General News
23 August, 2024
I was trapped and ripped off by Amazon.
This trap is a feature, not a bug.
In the wake of our story this week about Diane Forward thwarting a $500,000 scam, it seems pertinent to share this amazing opinion piece by Jenna Price. Australians lost $3.1 billion to investment scams in 2023, a figure that continues to grow each year.
Have an amazing weekend, and make sure to say hello to use at the HDFNL finals!
Ben Fraser, Editor
Look, it's true English was not my first language (although I do think I've caught up with the rest of you by now). And it's also true that I tend to rush from morning to night and may gloss over some tiny details. But I did manage to get three degrees and, touch wood, raise three children to adulthood.
However, I still do not know how I subscribed to Amazon Prime. Erin Turner, now the boss of the Consumer Policy Research Centre (CPRC), knows exactly what happened to me. She's led an entire project on it. She can even sing along to a few bars of that old Eagles' hit, Hotel California. "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."
More of that later.
There was I, watching 10 bucks come out of my account month after month. I mean, it's not that I didn't try to unsubscribe to Amazon Prime. Yeah, I'd be sitting there at the cancel button, clicking furiously. Time after time, I would think: "Yippee! I've done it!"
And time after time, I would find myself with that money coming out of my account. None of us can afford this. It's bad enough that six bananas are costing six bucks but the weird invisible chunks coming out of our accounts with no discernible benefit does not help with the cost of living, the out-of-control cost of living.
THEN! VICTORY!
I scrolled and clicked and scrolled and clicked and suddenly, confirmation that not only had I cancelled but that I would get my money back because I hadn't used the service. In fact, I'd never used the service.
How did this happen to me?
Emotions got the better of me. Just briefly, back in 1985, when we had our first kid, I enrolled myself in a pyramid scheme, which is how I describe any proprietary toy made for children which requires more and more bits and greater and greater cost (ask me how this family ended up with a vastly expensive electric Lego train if you wish to be bored to death).
Anyhow, this was a gorgeous wooden track with simple wooden trains. The imaginations of our children worked as the propellant so I fell in love with this toy and stayed in love. I kept it all in the roof on the off chance we'd eventually have grandchildren.
These days, that wooden set has a co-pro with the famous blue talking train Thomas the Tank Engine. It's not available generally. You just can't rock into your local toyshop, where overindulgent grandparents wander the aisles, throwing money at overpriced toys and grateful small business owners.
So I thought we'd buy some on Amazon, again at vast cost but at least they were available, all the way from Japan. And I'd spent enough that it would have been free postage anyhow so I am entirely unsure how I came to subscribe to Amazon Prime.
Yet I did.
Turns out this is so common, this unwitting signing up for life, that it has its own name: the subscription trap.
And this is where Erin Turner and her team at the Consumer Policy Research Centre come in. Their work on subscription trap practices was released this week and pretty much describes my experience. Subscribing is too easy - but when a consumer wants out, it's nigh on impossible.
Why is that?
Turner says it's about "dark patterns", in other words sneaky deceitful ways that are designed to keep you in the debt spiral loop forever and ever and ever, forced continuity or, as Turner could sing if she wanted, the Hotel California. You can never leave.
She and her team are calling for law reform in this country, to bring us up to speed with both the European Union and the US.
"Subscription traps are unfair and other countries are recognising this," says Turner. They have pressured the government to do better. As the report points out, an unfair trading prohibition could be introduced into Australian consumer law: "An unfair trading prohibition could explicitly or through a broad principle require that businesses make opting-out of a service as easy as opting-in."
Then I asked myself, why can't my bank intervene? Turns out there is a difference between direct debits and subscriptions. As a spokesperson for the Australian Banking Association points out, direct debits are between you and your bank.
Subscriptions are a direct relationship with the merchant. And we all know that merchants make it absolutely impossible for the consumer to get anyone to answer an email or pick up a phone call.
The Banking Code of Practice does a pretty good job of setting out what a consumer can expect from their bank. For example, I had zero idea that I could call my bank and ask them to issue me with a list of all my direct debits.
I can't do that with any single provider of subscriptions (except, strangely considering its monopolistic tendencies, Apple, which provides me with a list). And that Banking Code says if you've got a problem with a recurring payment, they can't help you. Only the merchant can help you. Yep. You can never leave. Birdman Don Henley and friends might just have been writing about Amazon.
Anyhow, Erin Turner reassures me. It's not me, it's them.
"These processes are designed to trick and trap you. It takes longer, you can't figure it out. They are trying to take advantage of you," she says.
But she has some tips if you ever sign up for, example, a free trial. Set yourself an alarm to notify you when the free trial ends. Maybe on day six to devote a full day to getting out of there.
And regularly review your bank account statement.
That's something more of us are doing these days. And how I discovered Amazon Prime was still taking its cut, months after I thought I'd cut them off.
Jenna Price is a regular columnist and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University.