TLDR; remove credit cards for express vpn through chat as well as disabling automatic renewal.
Due to the controversy surrounding Expressvpn,(link to that post here) I decided to play it safe and cancel my subscription. when I went to do this I disabled automatic renewal (the only way it will currently let you cancel subscription on the website ). I tried to remove my credit card from the Expressvpn website myself , but when this proved impossible I reached out to them through the in browser chat window . the customer service person I talked to told me there was no actual way to have this done , so they would put in a request to have it removed internally . I thought this was kind of weird but as long as the end result was the same I didn’t really care.
Fast foward to last night, I got an email telling me that my Expressvpn subscription could not be renewed , and that my credit card information was invalid . I logged into the express vpn website and went to the subscription page and sure enough , my automatic renewal was reenabled . I turned it off again , but then went back into the page to check it out and sure enough the automatic renewal is still showing as on. if I hadn’t seen for myself that it will still send out monthly charges I would just assume that it would show as on until the subscription were to run out but I now know this is not the case .
Based on this I cancelled the auto-renewal and because I did it via Paypal cancelled the payment there as well. Thanks for the heads up so far the auto-renewal has cancelled
If I remember correctly, I saw something similar about being unable to remove credit card info somewhere else. I could be wrong, but I think theres some sort of laws in I think England that require companies to always have that stuff on file. Although the auto renewal thing is a bunch of bull. If they charge you anyways, you could contest the charge with your bank.
I had the EXACT same thing happen to me, regarding them re-enabling my automatic resubscribe. I found out when I got an email saying my subscription had been renewed, and I contacted their customer service immediately to get it cancelled and refunded.
Update: I did indeed receive my refund, so at least they didn’t try and scam me out of that.
Much as I appreciate people wanting to hide their collectible spoon and thimble-related activities, I think it’s important that people have an actual general understanding of what VPNs are before they start advertising them.
It’s really debatable if they offer even the slightest benefit to your cyber-security, and even then that’s only if you’re willing to buy into the idea that they can be trusted more with your data than your ISP. They’re still a company that could be massively lying about their privacy policies just like (…insert whichever ISP or social media company you mistrust here…)
So I worked for a company kind of like this one. We had yearly auto renewals. A year later we offered the yearly renewal option broken in monthly installments.
The TOS clearly stated to reach out to support to cancel. Thus this turned off the auto renewal.
However, if someone picked the monthly installments, their card was still kept in file and would be charged until the end of their year as per the company TOS.
If said customer cancled the card or blocked transactions, the account was in the negative and then there was no way support could remove the card as it had an outstanding balance.
Online subscriptions are tricky. So I recommend that you look over the TOS in regards to cancelling and see what’s up.
Once you have that information, ss along with your first email to cancel and send it to them. This helps the support rep to close your account.
I still don’t understand the hype surrounding using VPNs. I never needed them for anything. Couldn’t care less about my personal info being available online
That’s a pretty common scam from subscription companies. Xbox live is another. Their cancellation system intentionally leads to a dead page. I had to go through the credit card company to cancel my membership. They mentioned they get a lot of calls for this issue.
what do you expect from a company that blatantly lies. paraphrasing a bit but they claim their vpn reduces latency and ping which is literally impossible
This is definitely a scam tactic, im on my 4th month after i canceled many many times, and its so hard to reach their customer service, sent many emails and still no reply…
If you’re on PC, grab the browser add-on SponsorBlock, or on Android, use YouTube Vanced, it now has SponsorBlock integration. It automatically skips sponsored sections, and has optional settings to skip things like intros/outros, recaps, reminders to like/subscribe etc. The portions to skip are crowdsourced, so not perfect, but pretty good especially on the big channels, and of course being crowd sourced, the more people who know about it, the better it will be.