In the digital world, almost all monthly subscriptions, including LinkedIn’s Premium subscription, are autorenewals. That means a subscription renews automatically from one month to another unless you cancel it before the expiry period. While this might come as a surprise to some people, fact is, you agree to this condition when you order the subscription.
If you have not cancelled the monthly subscription, then the renewal transaction is authorized by you. Since it’s not unauthorized, the Merchant – LinkedIn in this case – is right in taking the money from your credit card and your Credit Card Issuer Bank is also right in refusing to reverse the charge.
To stop this charge in future, you need to cancel the subscription.
According to some people, you can do this by approaching your bank whose credit card or debit card you used to pay for the subscription. But, according to my personal experience, that’s not true. And it’s not only me. According to the BuzzfeedNews article entitled How A Massive Facebook Scam Siphoned Millions Of Dollars From Unsuspecting Boomers,
Credit card companies also play a key role by largely refusing to grant charge-backs to people who have been roped into a subscription
The only way to cancel the subscription is directly with the Merchant. I strongly doubt if you will get your second month’s fees back but you can definitely stop the subscription from renewing for Month 3 (and later).
The last time I checked, it was quite easy to find the CANCEL option on LinkedIn website.
At the risk of straying slightly off the main topic, let’s see how that works with other companies.
- Some companies bury the cancel feature below several layers of their websites, making it difficult to find.
- Some others don’t support cancellation online and instead tell you to call a Hong Kong telephone number to cancel subscriptions.
- Some others don’t support cancellation at all, via any channel
- In the most egregious case, some companies block your access to their websites. See ZEE5 exhibit on the right.
This practice is called “Subscription Trap”. It is fueled largely by so-called Dark Patterns.
Subscription Trap Fraud: People buy what they think is a free trial of a product but unwittingly get signed up for a pricey monthly subscription that uses #RoachMotel tactic to become virtually impossible to cancel. https://t.co/McoXV4REQg
— Ketharaman Swaminathan (@s_ketharaman) November 14, 2019
Many people are falling victim to this shady practice of late, like this guy who set up a Google Cloud account with free credits for a hackathon and then forget to cancel the subscription and ended up with a bill for $4000.
My $0.02: Whenever you sign up for any new subscription, follow this guideline I’ve given in Ten Ways To Protect Yourselves From Fraud:
Sign up for subscriptions of news, streaming video and other services only via Play Store, App Store, PayPal or some other third party website / app that allow you to cancel the subscription anytime.
Above all, Caveat Emptor!