My complaint:
It appears this organization has been sued and agreed to settlement (more than once) for their deceptive practices surrounding their auto-renew policy in the past. eHarmony alleges that users agree to auto-renew in the terms and conditions when the user account is created, or that the same information pertaining to auto-renew is provided to users in a ation email. One should not have to (a) read the fine print in a terms and conditions statements or (b) review a ation email from a dating site to verify auto-renewal related policies. Surely this cannot be considered affirmative consent. They’re exploiting their customers using an often-overlooked formality, as is clearly illustrated in the previous lawsuits against them. I signed up and paid for a year through eHarmony in July of 2020. I was not consciously aware they would be setting my account to auto-renew. I met someone in April of 2021, manually set my account to inactive and have been in a serious relationship ever since. There was ZERO activity on the account for nearly 90 days prior to them renewing the service. Despite me being unaware and never having consciously agreed to auto-renew, any fair-minded person would agree that protocol here should be for the auto renewal to switch off after an account or user activity is inactive for a fixed period of time. This is common courtesy. No email warning was sent and even if they agreed to sending one in the future, it would likely be mistaken by their users as another spam message. When I explained this to them, they didn’t seem to care that I had manually switched my account to inactive nearly 90 days prior to them charging me, which occured on the 18th of July, 2021, nor did they seem to care that I had no intent or reason to continue to use their service. I hope something can be done about it. It’s not about the money, my bank refused the charge. This is about principal. We must not let organizations get away with this type of behavior.
Suggested solution:
Change your auto-renew policy. Users should have to sign up for auto-renew, not the other way around. Show some integrity.
