Man, I hate when companies automatically renew stuff without bothering to ask if you still want their product and/or service. I signed up with Rivals.com (a sports site) last year when I was writing a bunch of sports-related articles for different web outlets. At the time, the $99.95 membership fee was worth it because I was getting great information and earning much more than that from my articles.
But that sports gig ended about six months ago and I never logged back into Rivals.com after that. So imagine my surprise when I checked my credit card statement this morning and saw that Rivals had charged me for another one-year subscription to the site. Not only that, but they never even bothered to send me an email saying that 1) my membership was coming to an end; 2) that they would automatically renew it; and 3) that my credit card had been charged. WTF is that all about??? If I hadn’t checked my statement myself, I never would have known that they charged me.
Yeah, yeah… I’m sure the “fine print” on the site says something about automatic renewals, but that’s no excuse. It’s a poor practice, IMO, and I wish these places would stop. I mean, the slightest bit of an investigation by their customer service team would have shown that I haven’t logged in in ages. Does it look like I really want to continue my subscription?
And of course when I try calling their customer service line, I get nothing but recorded messages. What fun. So I sent them an email saying I want to cancel immediately and I want a full refund of my money. Let’s see if they comply.
March 21st, 2007 at 10:31 am
I would also dispute the charge with the credit card company.
March 23rd, 2007 at 6:20 am
Yes, I absolutely plan on disputing the charges with my credit card company if I don’t get a refund from Rivals.com. But I know from past experiences that the cc company wants consumers to try to deal with the merchant first, which is why I’m doing all of this.
That being said, I have a Citibank credit card and they are AWESOME about disputed charges, so I’m not that worried about the situation.
I still hate automatic renewals, though!
March 30th, 2007 at 2:15 am
[...] So I finally heard back from Rivals.com about my disputed charges. I posted about a week ago that they automatically renewed my membership and charged $99.95 to my credit card without notifying me of anything. [...]
August 8th, 2007 at 3:48 pm
[...] I actually received a refund from Rivals.com after months of trying!! Back on March 21, I made this post about Rivals.com automatically renewing my $99 subscription without even warning me that they were going to do so. I had forgotten all [...]