Hi fellow Lions,
Today I wanted to talk about how we can sometimes let charges slip through the cracks!
Low Charge Sneak
I recently had been getting charged for a VPN, with not a lot of notice from me sadly, that I wasn't using but couldn't figure out how to cancel it!
Earlier this year I was looking for a new VPN so I decided to shop around a little bit and try a few different ones. I ended up landing on the one I am using now and I'm enjoying it for the most part, though there are some elements to it that are a little annoying. I bought a full year subscription though, given that it was a better deal which is okay.
During that trial period though I made the mistake of signing up for a 7 day free trial with another VPN company and in order to do that, as most companies do these days, you have to give them a card to have on file for them to "store" and ultimately charge you, hoping that you would forget about them.
Well damn if it worked on me! LOL I signed up for it and didn't keep as close of an eye on the card account expenses as I should be, or normally do, and the company got me on the hook for a few months of VPN service charges without me using it or even noticing it! Damn they are sneaky and they rely on us being too busy and overwhelmed with data and information these days.
I remember reading somewhere that companies have paid lots of money to do market and psychological research to determine what the threshold is for people to sign up for something for a "free trial" period but end up forgetting about the trial period ending, forgetting about signing up or just ignoring the low service fee because it is not too noticeable. That type of stuff is how the gym business makes most of it's money; they attract you in with low monthly fees, knowing that people will use it a fair bit in the first few days or weeks and then stop going but forget to cancel the membership.
That same thing certainly happened with me, though after the first day I think I forgot to use that VPN service again because I was also trialing another one that I liked more. This becomes the issue: the charges of it are low enough that they escape most peoples radar and the companies make loads of profit off it because the service they provide is a lot cheaper than what it brings in. Pretty good gig if you ask me!
The good thing about this VPN fee and company is that I did end up noticing it, couldn't formally cancel it with logging in, which was annoying (is that intended?! I would like to think so.. lol) and had to email them for help in getting it cancelled. They cancelled it the next day after getting my email which was great but then it made me think of the stories I've heard from other people, and kind of experienced myself once.
If you sign up for a gym membership at these low-cost places, they lock you in unknowingly because they make it unbelievably hard to cancel the damn thing. You have to go through a rigamarole of phone tag, emails and there isn't some simple thing that you can log into and click cancel. They do as much as they can, bordering on criminal and illegal in my opinion, to put barriers in front of you so you can't cancel the service plan. That shit is insane and very frustrating!
I did see a meme the other day that was pretty funny but seems like it works. If you are stuck in one of those annoying service contracts, what right now seems like it works for some people who have tried it is to say they are going to prison LOL then the companies have cancelled their membership pretty quickly. I hope more people don't catch onto that and end up using it, in case I need to use it one day!
I'm glad that I'm staving the little bit of money that I ended up wasting on this though. I can't get the money back but any little bit like this eats into my crypto funds and nobody wants that! I don't have any crazy deep wounds to lick but for sure am taking this as a personal lessons learned.. don't sign up for multiple things without cancelling one of them first!
-CmplXty. Real human written content, never AI.
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