dispute the debt in writing and all that good stuff.
Except, if you're in a bad position to dispute the credit card charge, you're probably in a bad position to dispute the debt as well. If whatever you signed up for had ironclad renewal clauses you'd find it very hard to wriggle out of it, temporary credit card or not.
Well you can always send a dispute letter and then it's on the charging company to prove to the card issuer that the charge is legitimate I think. Now this probably won't get you out of a renewal charge if you signed a contract and did absolutely nothing to cancel, but if you have evidence you sent an email or contacted them, then you have some sort of case the card issuer has to look at. Especially if you can show you didn't use the product after they charged you.
If anything they can't argue that you want the service on the next renewal date.
I do know sometimes you are stuck. I had a friend sign up for home security monitoring on a 3 year contract - and Ring was better, so they wanted to cancel it, but they were unable to get out of it.