Go to Privacy.com. Register and give your real credit card. Don't get the $10/month subscription for "real" privacy, unless you really don't want a record of your purchases.
Now when you "subscribe" to WhizBang online, go to Privacy and create a special credit card just for WhizBang. Give WhizBang a fake name and address as well, and don't use your "regular" email. Create some spares on ProtonMail or some other low-friction service.
When WhizBang goes to verify your credit card, your fake name & address are not checked. You can give them whatever you want.
Your purchase will appear on your regular credit card records. If you want Privacy to use a fake seller, you have to pay for that.
When you want to cancel WhizBang, you just close their credit card. They will get a Decline when they go to charge it, and they'll eventually cancel you. You can go through their official cancellation process, if you want to.
To those arguing that legions of lawyers are going to track you down and sue you:
Yes, in many jurisdictions, including the US, canceling your credit card does not change your obligation to pay. (Imagine buying a $10,000 physical product and the seller forgets to charge until the day after delivery, and you've canceled the card. You're not getting out of that.)
However, there is substantial friction in the American legal system. Of course, if they can find you, they will send a threatening form letter from a lawyer. If you're not experienced with the legal system, this seems scary. But: big whoop.
It costs $5k-20k to fully pursue a contractual claim. Nobody does this for small consumer purchases. (They will send you to collections, if they know your identity, though. But if they don't have good ID, they can't even attach to your credit score.)
Nobody is going to send a subpoena for your $15/mo subscription on a dead credit card.
These concerns are all frivolous and irrelevant for 99% of consumer purchases that charge in the tens of dollars per month.
In the American legal system, it is important to distinguish between what is possible versus what is practical. And exploit that difference whenever you can.
This entire comment is waxing poetic about an imagined loophole that almost no one is actually relying on. If your credit card charge doesn’t go through, nearly every consumer oriented digital subscription simply revokes your access to the product. Neither side has any obligation to continue doing anything. There is no debt to collect on because nothing was delivered. There is no contract that was breached because the purchaser is not obligated to subscribe to future services.
It would make logical sense for it to function like that, but go ahead and test your theory. You will quickly find most places happily continue service for a while while sending bills and threatening collections.
This is especially true of those services that are difficult to cancel.
The grandparent was not just about subscriptions, but about a solution to the privacy and easy to cancel issue ("just close"), with the parent comment being about issues with payments missed in that case, going beyond subscriptions alone.
And you'd be surprised how some services continue to charge you (and give you the service) if your card stops working. I've had it happen several times when cards expire (due to messy post office service, it's a mess to renew here, plus I often forget to actively go and personally get the new one in time).
it seems kinda unfair to look at cases where companies pull shady shit around preventing cancellation, hiding the options, making people spend an hour on the phone then blame the consumer for a "race to the bottom" when they use a workaround to make cancelling the flip of a switch (like it should be).
No one is saying Privacy.com like methods are, for lack of a better word, wrong. Go ahead and fight unethical behavior with your own unethical behavior. The concern is that, despite unethical behavior being legal, you being unethical back doesn’t void the contract.
There is absolutely no way cancelling a credit card is evil or immoral. All they had to do was make it easy for us to cancel the subscriptions but no, gotta retain the consumer at all costs even if it means making their life hell until they'd rather keep paying than deal with the cancellation process.
They're the ones exploiting our "contractual obligation" to keep paying them despite no longer wanting the service. They deserve absolutely everything that happens as a result of their abuse. We won't apologize.
Presumably privacy.com knows your real identity, and presumably the privacy.com credit card number you give to the merchant can be traced back to privacy.com. From there the merchant is just a court order away from getting your contact info, and if you actually do owe them money, I don't think a judge would balk at that, at least not after the merchant has filed suit against you (as John/Jane Doe).
But of course no merchant is going to go through the effort and expense to do all this, unless you owe them a decent chunk of change. A couple months of a $15/mo subscription likely doesn't clear that bar.
How does a lawyer know who to send the threatening letters to? This whole conversation exists on the assumption that you're not fully anonymous in this relationship.
You aren't fully anonymous. Privacy.com has your info. The vendor, or their bank, can easily determine you gave them a privacy.com number. A court will happily compel privacy.com to turn over your info if the vendor can show the most basics of an agreement between you and them.
It doesn't guarantee the vendor will win a final judgement but no court is going to prevent them from tracking you down.
I don't buy it. What you say may be true if some small percentage of customers do it, however if this advice would start to become common knowledge, the amounts on the table change and so probably does the willingness to go after the customers.
Also, this sounds like a great opportunity for privacy.com to have a lucrative side business of bulk-selling the real customer data to collections agencies - or maybe just open up a collections agency themselves. How much do you trust them?
>What you say may be true if some small percentage of customers do it, however if this advice would start to become common knowledge, the amounts on the table change and so probably does the willingness to go after the customers.
So? As long as this doesn't happen, it's still practical.
Might as well say "this would stop working if credit services cease following a societal collapse". Sure, but it's not an actual issue for the foreseeable future.
The second paragraph is silly. Their business would collapse in a heartbeat.
If a large percentage of customers did this, then there would be pressure on legislators to crack down on it, but the compromise to emerge would be that online services ALSO have to make it as easy to cancel as it was to join.
Yes. Apparently this works differently in the US, but in any European country the ability to deduct currency is not governing the existence of an obligation of payment. That is determined by the (implicit) contract you agree to when subscribing to the service/product.
In most cases, since these sorts of subscriptions are pre-paid (that is, you pay for the month of service at the beginning of the month, before the service has been rendered), you can truthfully answer "I had no contractual obligation to pay".
And no, the judge is not going to say "you must only answer the question" if you answer that way; "when did you stop beating your wife?" doesn't actually work in a court of law.
Regardless, even if you did have a contractual obligation to pay, but found it impossible to cancel (assuming you're allowed to cancel without penalty), you could pretty safely answer "Yes" to that last question, and then your own lawyer would then expose the whole impossible-to-cancel situation when it's their turn to question you. Court of law isn't this "haha, gotcha!" thing.
If there's an issue about whether a question is admissible, the lawyers argue it. If the judge decides it is, they just say "Overruled; answer the question."
That's why your lawyer will tell you to look at them before answering.
Usually at this point I believe the correct procedure is that someone shouts “I’m putting the whole system on trial” and then everyone is forced to acquiesce.
I've been to actual trials, and yes it does happen.
You're right about one thing, though; it's much briefer. All the lawyer says is "Objection. Leading." They do it so much that they don't waste words like on TV.
I'm not saying that's wrong, but I know that many or most patent infringement cases are tried in front of a jury. There are no criminal charges in those.
So in at least some civil cases, one side can request a jury trial. I'm not sure in which ones.
Yes. A jury trial can always be requested by either side. However, it’s up to the judge (or appeals courts) if the request is granted. The high stakes ones (that you hear about on the news) tend to have the request granted. My point was that they are only guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment for criminal trials. My wording wasn’t particularly clear about that.
Shouldn’t it be more like “it was my understanding that going through the process that took place constitutes a lawful cancellation of the service provided” or something like that? “Yes, but I thought it’s okay” sounds like a bit self incriminating.
Agreed, someone would have to be egregious to attract prosecutorial attention. But for a civil judgement, using a temporary card with a fake name that is cancelled without notice (particularly if a discount was offered up front in exchange for commitment) is going to weigh in the plaintiff's favor. That, in turn, factors into e.g. credit agencies when considering taking such items off a report after the debt collector who bought it begins collections.
TL; DR This is a fine strategy. But try to cancel using the service's means. If they force you through loopholes, fire off an email and carry on. None of this is legal advice. But it does seem like the courteous thing to do.
Prior to this year, German consumer contracts were even worse than American ones. Three years was the normal, with three month notice periods, limited cancellation windows, no prorated refunds, and just as many dark patterns.
Hadn't expected that from Germany! What changed? Here in NL the law requires that cancellation must always be possible through the same channels as signup, and I assumed this was due to a EU directive implemented everywhere.
I was flabbergasted that even NS (Dutch railway) tries this shit. I subscribed to one of their products through a simple webform, and to cancel I had to contact their webcare people in some kind of webchat. No thanks.
> Hadn't expected that from Germany! What changed?
I didn't see anything about EU compliance in the relevant news (and it was relatively big news for such a quotidian change). Possibly the number of people with useless gym etc. memberships after corona was the last straw - these were often 2-3y autorenewing contracts, for fairly large amounts.
I have sometimes seen shitty things from insurance companies. Such as: "Your insurance is renewing on August 1st and you need to send us a filled 3-page PDF to this address in order to cancel it 30 days prior"
My strategy: Fire off an email to whatever billing email is on there, say "I will not be renewing this insurance", and cancel the direct debit. They will try to charge, send a couple letters, and it's all safe to ignore because I've stated my intent to cancel in time.
If only those businesses weren't trying to start off a relationship by acting in bad faith (eg, making it incredibly difficult to cancel your subscription)...
If privacy.com gets a subpoena from a court, do you think they would just ignore it, or would they dutifully hand over any details of whoever owned that credit card?
That is illegal and depending on the type of service not possible. A delivered and received email constitutes due notice in many European countries (perhaps not all, not sure), which is likely to reach you. But if it is possible, I guess they couldn't, unless they are very determined and manage to force your VPN or CC issuer to disclose.
To note, in EU most sites will have strong verification of your credit cards (at least since last year)
Looking at their site, privacy.com doesn't seem to handle 3DSecure or any other DSP2 level of authentication. Has anyone recently succeeded making payments with that in the EU ?
Of course if you give your actual credit card number/CVV etc. but with a fake name it will get refused by your issuer.
One great feature of Privacy.com is that you can use pseudonyms rather than your legal name for making purchases. One "failure" mode I've encountered (twice!) is that if you accidentally reuse an old credit card account with a second service (eg. if you accidentally created a card for "donations" and use it at two different websites, or you create one for Ko-Fi or similar and it gets charged by multiple different "merchants" under the same service), the second transaction will fail. You'll get an email telling you the transaction was declined, but if you don't have email notifications enabled, it can get quite confusing why the payment isn't going through.
I generate free virtual cards with the Capital One Eno chrome browser extension
Works great and you can set a date for it to lock itself after to block charges, they even suggest it as a use case for stopping trials from charging you, etc. It generates a card per website and you can replace it as many times as you want all for free.
it doesn't always work though. Some companies can detect if you're using temporary credit cards and won't let the txn go through. Frustratingly it's often the ones that I would like to use it with the most.
I am curious if the card #s I can get directly from Citi might work but haven't tested it out. Those are a pain to generate compared to privacy.com though.
The first 6–8 digits of a credit card number represent the issuer (IIN, see [0]). Merchants can perform a lookup of those first few digits to their own denylist. Citi’s IIN for temporary cards should (in theory) be the same IIN used to issue non-temporary ones.
Now when you "subscribe" to WhizBang online, go to Privacy and create a special credit card just for WhizBang. Give WhizBang a fake name and address as well, and don't use your "regular" email. Create some spares on ProtonMail or some other low-friction service.
When WhizBang goes to verify your credit card, your fake name & address are not checked. You can give them whatever you want.
Your purchase will appear on your regular credit card records. If you want Privacy to use a fake seller, you have to pay for that.
When you want to cancel WhizBang, you just close their credit card. They will get a Decline when they go to charge it, and they'll eventually cancel you. You can go through their official cancellation process, if you want to.
This works. It's what I do.