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How I Tricked a Subscription Into Finally Letting Me Cancel Online
Years ago, I signed up for a digital subscription to my local newspaper. This was not only a means of having access to paywalled stories but also just to support them. Well, since then, the price (like with most subscriptions these days) has continued to rise. Plus, an independent news organization has popped up in Springfield, leading me to want to support them more than the mass media company that owns the other outlet. Unfortunately, any time I’d go to cancel my subscription, I’d run into issues, leading to an annual tradition where I see the charge show up on my credit card, spend a few minutes trying to cancel, failing, and giving up for another year. Well, that was until recently when I found a way to basically trick them into letting me halt my recurring payment.
You can tell a company is scared about people canceling when they make it difficult to even manage your payments. In most cases, when a site displays autopay (or, in this case, the ironically named “EZ Pay”) settings, it’s accompanied by a toggle-off switch. Yet, that wasn’t the case here. Furthermore, nowhere on the page would you spot the word “cancel.”
This led me to the FAQ where, way down at the bottom, you could find the answer to the question “How can I cancel my subscription?” Of course, the answer wasn’t exactly to my liking as it listed a customer service phone number I could call. To be honest, I didn’t even bother with this as I figured it would be a pain.
However, following this phone number listing, I keyed in on this note: “Residents living in California, Georgia, Maine, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Virginia can cancel online.” That’s when it hit me: I could pretend to live in one of these states!
Once realizing this, I decided to try changing my billing address to my former California address. Although it accepted my address, I didn’t notice any updates. In fact, when I went back to my billing address, my Missouri one was still displaying — but trying to change it again gave me an error. Instead, I decided to wait a day.
Sure enough, when I logged in the following day, a “Cancel Subscription” option had magically appeared under Billing. After a couple of clicks, I got confirmation that my subscription had (finally) been canceled. Plus, going back to the main profile page, I noticed that the “Your Next Bill” balance now displayed $0.
Look, I don’t feel great about ditching my local newspaper or having to lie to them to do it. That said, I also don’t appreciate them making me jump through hoops. So, I’ll take this as a win for now and hope that, in the near future, they realize that it doesn’t have to be this way. In the meantime, if you’re facing a similar situation, perhaps a temporary “move” could come in handy for you too.
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