Your automatic subscription renewal should be easy to cancel, but many aren't, and it's against the law

Chris O’Brien of Pasadena is an actor. He gets some jobs through casting websites like Casting Frontier. 

But recently, it wasn’t a job from Casting Frontier that caught O’Brien’s eye, but a credit card charge. 

“They seemed to have just raised the price suddenly,” he said.

O’Brien’s annual membership with Casting Frontier is set up for automatic renewal. And when the most recent automatic charge hit, he said the cost had gone way up. He contends Casting Frontier never told him about the increase. 

“It went from $75 to $200, it was more than double," he said. "And especially the way inflation has been the last year, that’s my grocery money for the month. It was out of nowhere. I never got an email or a warning."

Robert Tauler and Kevin Cole are O'Brien's attorneys and they're suing Casting Frontier. 

“Anytime a consumer feels wrong about a situation or feels frustrated with a subscription service, that’s reason enough to know that something's probably off,” Tauler said. 

According to state law, when you sign up for a subscription that automatically reviews, the company must explain when it’ll charge you and how much. It’s also required to make it simple for you to cancel the subscription. 

“So there are very specific protections that California puts in place to make sure that if consumers are going to get a second charge, an automatic renewal, that they’re told about it, they understand it, they know it's coming, they can cancel with ease,” said Cole.

If O’Brien wins his case, he’ll be awarded a minimum of $2,500, per law. 

The I-Team reached out to Casting Frontier, but it didn’t respond. But in a legal response to the lawsuit, the company denied it did anything wrong. 

Douglas Allen is an assistant district attorney in Santa Cruz county. He’s also a member of a state task force, set up to enforce the automatic renewal law. 

“Frankly, we see some pretty egregious violations of the law,” he said. 

Allen said most companies comply with the law, but some make it especially difficult for customers to cancel their subscriptions. 

“There’s a lot of money to be made in the auto renewing contracts. And the less savory companies expect to make their money because they deceive people into three or four auto renewals before they realize what they’ve signed up for,” he said.

In the past eight years, Allen said the task force has investigated 45 companies; 15 were found in violation of the law, resulting in $16 million in fines. 

As for O’Brien, it wasn’t an easy decision to come forward, but he hopes it will help others save money.

“It can be scary to sort of say, ‘I don’t think I'm being treated right,’ because you don’t know, if you upset the wrong person, then you’re not an actor anymore.” he said.