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Dave Smith[_1_]

On 2016-01-09 4:22 PM, wrote:
> In response to a come-on, my wife took out a trial subscription to Cooks
> Illustrated. Now they sent her a "bill" saying that because she had signed up
> for their Six Months Automatic Renewal program, she should please get the
> money in.
>
> Did anyone ever run afoul of this? She never would have tried the
> magazine had she known she was signing up to subscribe in perpetuity.
>

I think it is too common to see negative option billing. Rather than
paying up front and renewing at the end of the subscription period, they
give you a free sample and don't really tell you that the reason they
want your credit card information is that they will automatically bill
you until you cancel.

My wife fell into that with ancestry.com. I had been interested by
opted not to do the negative option thing in case I forgot to cancel.
She usually handles the credit card bills and does not question my
charges. This past summer I looked at the MasterCard bill and saw a
charge for over $100 for Ancestry.com. I called the CC company to
dispute it and learned it had been going on for four years and they gave
me the number of Ancestry.com. After dealing with them I had to discuss
it with my wife. She thought she had applied for a free trial and had no
idea they were going to charge us... over and over again. If I had
known that we were paying for it I would have used it.

My wife also buys annual subscriptions for a couple magazines as gifts
for some family members. We ended up cancelling a couple of them
because of their marketing ploys. She would order and pay for a yearly
subscription, and then 2-3 months later they would start sending her
bills for renewal. I guess they figured that people don't keep track of
when they buy an annual subscription and that they can suck you into a
premature renewal.