When it’s quit-or-get-billed time,
technical snafus are doubly frustrating. I was surprised to see how many
services – such as ESPN Insider, FreeCreditScore-com, GameHouse, IMDb Pro,
RealPlayer Super Pass, and Spotify Premium – suffered from technical errors on
their sites that made canceling hard.
The
issue was that the browser window Spotify spawned for canceling wouldn’t accept
Facebook password
With Spotify, for example, I ran into a
password glitch. When I indicated that I wanted to cancel my Spotify account
within the client software, the service-cancellation page loaded in my browser
and asked me to resubmit my Spotify password. Because I had been forced to set
up my Spotify account with my Facebook credentials, I entered my Facebook
password. Spotify rejected that password several times, serving up an
“Incorrect Password” message despite the fact that I had verified it was
correct. At this point, I had few options other than to select the ‘Forgot your
password?’ link.
Next, Spotify declared: “It looks like you
are using your Facebook credentials to log in to Spotify. To change your
Facebook password go to your settings page at Facebook.com.” After I changed
the password using my Google Chrome browser, Spotify still refused to accept my
password on its site. I couldn’t unsubscribe.
Graham James, a Spotify spokes-person,
later told me that I wasn’t the only person hit with this bug. He said that a
“medium-sized” group of people was frustrated by this problem earlier this
year, and that the glitch had since been corrected. The issue, James said, was
that the browser window Spotify spawned for canceling wouldn’t accept Facebook
password. The fix was to open a different browser: If you were using, say,
Chrome, you could avoid the problem by opening the same Web page in Internet
Explorer.
Hard to find, hard to cancel
I had a particularly difficult time
attempting to cancel a 30-day trial of SociallyKnow, an $11.95-a-month service
that monitors your child’s Facebook account and reports signs of bullying or
risky communication. I could find no cancellation information on the website.
The toll-free phone number that I dialed took me to an answering system that
would accept only voicemail messages, with the promise that someone would get
back to me. When I emailed the company’s customer support department from a
link on the homepage, I received bounce-back messages saying “address unknown.”
I never received a callback despite leaving nearly a half-dozen requests for
the company to return my call.
After I contacted the company’s public
relations firm seeking comment for this report, I got a call from
SociallyKnow’s cofounder, Paul Crandell, who apologized. “There are obviously
some bugs to work out,” Crandell told me. He blamed technical errors for the
problems I had encountered with the service’s voicemail and email.
SociallyKnow, Crandell admitted, should make its cancellation instructions
clearer. In his defense, he said that the site offers some disclosure about how
to cancel the service, pointing to a sentence about half-way into the 3020-word
terms of service that states: “The Customer may terminate its SociallyKnow
account at any time and for any reason, after the first three months of
service, by sending an email to support @SociallyKnow.com.”
Susan Grant, director of consumer
protection at the Consumer Federation of America, says that free-trial offers
online account for a large number of consumer complaints to state and private
consumer-advocacy agencies. “We find people complain less about the services
themselves, and more about surprise charges and tricky terms of service,” Grant
notes. She says that typical complaints include mystery billing for services
that consumers don’t remember agreeing to pay for.
“Free trials are ubiquitous, and there are
just no standards, which is problematic for consumers. It’s very much a Wild
West out there,” Grant says. No two free trials are the same, she says, and
companies may employ several tricks. “It almost seems like they are making it
hard to quit on purpose.”
The pitfalls of free trials
Over the course of my testing, I discovered
quite a few of these tricks. If you’re considering signing up for a free trial,
watch for the following traps.
·
Free trials can cost you more in the long run
With my subscription to ESPN Insider, the
terms and conditions mentioned that “the renewal rate may be higher than the
introductory rate for first-time subscribers.” When I checked the prices, I saw
that ESPN charges $39.95 a year for ESPN Insider if you sign up without the
free trial. My free-trial arrangement, in contrast, worked out to a rate of
$44.95 per year.
·
Some free trials don’t prevent you from
incurring costs
My Audible 30-day free trial included two
free audiobooks. But if I had listened to a third book during the trial period,
I would have been charged before the end of my 30-day free trial.
Some
free trials don’t prevent you from incurring costs
·
Knowing when the trial starts stops can be
tricky
In some free trials, the day you start your
trial is day one. For instance, if you start a seven-day free trial on a Sunday
night at 10 p.m, the trial will end the following Saturday – not the following
Sunday at 10 p.m. Although you might naively assume that you have seven full
days from the moment you start, in fact you have only seven calendar days. This
issue is particularly tricky with free trials that last 72 hours, such as the
ones I tested at Match.com and at the Foreclosure Radar website.
·
Waiting until the last day can cost you
Cancelling on the last day of a free trial
may result in charges. That’s exactly what happened to me (by accident,
according to representatives) with my free trial subscriptions to the Cooks
Illustrated culinary website and to TrustFax.
·
Free trials may have costly conditions
With DVD-by-mail rental services such as
Blockbuster and Netflix, you must send DVDs back within a certain window, or
incur a charge. Blockbuster has a grace period of ten days past the end of
membership; after that it charges you $20 per DVD plus ship-ping and handling.
Netflix has a seven-day grace period, and then charges $14 for each DVD and $20
for Blu-ray discs.
With
DVD-by-mail rental services such as Blockbuster and Netflix, you must send DVDs
back within a certain window, or incur a charge.
·
The truth might be buried in the fine print
Companies providing free trials typically
emphasize the benefits of the trial while downplaying the actual terms of the
offer. The Socially-Know free trial, for example, converts into paid monthly
service with a three-month minimum membership requirement. So if you
inadvertently allow your free to become a paid subscription, you’re on the hook
for three months of service.
·
Some services use scare tactics
Free trials of identity-theft protection
services sometimes play fast and loose with the facts regarding the real threat
of ID theft, the Consumer Federation of American found. “Some use data
exaggerating the prevalence and risk of ID theft,” the CFA’s Susan Grant says.
When I called to cancel an ID-theft
protection service from LifeLock, Rebecca, a customer service representative
for the company, tried to retain me as a customer by citing U.S. statistics on
identity theft. Eleven million people last year had their identity stolen, she
told me.” That number has already been superseded this year”, she said. When I
asked her where the statistics she had cited came from, the LifeLock rep
claimed that the source was the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
However, I checked with the FTC, and a
spokesperson said that those numbers on ID theft. According to the U.S. Bureau
of Statistics, 8.6 million households in 2010 (the most recent figures
available) reported an attempted or actual incident of ID theft where a
person’s identity was used to open a bank or credit account. No preliminary
figures for 2012 were available.
When I asked Tami Nealy, a LifeLock
spokesperson, about the issue, she told me that the 11 million figure for ID
thefts in 2011 should have been credited to a report by Javelin Strategy and Research,
funded in part by Intersections, an ID-theft prevention firm. Nealy said that
ID theft in 2012, as compared with 2011, is on the rise according to a number
of different studies. But she also acknowledged that the representative had
incorrectly described the data no me as having come from the FTC.” We apologize
for any confusion her inadvertent cite error may have caused,” Nealy said.
