Disputing Charges Resulting from Trial Memberships

Have you ever signed up for a trial offer with a company and completely forgotten about it later?  I have, though it has been quite some time since that happened to me.  In my situation, I had called to place an order on an item and got suckered into agreeing to a trial membership to some sort of program.

At the time I signed up for the trial, I was lured into it because I was getting some great freebies in return.  I thought I would go ahead and cancel the trial membership once it was over, but I forgot about it when the time came.  Fortunately for me, I was able to call the customer service number on the statement and I talked the company into dropping the charges and they cancelled my membership.

Unfortunately, getting these charges dropped isn’t always so easy.  This is because these companies record your conversation and get you to “agree” to the membership over the phone.  This makes it hard for you to dispute the charges since you technically did agree to the membership.

Nonetheless, if you do get charges from one of these companies, you might want to consider calling your credit card company rather than calling the customer service number.  When you call the credit card company, tell them you are disputing the charges and let the credit card company check into it.  If the company has a recording of you agreeing to the charges, you may have a hard time getting the company to side with you on the issue.  At the same time, if there have been several complaints about this company, the credit card company may actually drop the sneaky company and won’t allow it to process credit card charges anymore. 

 

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 9:54 am and is filed under Tips & Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.