NEW YORK (AP) — New York’s attorney general filed suit Wednesday against SiriusXM, accusing the satellite radio and streaming service of making it intentionally difficult for its customers to cancel their subscriptions.
Attorney General Latitia James’ office said an investigation into complaints from customers found that SiriusXM forced subscribers to wait in an automated system before often lengthy interactions with agents who were trained in ways to avoid accepting a request to cancel service.
“Having to endure a lengthy and frustrating process to cancel a subscription is a stressful burden no one looks forward to, and when companies make it hard to cancel subscriptions, it’s illegal,” the attorney general said in a statement.
The company disputed the claims, arguing that many of the lengthy interaction times cited in the lawsuit were based on a 2020 inquiry and were caused in part by the effects of the pandemic on their operations. The company said many of its plans can be canceled with a simple click of a button online.
It should be federal law that any recurring service with online accounts in any format offers two click cancellation (cancel directly on the account page, plus confirmation), and any recurring service that doesn’t must be cancellable in less than 5 minutes in person or on the phone, with massive fines per user if it can be demonstrated that they failed to do so.
Actual rentals of physical goods or properties are a different category, because things have to be returned, but services are as simple as removing access or cancelling future scheduled visits from personnel, and complicated cancellation processes are effectively always malicious (in the cases they aren’t actually deliberate, they’re at best grossly negligent).
It’s true. They really do, it’s very frustrating.
