$1,730 recovered from a subscription cancelled three years earlier

Our client signed up to a fitness content subscription during a free trial and cancelled inside the trial period using the in-app cancellation flow. He received no confirmation email and thought nothing more about it.

Thirty-eight months later, reviewing his account after changing jobs, he found $45.50 leaving monthly. The trader's position was that no cancellation had ever been received and that he had been free to cancel at any time.

He had no confirmation, no screenshot and no reference number, which is exactly the position an in-app cancellation flow tends to leave people in, and why these claims go unchallenged.

We approached it from the bank's side rather than the trader's.

Two months after cancelling he had telephoned his bank to ask about the payments and had been told to contact the merchant. That call was logged. Under the rules on continuous payment authorities, a customer can instruct their bank to stop the payments and the bank must act — it cannot require the customer to resolve matters with the merchant first.

We requested the call recordings and contact notes by subject access request. The notes confirmed both the enquiry and the advice given. That made every payment taken after that date the bank's liability rather than the trader's.

Separately we examined how the trial terms had been presented at sign-up, using an archived version of the page. The auto-renewal disclosure sat below the fold behind a collapsed link, which supports a separate argument about prior information.

We put the claim to the bank for the thirty-six payments taken after the logged call, totalling $1,638 plus interest. The bank accepted liability and paid $1,730 within five weeks, without needing an Ombudsman referral.

The two payments taken before that call were pursued against the trader by chargeback and declined as out of time. We advised that the amount did not justify escalating and he agreed.

We also reviewed his statements for other recurring payments and found two more he had forgotten, worth $22 a month combined. He cancelled those himself and we did not charge for it.