I’m just a regular person making about $70K a year in a big city, and I’ve recently felt incredibly powerless dealing with private companies. For instance, my landlord’s auto-pay system had a glitch that excluded my pet rent and water bill. I ended up with over $1,000 in late fees. Despite hours on the phone, it turns out their system doesn’t really do auto-pay and requires a fixed amount instead of covering the full rent. It feels like a scam, and my options are to pay the fees or potentially spend a fortune on legal action.
Another frustrating experience was trying to cancel my pest control service. I had to endure a 40-minute call followed by 35 minutes of arguing, just to finally cancel. There’s no online cancellation option, and the process felt like a timeshare sales pitch.
Why do ordinary people seem so unprotected against these shady practices, and how can we change this? How does one person even start to address these issues?
Sometimes they have automatic payments that go though your account. Once they took it try to get it back.
I am not following
He’s saying they will illegally initiate a transfer from your bank of more money than they agreed to take. Forcing you to sue them to get it back, rather than the other way around.
With the understanding of course that initiating a lawsuit is prohibitively expensive for normal people.
Particularly normal people whose money they can take.