How can I reverse unauthorised online transaction. I subscribed to LinkedIn Premium. After 1 month they took 7080 INR. I reported to my bank and now after 60 days they say that the merchant has declined. What can I do?*

In the digital world, almost all monthly subscriptions, including LinkedIn’s Premium subscription, are autorenewals. That means they renew automatically from one month to the next unless you cancel them before the expiry period. When you order the subscription, you confirm your agreement of this condition.

If you have not cancelled the monthly subscription, then the renewal transaction is authorized by you. Since it’s not unauthorized, your credit card issuer bank is right in refusing to reverse the charge.

You need to cancel the subscription directly with the Merchant of Record, which is LinkedIn in this case. I strongly doubt if you will get your second month’s fees back but you can definitely stop the renewal from happening for Month 3 and later.

The last time I checked, it was quite easy to find the CANCEL option on LinkedIn website.

At the risk of straying slightly off the main topic, that’s not necessarily the case with many other companies.

1. Some companies bury the cancel feature below several layers of their websites, making it difficult to find.
2. Some others don’t support cancellation online and instead tell you to call a Hong Kong telephone number to cancel subscriptions.
3. Some others don’t support cancellation at all, via any channel.

This trend is called “Subscription Trap” and is fueled by so-called Dark Patterns.

Many people are falling victim to it these days, like this guy who set up a Google Cloud account with free credits for a hackathon and then forget to cancel the subscription and ended up with a bill for $4000.

My $0.02: Whenever you sign up for a new subscription, follow the following guideline given in Ten Ways To Protect Yourselves From Fraud:

Sign up for subscriptions of news, streaming video and other services only via Play Store, App Store, PayPal or some other third party website / app that allow you to cancel the subscription anytime. Many companies use the so-called Roach Motel dark pattern to make it easy to sign up but hard to cancel their subscriptions on their original websites / apps e.g. Wall Street Journal.

Above all, Caveat Emptor!

*: This is the original question I answered. I’m repeating it to help me make sense of my answer in case it’s moved to / merged with some other question that I didn’t answer.