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Dark Patterns: How to Escape the Subscription Trap · Making Cents

• 0:00
  If you've ever felt like the world is conspiring to make you poorer, you're not actually that far off the truth.
• 0:06
  There are money traps designed to make it easy to spend and harder to stop.
• 0:11
  They're called dark patterns, and often when you're shopping online is when you're the most vulnerable to them.
• 0:18
  Anything from subscription traps to your own information being used against you.
• 0:23
  So how do you fight back?
• 0:25
  You.
• 0:25
  You absolutely can.
• 0:26
  And I've got just the Money World insider to help us figure it out.
• 0:30
  Jan Verberne, senior legal counsel at Revolut, has seen all of these tricky tactics before and knows exactly which levers to pull to make sure you stay one step ahead.
• 0:40
  They're relying on that frustration and people being busy, because once you know these.
• 0:45
  Traps, protecting yourself gets a lot simpler.
• 0:47
  There are offerings now where you can have a virtual card.
• 0:50
  It's a lot more secure.
• 0:51
  You can say, I actually just want to use this virtual card for one subscription type or just for one transaction.
• 0:57
  So.
• 0:57
  Welcome to Ask the Experts the part of Making Sense where people from inside the money world answer your questions so you can get the inside word on what actually makes a difference.
• 1:07
  I'm Francis Cook, financial journalist and fellow financial freedom seeker who makes money simple for you today.
• 1:14
  How to escape the money traps designed to keep you paying.
• 1:18
  This episode of Making Sense is supported by Revolut, the app that helps your money go further at home and your travel budget go further overseas.
• 1:26
  I want to help as many people as possible reach financial freedom by taking control of their money.
• 1:31
  And you can help me in that mission two really easy ways.
• 1:34
  First, hit subscribe wherever you like to listen, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast player.
• 1:41
  Then send this episode to a friend so we can all level up our money together.
• 1:45
  Then the show grows, and I can keep giving you the money info that makes a difference to your life.
• 1:51
  Welcome, Jan.
• 1:53
  Ready for the letter?
• 1:54
  Ready.
• 1:54
  Let's go.
• 1:55
  All right.
• 1:55
  Hi, Francis.
• 1:56
  I want to cancel a subscription.
• 1:59
  That's it.
• 1:59
  But apparently it's harder than you would think.
• 2:02
  I signed up on a free trial.
• 2:03
  It's not for me.
• 2:05
  Now when I try to cancel, I get sent down this maze, page after page, asking why I'm leaving, offering me a discount.
• 2:13
  I asking if I'm sure.
• 2:14
  Asking again.
• 2:15
  Five pages deep, and I still haven't actually canceled anything.
• 2:19
  Then finally, right at the end, it tells me I need to call to finish canceling an actual phone call in 2026 to stop paying for something I don't use.
• 2:29
  Look, I'VE got a busy job, this place is only open in office hours, and this seems stupid.
• 2:34
  Is this even allowed?
• 2:35
  Surely it can't be this hard to cancel something that I don't want anymore.
• 2:40
  I feel triggered just reading that letter.
• 2:42
  Me too.
• 2:43
  I'm like, ugh, we've all been there, right?
• 2:46
  And it really reminds me of an episode we had a few weeks back where we were talking about dark patterns and how there's these sort of things that are gray zones that are technically allowed, but they're really annoying.
• 2:58
  So, you know, when you've got this system clearly set up to, okay, you can cancel, but we're gonna make it really hard for you.
• 3:05
  How common is that?
• 3:07
  That is something we're seeing increasingly, unfortunately.
• 3:09
  I think there are certain companies that invest heavily in making it very easy to get your payment information, get you through their onboarding process.
• 3:18
  And then once you're in, they ramp up the friction to allow you to get off that subscription.
• 3:25
  And so, as your listener mentioned, you feel like you're in a maze trying to just cancel and stop paying.
• 3:31
  And I think really they're relying on that frustration and people being busy to keep you on the subscription service.
• 3:39
  So they know that if you go down one avenue and you're not able to get out of the subscription and then you try and pivot and now you've got to call them, a lot of people will just give
• 3:49
  up, and then they continue paying for the service that they no longer want.
• 3:53
  Okay, so what sort of common traps do we see that are along these lines, not technically illegal, but annoying?
• 4:00
  The subscription trap is one that's very common.
• 4:02
  Another is this technique called drip pricing, which if you've made an online purchase recently, there's a good chance you will have seen it in some shape or form, which is where you might see a price for a subscription
• 4:13
  or for a purchase.
• 4:16
  And you proceed to pay, thinking that that's the price you're going to be paying.
• 4:20
  And then through the process, they drip feed, you know, additional little charges.
• 4:25
  There's maybe a service charge, a payment processing fee, an extra fee.
• 4:28
  Cause it's Tuesday.
• 4:29
  And then eventually when you go to pay, or you're already subscribing, and then the next month you see the price has gone up, it's higher than what you expected.
• 4:38
  So that's another common, I guess, kind of trap that we see online.
• 4:44
  Another is when it comes to paying in a currency that's not New Zealand dollars, we see people sometimes slip up and end up paying a lot more than they Expected.
• 4:55
  So if we're paying in another currency, we might see, for example, okay, this is 100 USD quickly check on currency converter, that's about 17 0.
• 5:05
  But when we go through the payment process, we'll see on our account, actually we've been charged a lot more than $170.
• 5:11
  And that's because in that payment process, maybe the banks charged an exchange fee or applied an exchange rate.
• 5:17
  That's not like market.
• 5:18
  It's actually one of the first problems that Revolut set out to solve is that in the Revolut app you can convert that currency live.
• 5:26
  You can see what the conversion rate is.
• 5:28
  Okay, I'll convert that now to US$100 and then you can pay in the local currency so you don't have any of those surprises.
• 5:36
  Because that's the thing now, we're all shopping online these days and it's all over the world.
• 5:41
  And yeah, US Dollars, great, that's one thing.
• 5:45
  But there's Aussie, there's the uk, there's Europe, who knows?
• 5:49
  And I'm not keeping all that stuff in my head.
• 5:51
  And it's a real pain because there's huge fees attached along every step of the way sometimes depending on where you're going.
• 5:57
  Right, exactly right.
• 5:58
  Okay, so we've got these traps and we've got, you've already outlined actually one solution there.
• 6:03
  But what sort of solutions do we have to make these traps a little less grabby?
• 6:09
  How do we sidestep them?
• 6:10
  I think on the subscription trap, one thing a lot of people I guess fall into is they set up a free trial and then forget that in three months it's about to start biting and they'll start being charged.
• 6:23
  And so one simple technique is you can set up a reminder on your phone to say in three months time, remember you're about to start being charged for the service you're on a free trial for.
• 6:33
  Actually, Revolut has some cool functionality.
• 6:35
  I've just found out about where you can see a calendar view of your payments that will be coming out of your account so that you could check, okay, next month in September, what are my planned payments that will
• 6:45
  be coming out of the account?
• 6:46
  And you can decide, oh, okay, I need to remember to reach out to that company to cancel if I don't want to continue on to a paid membership.
• 6:55
  The other is essentially trying to find a way to keep more control over the payments that are coming out of your account.
• 7:03
  One issue a lot of people see when you think about like the traditional banking offering of just having one credit card and one debit card is once those details are out there, the company has those details and it
• 7:15
  takes a lot of effort for you to switch a card and cancel.
• 7:18
  There are offerings now where you can have a virtual card.
• 7:20
  It's a lot more secure.
• 7:21
  You can say, I actually just want to use this virtual card for one subscription type or just for one transaction.
• 7:27
  And as soon as that transaction's done, immediately the card evaporates.
• 7:32
  You can generate a new one in the app, but you're not tied to just having one version of each card.
• 7:38
  And so you create a bit of a barrier between you and the merchant that you're paying online.
• 7:44
  This episode of Making Sense is supported by Revolut.
• 7:47
  When it comes to spending online, standard security hasn't always kept up with modern traps.
• 7:53
  That's why Revolut uses cutting edge technology to give you proactive defenses and total peace of mind.
• 7:59
  Customers worldwide trust Revolut to look after more than $67 billion of their money.
• 8:05
  If something looks suspicious while you're shopping online, their machine learning models can pick it up, notify you and freeze your card immediately.
• 8:13
  You stay in complete control.
• 8:15
  So if it was you, you can simply unfreeze it right in the app.
• 8:19
  For even more protection, you can use a single use virtual card.
• 8:23
  The card details automatically refresh after adding every single transaction, adding a powerful extra layer between your real account and retailers you might not trust completely.
• 8:33
  You can personalize more than 10 different security settings.
• 8:37
  Plus, if you ever run into issues, their award winning support team is on hand247 to resolve things quickly.
• 8:43
  You can join over 75 million users worldwide on our link, plus get $40 when you sign up and spend T's and C's.
• 8:51
  Apply.
• 8:52
  It's so interesting how the financial world has changed even just over the last ten years or so.
• 8:57
  As we've brought in more digital options, open banking, AI, all these things I think are really forcing financial institutions to level up their game to put a bit more power back on the customer side.
• 9:12
  Because until now, when you are handing over that information, you maybe have one credit card number that you're using on everything and then you have to try and cancel it and it's really hard.
• 9:21
  You're not going to cancel your entire credit card for one subscription to say, I'm going to call them out on this, say the New York Times, because they are chronic for making people call.
• 9:31
  And you're trying to call America to cancel your subscription.
• 9:34
  Like I'm not, I'm not doing that that's so annoying to be able to have a one off card where you can just cancel it and be like, well, you're not getting my money now.
• 9:41
  So I guess that's my subscription canceled is a really nice way to get a bit of power back in your hands.
• 9:48
  Do you think that there's going to be more innovation on that front from financial institutions as there's sort of more competition in this area, more options, more digital options, open banking options?
• 10:00
  Yeah, I certainly think so.
• 10:01
  I mean, New Zealand's taking a great step with implementing open banking and we're going to just see continuous innovation in this space.
• 10:09
  And I think there are great providers in New Zealand that are looking out first for customers.
• 10:15
  What are services that New Zealanders haven't previously had in the financial services space that we can offer into New Zealand?
• 10:23
  And before the podcast, we were talking about Europe and how exciting it is, the things that are happening in Europe and the fintech space.
• 10:30
  I think increasingly New Zealand's only going in that direction to sort of close that gap between APAC and Europe and America, which is really exciting.
• 10:40
  100%.
• 10:41
  I mean, we think about it, it's been less than a year now since we bought an open banking and the rest of the world has had it for years, years and years and years.
• 10:49
  But you know, hey, at least we're there now.
• 10:50
  That's great, we love it.
• 10:52
  There's so much of our information that does end up going out on the Internet these days.
• 10:57
  I mean, I get little security alerts now and then being like, hey, this password's been leaked again, you should probably change it.
• 11:05
  Or hey, your credit card info popped up here.
• 11:08
  Want to do something about that?
• 11:09
  And I'm just like, great, so what are some things we can do more broadly to protect our information when we're out and about on the World Wide Web?
• 11:18
  Any way that you can limit the personal information that you provide online is going to be useful because there are a number of risks associated with your personal information being out there beyond the financial side.
• 11:28
  So the risk of identity theft or just a privacy breach in that information being available to people that you didn't want that information to be available to.
• 11:40
  But on the financial side, the risk is that once someone has access to your financial information and has the ability to execute transactions on your behalf, that risk of unauthorized transactions being made on your behalf really kind of
• 11:54
  skyrockets.
• 11:55
  We can all take steps to limit how much personal information we have online.
• 11:58
  But the reality is, if you're going to be transacting online, you necessarily have to give some of your personal information.
• 12:05
  You need to give some kind of card details across so that a transaction can be made.
• 12:11
  And that ability to have something like a disposable card where you've got that additional layer of security where you can say, I'm only giving you this card for this transaction, and then it disappears.
• 12:22
  That's one really useful step that you can take to limit how much of your personal information is going online.
• 12:29
  Yeah.
• 12:29
  And I think the idea of the disposable card, it's quite a new one to New Zealand, right?
• 12:35
  In New Zealand, yeah.
• 12:35
  Not new internationally, but New Zealand's catching up, which is great.
• 12:39
  We'll get there.
• 12:41
  But it is, I mean, you do, I think, have to be quite diligent these days to keep as much of your personal information as you can.
• 12:49
  It's one thing to try and scrub it off the Internet post fact.
• 12:52
  If you can stop it getting out there in the first place, that's surely better.
• 12:56
  Yeah, 100%.
• 12:57
  And we actually had a colleague recently who had this experience where she was on a short domestic flight and while she was in the air, there wasn't potential unauthorized transaction on her account.
• 13:11
  It was flagged by the system as being potentially fraudulent.
• 13:15
  So the transaction was blocked until she approved it.
• 13:19
  In the meantime, her card was frozen.
• 13:21
  It was one of the virtual cards was frozen.
• 13:24
  And when she touched down, she had a notification from Revolut saying, hey, we've got a suspicious transaction on your account.
• 13:31
  Can you authorize this or let us know if it was fraudulent?
• 13:34
  It wasn't her.
• 13:35
  So she said, it's fraudulent, the card was frozen.
• 13:38
  So they couldn't do anything else with those details.
• 13:41
  And immediately a new card was regenerated for her.
• 13:44
  So those details that had been compromised, they're gone, they're useless because they're no longer attached to her card.
• 13:50
  And I think in the past, if you were in that situation and your credit card details had been taken and you had to reapply for another card, wait for it, either go into the branch or wait for it
• 14:02
  to be delivered.
• 14:03
  It's just a completely different kind of user experience.
• 14:07
  Especially if you're traveling.
• 14:08
  Yeah, exactly.
• 14:09
  Exactly.
• 14:10
  Okay, so if there's one thing that people did to try and protect themselves financially online, do you think there's one big overarching thing?
• 14:19
  I think in the financial space, it's to create that buffer between your transactional account where you have your spending money or your savings.
• 14:27
  Savings and third parties that can potentially access it.
• 14:31
  And so these techniques we've been talking about, particularly with having disposable cards or single use cards, they're a really useful way for you to implement that buffer in a really easy way.
• 14:44
  So that, you know, when we talked about subscription traps and then struggling to cancel them, you take that power out of the subscription services hands.
• 14:52
  If you cancel and then you say, well, I've canceled and also now you have no no longer have access to my account.
• 14:59
  Whereas if, if those details are out there and the third party can continue to draw down on your account, that's where you really run into trouble.
• 15:07
  I love that.
• 15:08
  Very actionable.
• 15:08
  Which we always like.
• 15:10
  Thank you so much Jan Vaboon from Revolut.
• 15:12
  Really appreciate your time.
• 15:14
  Now, if this episode was helpful to you, send it on to a friend so we can all level up with money together.
• 15:18
  And we can also take more of your questions from for future episodes like this askancescook, co NZ and we will deep dive your questions, get you some answers.
• 15:29
  Until next time, have a great day.
• 15:32
  This podcast can only give you general information about how things work in most situations.
• 15:38
  It's not individual financial advice.
• 15:40
  If you're after that, a financial advisor is always the best bet.