Last year I joined an organization and used PayPal to pay the dues. Apparently it was set up as an automatically renewing subscription, because today I received a notice that a renewal payment had been sent. I received no previous notification whatsoever that this was going to happen. There was no way to stop it because the payment had already been sent when I recieved the notice. The organization has since changed to a policy where dues are free, so now I have to ask them to refund my payment. How can PayPal work this way? WOW! It is about the most irresponsible payment processing policy I have ever seen. I can't remember what I did a year ago. I can't imagine that I would have intentionally set up the subscription to renew automatically. As a rule, I don't do that sort of thing. But even if I did, some form of advance notice to let me prevent the payment would have been appropriate. I don't even know how to check whether any other automatic payments have been set up for my account. I had to do a bit of searching just to figure out how to cancel this subscription. PayPal needs to send notice about five days before processing any automatic payments. I see that there have been other complaints in the forum about this issue, mostly from merchants having to deal with angry customers like me. If we can't get PayPal to do this simple thing, then we need to start complaining to the media, the Federal Trade Commission, and our state attorneys general. It is a totally unacceptable business practice. The fact that PayPal has direct access to my bank account makes it almost criminal. I am copying this message to my local newspaper.
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