united-states contract-law consumer-protection online social-media
What specific law is broken if the merchant continue to charge the customer&#39;s card after the customer disabled his account?
<p>A customer used to have a VIP account with a California social media company that charges a monthly subscription fee.</p>
<p>In July 2021, the customer disabled his account and terminated his VIP. No service is received since July 2021. The customer did not log-on the social media platform and did not send/post any messages. However, for the whole year, the merchant is still charging the customer's card for an expensive subscription fee.</p>
<p>The customer carefully read the merchant's T&amp;C which does <em>not</em> explicitly allow the merchant to charge a fee for a disabled account; in fact, the word &quot;disable&quot; is <em>not</em> mentioned in their full T&amp;C. However, the merchant claims that the customer was notified that &quot;a disabled account can still incur VIP fees&quot;. The customer never receive any notification through email or mail.</p>
<p>What rights does the consumer have in this case?</p>

<p>The fact that the terms and conditions do not mention the word &quot;disable&quot; is significant, but not in the way you seem to think.</p>
<p>You state: &quot;...the merchant's T&amp;C which does not explicitly allow the merchant to charge a fee for a disabled account&quot;.  However, this doesn't mean that the merchant needs to explicitly state that they may.  What it actually means is that the merchant does not recognize the term &quot;disable&quot; in the context of terminating the service contract.  (Did they use stop, terminate, delete, eliminate, fall into disuse, log off, etc. or any other similar expressions?)</p>
<p>You haven't defined what &quot;disable&quot; means, but perhaps it is more like a &quot;pause&quot; in service for which payment is still required?  (Like having the post office hold your mail vs terminating all deliveries.)</p>
<p>What you need to do is to read the section of the T&amp;Cs that deals with terminating service and payment, understand what is required, and execute the procedures they describe.  Whatever words they use, do that.  If you have done all the steps and can prove it then you have a case against them, otherwise you are arguing semantics and interpretation...</p>
<p>As to the title question, it does not appear that any &quot;law&quot; has been broken, this is just a contractual misunderstanding.</p>
<p>P.S. This is the reason why I always set up payments through my bank to &quot;push&quot; money to vendors rather than authorizing them to &quot;pull&quot; money from me.  When I am done I notify them and stop paying.  I don't need to ask them to please stop taking it from me.</p>
