8 Autopay Traps That Keep Charging Bay Staters After They Cancel
Guess how many people call the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) each day to report a subscription that kept charging after they canceled it?
Seventy, on average.
That number is from 2024 and was up from 42 a day in 2021.
Ouch.
These are the autopay traps that keep charging Bay Staters after they cancel.
Note: This is general information, not legal or financial advice. Cancellation and billing rules vary by company and by state and can change. If you think a company broke the rules, check your account terms or the Federal Trade Commission’s complaint process.
1. Missing the Monthly Cutoff
Planet Fitness sets a cutoff date each month for anyone who wants to stop being charged.
It’s one version of the pattern behind those 70 complaints a day the FTC counted in 2024.
Its customer service page says a cancellation has to arrive by the 10th of the month to stop the charge that bills on the 17th.
The change can take up to seven business days to process, by that same policy.
Miss that window by even a day, and one more month bills anyway.
A member who cancels on the 12th, thinking they’re done paying, still finds a charge on the 17th.
That’s not a glitch.
It’s the calendar working exactly the way the policy is written, and many subscription services run on a version of the same clock.
2. Retention Call Marathon
SiriusXM required customers to talk to a live agent before it would process a cancellation at all.
New York’s Attorney General found the company trained those agents to pitch as many as five retention offers before letting a caller go.
One call, filed on behalf of a 92-year-old customer, ran nearly 40 minutes.
Agents were told not to take no for an answer.
Many callers hang up first.
They walk away frustrated and assume the request went through.
SiriusXM bills them again the next month because nothing was ever processed.
3. The One Accepted Channel
ABCmouse, a kids’ online learning program, refused to process cancellations that came in through its listed contact channel.
The FTC found that more than 100,000 customers tried to cancel using the site’s “Contact Us” link, and ABCmouse turned them away.
The company told them a cancellation only counted if it happened through one screen inside a member’s account.
No heads-up came first.
People who did exactly what a reasonable customer would do paid anyway.
ABCmouse treated a request sent the wrong way as no request at all.
4. Amazon’s Multi-Click Maze
Amazon built a Prime cancellation flow so long that employees reportedly nicknamed it after Homer’s Iliad.
Signing up took two clicks.
Canceling meant clicking through several pages and more than a dozen screens, each one built around another reason to stay before an actual cancel button ever showed up.
The FTC’s complaint said the point of the process wasn’t to help anyone cancel.
It was to stop them.
A member who clicked “Cancel” on an early screen and stopped there, believing the job was done, hadn’t canceled anything.
Amazon kept billing that account exactly like one that never touched the cancellation flow at all.
The FTC’s case ended in a $2.5 billion settlement in September 2025, split between a civil penalty and consumer refunds.
The agency put the number of consumers affected by unwanted enrollment or a delayed cancellation at roughly 35 million.
35 million isn’t a rounding error.
It’s what happens when a company makes leaving cost more effort than many people are willing to spend on a single afternoon.
5. Getting Steered to Pause
Uber pushed Uber One members toward pausing their membership instead of canceling it, according to an FTC complaint filed in April 2025.
Someone who followed the flow all the way through could face as many as 23 screens before reaching a cancellation screen at all.
Along the way, some customers landed on customer support instead, with no contact information given.
A pause isn’t a cancellation.
It delays the account instead of ending it, and a member who thinks they’ve handled things often finds the membership picked right back up.
What Negative Option Billing Means
Every trap on this list runs on what regulators call negative option billing.
It’s a setup where a company keeps charging a card on file until the customer takes an active step to stop it.
A single forgotten ten-dollar monthly charge adds up to $120 a year.
Three of those, spread across a streaming app, a gym, and a delivery service, run past $360 without a single new purchase.
6. Vonage’s Unreachable Line
Vonage required customers to reach a “retention agent” by phone before it would cancel service, per an FTC case that closed in 2022.
The FTC said the company made its cancellation phone number hard to find on its website, cut the hours the line was staffed, and didn’t return promised callbacks.
Customers who tried to downgrade got sent in circles instead.
Some did reach an agent, asked to cancel, and believed that settled it.
It didn’t.
The FTC said Vonage kept charging those accounts anyway, and customers who complained got only partial refunds of money the company had no authorization to take.
Vonage paid $100 million in refunds over it, and it kept billing every account nobody there ever confirmed had been canceled.
7. App Deletion Vs. Cancellation
Google Play spells out a rule that trips up many app subscribers every year.
Its help page states plainly: “When you uninstall the app, your subscription won’t cancel.”
The subscription lives with the app store account, not the app icon on the home screen.
The two aren’t the same.
Delete the app, and the charge keeps landing every cycle until someone opens the store’s subscription settings and cancels there.
8. The Card-Replacement Trap
Visa runs a system behind the scenes called Account Updater, and it undoes a common do-it-yourself cancellation trick.
When an issuer reissues a card, or replaces a card reported lost, it sends the new number and expiration date into that system.
A merchant that already has the old card on file can submit a lookup, and Visa hands back the updated number whenever the issuer supplied one.
Someone who can’t get a company to stop billing sometimes tries killing the card instead.
They report a card lost, wait for a replacement, and figure the old charge died with the old number.
It doesn’t.
The merchant just requests the updated number through Account Updater and bills the new card the very next month.
A Higher Bar for Cancellations
Massachusetts now requires a business to let a customer cancel a subscription exactly the way they signed up for it, under rules Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office finalized in 2025.
If someone enrolled through a company’s website, that same website has to offer a way out, under a rule that took effect September 2025.
Businesses also have to send a written notice before a subscription rolls into a new term.
Most states still don’t require any of it.
Not Massachusetts.
Bay Staters who hit one of the traps above now have a state rule to point to that most of the country doesn’t.
Psst! Think you know the rules behind subscription cancellations? Take our myth-or-fact challenge and see how many you get right.
Still-Changing Rules
The FTC reopened its rulemaking on cancellation practices in March 2026, months after a federal appeals court struck down its 2024 version.
Public comments on the new proposal closed in April 2026, and the agency hasn’t finalized a replacement yet.
Nothing’s final yet.
The old rules still apply in the meantime.
The FTC has opened at least five new cancellation-related cases since the 2025 ruling.
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