Shady billing practices
I want to warn fellow users NOT to subscribe to NY. They entrap you and when you attempt to contact customer service, you are ignored. I was sent an email urging me “your subscription is about to end! renew now”. I clicked on the link in the email. It opened up an offer which was $US119 for one year (I didn’t realise it was US dollars, in fact it was $AUD200 in my currency, nowhere on the page does it state the currency): I rejected that offer. That equates to a whopping $16 AUD for an electronic, online-only magazine. Unbelievably expensive. Printing and mail costs for them? Zero. So it’s pure profit for the owner. After rejecting the first offer, suddenly another one popped up. “We really don’t want to lose you. If you click now, we will renew you for $65.99 per year. A discount of 50% off.” That equates to around $AUD100. Which for 12 issues is about $8 per issue. Still expensive right? To my eventual chagrin because of what happened, I accepted the offer. Upon accepting that offer, nothing. No email, no invoice, no record, no receipt. Then two days later, my account was charged for $AUD200. (So they charged me the full amount, for the offer I rejected. They did not apply the 50% discount. Without the discount, I would never have renewed at all). I emailed customer service Conde Nast. That was the next fiasco. They did not reply for 5 business days. I then wrote to NY subscriptions. I was ignored. Then I got an inane reply from a guy who simply said, Oh that is the fee for one year subscription. He didn’t even look at my email. I had sent a screendump of the 50% offer I had taken up. Given their stupidity and apparent dishonesty, I lodged a formal dispute (“chargeback”) with my bank, I then also complained to USA fair trading. I read all the other user stories of fights with this company. Many many people never get refunds from the owner, Conde Nast. (Read reddit posts ad infinitum on this.) I note the technique of urgent emails demanding payment is akin to the techniques used by large pornography sites to extract money. This is the New Yorker. Yes, they use these tactics. Another point in common (with sham sites and pornographers): you never get documents from the NY magazine. You must log into your account to access any record at all, meagre as they are. To do that of course you must remember your login/password. Otherwise, you cannot cancel, and cannot control auto-debits applied to your account. There is only one surefire solution to a
