New York Attorney General Letitia James sued New York-based radio provider SiriusXM on Wednesday for allegedly trapping consumers in subscriptions through deliberately burdensome cancellation processes.
Responding to hundreds of consumer complaints, the Attorney General’s office determined that SiriusXM forces its subscribers to call or chat online with an agent to cancel a subscription, then deliberately draws out those interactions “as part of its strategy to prevent subscribers from canceling,” Ms. James said.
The investigation found that the company trains its customer service personnel to not take “no” for an answer when asked to cancel a subscription.
“Having to endure a lengthy and frustrating process to cancel a subscription is a stressful burden no one looks forward to, and when companies make it hard to cancel subscriptions, it’s illegal,” Ms. James stated.
“Consumers should be able to cancel a subscription they no longer use or need without any issues, and companies have a legal duty to make their cancellation process easy. New Yorkers can trust that when companies like SiriusXM try to take advantage of them and violate the law, my office will step in to stop them,” she added.
SiriusXM Responds
“It’s telling that the New York Attorney General issued a press release before providing SiriusXM with a copy of the complaint,” the company said in a written statement, saying it offers “a variety of options” for customers to cancel.
“We intend to vigorously defend against these baseless allegations that grossly mischaracterize SiriusXM’s practices.”
The company is being sued for violating State and federal business laws concerning automatically renewing subscriptions, and for engaging in fraud and deception, as subscriptions were not always cancelled even when the cancellation process had been completed, according to the AG’s office.
In one case, a persistent customer managed to complete the unsubscribing process after a 40-minute discussion, but is then alleged to have found that the company continued to charge them anyway. When the consumer filed a complaint, the company claimed that the customer had never filed a cancellation request.
Hundreds of complaints were filed at the AG’s office and other agencies, describing agonizing communications with the company’s subscription service.
“Wait times regularly exceed ten minutes to be connected with a live agent by phone, and 25 minutes to be connected with a live agent by online chat,” the AG’s court petition read. “The wait times do not include time spent going through additional preliminary steps before entering the queue.”
Then follows a lengthy six-part conversation that includes going through a list of questions and pitching the subscriber as many as five retention offers, the AG said. Even when customers decline the offers, agents are trained to keep bombarding callers with questions and offers until customers either give up or give in.
According to data provided by SiriusXM, however, it takes subscribers 11.5 minutes on average to cancel by phone, and 30 minutes to cancel online.
SiriusXM is an audio entertainment company headquartered in New York City with over 34 million subscribers, of which nearly 2 million are New Yorkers.
In addition to penalties and forcing the company to adopt a customer-friendly cancellation process, Ms. James said she seeks “full restitution for all impacted subscribers nationwide, including compensation for the time SiriusXM wasted by putting its subscribers through a deliberately lengthy cancellation process.”
The Attorney General requested all consumers who have been affected by SiriusXM’s cancellation practices, or by similar deliberately complicated cancellation practices of any other automatic-renewal subscription service, to file a consumer complaint online.
