This seems like a great idea, and I think Mastercard still has enough pull in the credit card industry to make this work.
Please do MasterCard. When I worked TTY I heard so so so many elderly people get fucker over by this.
I think MC and all major CC’s get lots of calls from those who have been duped by such things and in my experience yes they do automatically credit. So it’s just making it a policy, which is a good one.
The cynic in me wonders if it’s gotten to the point that the money it costs Mastercard to deal with victims of this practice exceeds the money they get from the free trial customers that don’t bother complaining after they get billed.
But yeah free trials that ask for your credit card are indeed a big hassle because you have to remember to cancel before the trial is over, and some companies don’t have a good or effective cancel procedure.
That’d be the realist in you, not the cynic. Financial institutions that care about customers more than about their bottom line? Hah!
This happened to me a few years ago. I was banking online and after I finished, I was asked to fill out a survey in exchange for a free offer. The word trial was not used, I specifically remembered free offer. I was redirected to another site for the survey, but I didn’t click on spam bait or do anything stupid. This happened while I was banking with Citibank.
I was given a choice of several products and I selected a skin cream. I used my AMEX card for the S+H. I received the cream, a full sized bottle not the smaller sample I’d been expecting.
A few weeks later they tried to bill me for around $100. I know this because AMEX called me before the charge hit my account. I told them exactly what happened as per above. Then I said “ I guess the OFFER was free, not the product. I did agree to this even if I didn’t understand it. I guess I need to call your resolution department to dispute it. “.
And they said, you don’t need to do that, the charge will be removed from your account. And it was.
The kicker to this story, the surprise twist I guess, was that was the best goddamn skin cream I’ve ever tried. I wouldn’t pay $100 for ANY skin cream, but I might have paid to $50 or even $60 for this stuff. I used every last drop and when it was gone I cut open the bottle and scraped out the last drops. It really worked.
Too bad the company had such bad sales practices.
My mom ran into a similar situation: it wasn’t a CC scam, just a run-of-the-mill MLM scheme, but it did end up costing her a friendship. She was really impressed by her dealer friend’s MLM toiletry products, but she was only interested in buying them, not selling them, and her friend kept on insisting so much that she stopped talking to her rather than continue to get pestered.
I hate that. It used to be that if I had a friend that was trying to make a little money with that MLM stuff, I’d buy a little something to help them out. When I was a kid, my mom had a Avon lady that would come over to sell her cosmetics and give us these cute lipstick samples. I had good memories of it,
But now, they aren’t even interested in selling you product, they want to rope you into their little sales racket. At the time, I had a real sales job where most of my orders carried nice solid 4 figure commissions, occasionally more. I had no interest in selling skin creams or candles for a couple of extra hundred bucks a month. But they could be relentless.
So I finally stopped buying the stuff. Nothing from anyone. I just told everyone that there were too many people trying to sell me too much stuff, and I wasn’t buying any of it.
I have one of those green dot esque gift visa cards, I keep around $50 or so on it at any given time. Any time anything needs a card number for a nominal shipping and handling, or trial offer, or want to get something in a game, I use that number. We sort of organize our debit card purchase use - online buying from Amazon and select other sites we use frequently get one particular plastic, our MMORPG monthly fees and other entertainment only stuff [like movie tickets and our every 5th year vacation cruises] is on a different debit card [a vacation specific account] and our mortgage and household expenses are on a separate account that mrAru’s military pension and the amount we have budgeted for that sort of thing goes into specifically. We have a Navy Fed Cred account that we are going to be using specifically for the Nevada property and the expenses involved in getting the place built because there is a Navy Fed Cred in Fallon. mrAru is going to redirect his Navy pension there when we close out the Connecticut based Fed Cred we currently are using as our main account.
So far in the almost 20 years I have had the gift visa, the most that has ever been scammed/stolen is actually $17, which I consider amazingly lucky! But then again, I rarely click through on those free trial things that are paired up elsewhere, generally I get stuff like the trial size Crio Bru, which I will actually say was amazing, and will go into regular purchase Chez Aru.
Check MC’s merchant agreement. I’m not going to dig it up right now, but I’m nearly positive they added a section or two (a regular section and something about disputes) covering recurring billing. I could be off, but if I’m not, you can assume that Visa did the same and American Express did something very similar, just with their own spin on it.
Personally, I think there should be a law about recurring billing. IMO, you should be able to cancel in the same, or similar, way as you’re allowed to sign up. That is, if you can sign up online, you can cancel online. That would also mean if you sign up over the phone, but they allow online enrolling, you should still be able to cancel online.
It wouldn’t hurt my feelings if they were required to give you a confirmation as well to avoid all the ‘I cancelled’, ‘well, you cancelled the wrong way’ BS.
While I’ve never joined, from what I understand, cancelling a gym membership seems to be the worst. I’ve heard, I don’t even know how many, horror stories about people getting the run around, and then on top of that, having to cancel multiple times and still getting charged. Or, changing their credit card number to avoid dealing with this and getting tossed into collects. I don’t want to re-hash and old threat, but someone here was planning to tell a gym they were moving out of the country, just to avoid all that.
In the case of a gym, if you can only sign up online, yeah, they’d still have you in the door to cancel, but the confirmation would (or should) carry a lot of weight.
And while we’re at it, signing up and cancelling should be about the same level of ease, however that’s defined.
To be honest, I’m surprised the powers that be haven’t stepped in to help consumers deal with cancelling gym memberships.
You can make a lot of rules on how easy it is to cancel, but companies will just bend the rules as far as they can.
I still think it’s better that the customer must take a positive step at the end of the trial if they want to continue and therefore be billed. So an opt-in at the end of the trial instead of opt-out.
Whenever I hear a commercial that mentions that the product is free, just pay shipping and handling or get a trial jar of something for only a penny, I always think to myself that I assume they wouldn’t take cash or a check. The S&H charge, or asking for a penny is just away to get your credit card number and get/trick/force you to sign up for recurring billing.