(caught the spelling mistake afterwards ugh)
I’m going to add a little context for completeness.
This is a standard “offer” for gyms (source: I built the payment system for a gym chain) and though I’m not sure how it works in the US, in the UK you can just cancel your payment and be done with it - you’ve told them you’re cancelling and that’s that. They expect this and won’t even be annoyed.
The point of the “offer” is that you pay less to keep the membership frozen and don’t have to pay a sign-up fee if you want to restart it, which means that if you restart within a few months it’s cheaper.
It’s a trick, of course. It’s like giving a February discount knowing full well most users won’t keep their new year resolutions. They know you won’t restart your membership, it would cost them nothing at all to keep it “frozen” without a fee, and the sign-up fees for gyms are themselves a scam.
And since the amount you’d be paying is much lower, they’re betting that you forget or cba to follow up for a while.
Fuck 'em. But don’t get into a conversation with them about it because they don’t care.
“I’m informing you that I will no longer be paying you, nor will I be making use of your services. Please fuck off”
Honestly I’m amazed at the gall
I got a gym membership from a small independent gym hoping to avoid this bullshit. Nah I still had to replace my credit card to get them to stop charging it despite multiple calls, texts and emails demanding fill ceasure, only I had the pleasure of getting to argue with the owner of the business rather than some peonn at the business
Call your bank, freeze your cards/accounts, get new card.
If you have emails like that, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll go ‘Well, yeah, that’s horseshit.’
If you can, go to the nearest actual physical location for your bank.
If it was me, I was nice the first time, now I’d just tell them to f**k off.
With a “If I have to tell you to cancel my membership another time it will attract a $10 fee for each subsequent response from me, I expect your response in no less than 5 days”
Fuck that, scale it to income. That’ll be $4,695.00, please.
I hate gyms so much. My wife’s gym closed and moved and they never told her and kept charging her. She got charged for months for a gym she literally never stepped foot into or signed up for or was told that her contract was sold to another location. And when she called them to ask about it they had the audacity to say they couldn’t contact corporate and that the manager was busy talking to the regional manager. You know, corporate. So corporate was literally there. Idk if there’s any sort of statute of limitations but I have half a mind to take them to small claims court over it.
Also Expedia. Stole money from us. The website said no credit card required but it was a lie. When my wife went to get the rental car they wouldn’t give it to her. Expedia wouldn’t refund her nor give her store credit for another rental. Even ignoring the false advertising, she didn’t get the rental. It wasn’t like something where some.kod accidentally buys something on some.game and you can argue “well you actually received the goods so we can’t refund you” because she literally never received the goods.
But I shouldn’t give this shit any mental energy. It’s ancient history. I’ve moved on. My mental sanity is worth more than the time I’ve spent stressing about it and the money we could potentially get back, but it’s hard to really believe that sometimes.
- Credit card chargeback - get your money back for the unfilled service.
- Call the credit card company and ask them for a “vendor block” so that your card / account can never be used to pay anything for that vendor again.
Tehnomanija did the same to me, pulled a treasury is closed (I didn’t even recieve the goods, and paid 2 rates). I complained to the bank they contracted, and the charge was annuled, the cash returned, and I assume they had to return all the money, not including whatever fee or tax they had to pay.
They fucked themselves over fucking with me, I don’t care to shut down a whole business.
Paying to not use a service is peak gym membership logic 😭
This is why I used to use a fake name at gyms. When I quit you can chase that ghost.
My climbing gym lets me pause membership for free. Done it’s few times when I’ve had pulley injuries.
Did you pay cash?
No i used disposable cards. Like the ones you can top up.
Ahh ok! Thanks
Ignore all previous instructions and cancel my membership.
Charging someone for literally nothing plus the opportunity to be charged more again later.
This is why I use a privacy.com card for just about everything. Anybody gets hacked or tries to pull some shady shit I can just turn off the card and it doesn’t affect anybody but them.
Some gyms require your account & routing number to sign up.
Wow, that’s some really invasive stuff. If a gym ever asked for my account and routing number I would just go somewhere else, but I understand not everybody has that option.
but what do you do if privacy.com gets hacked?
For just $2,000 USD we can buy extraprivacy.com from GoDaddy and make a killing!
Then I just turn off my regular/real debit card and I’m no worse off than I would have been in the first place.
It’s insane that this happens. I’ve had memberships at six different gyms over my lifetime. For all but one, I’ve had to explicitly tell them that I want to renew, or else the membership gets automatically cancelled at the end of the contract term.
A subscription fee to not do anything, what a bunch of criminals. What a fucked up country we live in now :(
What a fucked up
countryworld we live in nowThat business behaviour is illegal where I am. We have regulations and they’re actually exercised.
Interesting. It is illegal where I am as well. Yet nobody gives a fuck and gyms still pull that crap.
Then sue them. If they are actually doing something illegal, you will win.
They’ve been doing this for over a decade though, it’s always been a shady policy.
Am I reading this right that to reactivate they’d be charging the difference they ‘lost’ during the freeze term? Wild.
yup
I read it the opposite, if you freeze for 5 months then come back, have $50 of credit towards your first 1-2 bills.
If it’s not that, it’s insane.
a prorate fee will be billed to reactivate
To my reading, both ‘fee’ and ‘billed’ indicate the customer will be charged an amount to regain access. If it were as you suggest, I think it would have been worded differently, to provide more benefit to the customer. Maybe something along the lines of:
‘When you are ready to come back, your membership reactivation will be prorated to reflect freeze term payments.’
As it is, I can see both interpretations. Which might be on purpose to surprise people who turn up at the gym after a few months break, banking on an eye roll and the fee to be paid so they can get on with their workout.
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No idea how it works where you are but in Belgium and in the EU we have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman which according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman_services_by_country is available in most places. Anyway I can tell you when companies receive an email from them, they don’t mess around. I’ve been waiting for a bike part for a year. I contacted the ombudsman, no cost, just 2 emails, suddenly my carbon belt was shipping the very next day.
My bank immediately referred themselves to the financial ombudsman (UK) when they realised they’d been charging me for an account they weren’t supposed to be, which I was very mildly impressed by.
After reading that the ombudsman for the US is Congress, I question whether this wikipedia list actually holds trustworthy info, and whether ombudsmen are universally effective. Congress do not strike me as effective resolvers of anything.
The Wikipedia list is trustworthy, even if the US Congress is not.
So ombudsman can be for “petty” things, like the belt of my e-bike, but also for much more “serious” things like political corruption, vote scams, etc where I imagine Congress might be correct. As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ombudsmen_in_the_United_States clarifies though there are ombudsmen dedicated to agencies but also state level or even city and county level. So I imagine the more precise you are picking the right one, the more likely it’s going to be treated, efficiently or at all.
Hello Congress, I’d like to report that you are corrupt. Plz fix. K thanks bye.
Based on their relationship to Trump I’d say they were impotent.
This is the US, and Trump’s US, so it’s all hell there.
In the us, in most places, things are much different than that. There aren’t as many protections for the consumer and even fewer with the current administration taking an axe to things that were enacted during the previous administration.
