Wednesday, August 02, 2006

PayPal Subscriptions - Theft By Another Name

I signed up for pbwiki a while back, canceled my account - or so I thought - and then got dinged for another $5.00 from PayPal. It's the principle of it. These fuckers ganked me. It's not all or even mostly on pbwiki - maybe - but it's certainly on PayPal, who makes it damn near impossible to cancel a 'subscription'.

So, the FTC gets a complaint about PayPal/eBay:

PayPal 'subscriptions' are almost impossible to find, making it impossible to cancel a subscription and stop paying money to vendors. This resulted in at leasta $5.00 loss for me, probably more. But I'm a tech expert, and I couldn't cancel my subscription without much difficultly. This means that thousands of Americans are probably being ripped by PayPal.

I want their procedure fixed. If they make it easy for me to subscribe, they should make it equally easy to unsubscribe. As it is, their unsubscription model is like AOL's - PayPal specializes is stealing money from people who are not tech savvy.


FTC is just a bunch of terrorists, too, but at least now it's documented.

Bastards. If I'm a tech weenie and I can't figure this shit out, how are we expecting grandma and grandpa to figure this shit out?

Fuckers. PayPal is now owned by eBay.

...even dead people can't get out from AOHELL. Color me, not surprised.

...I should say I don't think the FTC are terrorists. I think the U.S. government consists of terrorists at the top - always has. The FTC - I know nothing about them - other than the fact that they're good at spending my money and ignoring my complaints - but they're certainly not terrorists. Just wanted to clear that up in case we get some wackos down the road trying to dilute my arguments by bringing up statements that were obviously-at-least-to-me-hyperbole. As for PBWiki, I got no issues with them. Was still an overall good experience for me, and I'd still recommend them to others.

1 comment:

dew said...

As the founder of PBwiki, I apologize. Managing PayPal subscriptions is not just hard for consumers, it's hard for vendors, too. There is no easy interface to enumerate subscribers or cancel them when someone writes in requesting to cancel their subscription. There's no obvious or easy way I know of for us to have PayPal send subscription reminders to users with unsubscribe links baked in, either. As a very small team, we don't have the resources at hand right now to implement our own subscription setup, so we have to rely on larger providers like PayPal. We're sorry you had a bad experience and hope you take our refund of your payment as an apology.