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FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

(www.ftc.gov)
1737 points pseudolus | 2 comments | 16 Oct 24 13:09 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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Beijinger ◴[16 Oct 24 18:37 UTC] No.41862263[source]▶
I want this "click-to-cancel" rule for any form of subscription. Everybody tries to bill you into oblivion. You must be insane if you don't use virtual credit card numbers today. I am apartment hunting right now. Most apartments don't exist and some Nigerian scammers try to make you request a "credit report" that is basically a subscription service and really difficult to cancel.
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crazygringo ◴[16 Oct 24 18:42 UTC] No.41862330[source]▶
> You must be insane if you don't use virtual credit card numbers today.

Virtual numbers protect against people stealing your number. They don't really do much against subscriptions.

If you sign up for a service and stop paying, it gets sent to collections, and then impacts your credit score because of unpaid debt. Whether you used a virtual number or not is irrelevant.

So it's not "insane" not to use virtual credit card numbers. To the contrary, it's just not usually worth the hassle. The few times my number got stolen and fraudulently used over the past two decades, I called and the transactions got reversed immediately. And those all happened after I used my card physically anyways, not online, so virtual numbers wouldn't have helped anyways.

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1. peterldowns ◴[16 Oct 24 18:55 UTC] No.41862503[source]▶
^ all of this is completely correct. I'll also add that many virtual credit cards that have "limits" or that let you "turn them off" work by not allowing transactions to auth, but merchants can almost always force an authorization that cannot be blocked. If you don't want to pay someone for a service you signed up for, you really do have to cancel your agreement with them, you can't just stop paying them.

I'm very excited about the new click-to-cancel rule for this reason — hopefully doing the "right" thing will be really easy and actually work.

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2. Beijinger ◴[19 Oct 24 17:02 UTC] No.41888973[source]▶
"but merchants can almost always force an authorization that cannot be blocked."

This is not true. They cant override a limit or bill a vCC that you disabled.