My experience with a disputed credit card charge

Hopefully you can all benefit from me sharing my unfortunate experience recently. My credit card was debited for a full year’s membership with no warning. I have been a loyal paid member for many years, but decided this year not to renew my membership. As soon as I saw the charge on my credit card statement, I raised a support ticket with ChinesePod to seek their help. There was no reply, so I raised another. And then another.

After about three weeks and three separate tickets I received a reply stating that I had already been sent an email that this charge was going to be made. I never received such an email. All they told me was to change my subscription settings to not automatically renew (which I never set to do so anyway - it should be an opt-in setting, not an opt-out setting).

I did so, and received a “Sorry to see you go” email addressed from Grace. The email said “If you have any feedback, I’d love to hear from you”, so I replied back to her explaining my situation. That was on the 27th of December 2019, and to date I have not received a response.

It’s clear that there is no assistance provided to members in such cases. So I’m leaving this here in the hopes that I can spare some of you the same experience I’ve been through.

Hey Tony,

I am sorry for the trouble you are experiencing.
We value you as a longterm user. Sadly we do not offer any refunds due to our policies. We make it clear that our service is based on a subscription model with recurring payments, you can see it twice during your payment and checkout and it is also in our terms and conditions.
We forwarded your case to our senior accountant for review.
I could offer you a 50% discount for your next membership as a reward for your loyalty.
Feel free to contact us anytime at support@chinesepod.com
We will contact you personally after the review.

Have a good day and a happy Chinese new year!

Best regards
Oskar from ChinesePod

Hi Oskar, it doesn’t really work that way I’m afraid. What you’ve done is to automatically sign me up for having my credit card charged each year which I never opted into, and just hope that I forget to go and change the setting so that you can extract a payment out of me. By law, you need to give consent to receive marketing emails (opt in, not opt out). By law, you need to give consent to companies collecting and sharing your personal information (opt in, not opt out). Your business practice is really unethical.

The last thing I want to do is to sign up for another year after this experience, even with a discount. Every year I’ve gotten a 50% discount by taking advantage of the Cyber Monday offer. What you should really do is to refund the money that was never supposed to be charged. Failing that, the next best thing you could do is to refund the difference between the full year amount you charged and the 50% discount I would have gotten if I chose to renew with the Cyber Monday offer.

Thank you Tony for sharing your experience. I’m regularly astonished how companies relying on user satisfaction handling such cases. I experienced same situation last year with Xing (Germany’s LinkedIn pendant). I cancelled the subscription, but somehow the system screwed up and I did not get a confirmation mail. Finally they prolonged my subscription. After intervention they offered me a similar offer, which is more a smash into my face than a benefit.
From then on I explained to all my fellows that I cannot recommend Xing. But such behavior seems to be not taken into account by companies living from subscribers.
Perhaps there are always enough new ones.

Belonging the policy - that’s an excuse. Policies are not god given. They can be changed, overruled or simply ignored. Depends on the will.

My experience was very similar to yours, and incredibly frustrating. In my case Eisha (A Chinesepod representative I spoke to on the phone) acknowledged how great it would be if Chinesepod would change their policy, but then made it clear that the policy would not be changed based on my and many other people’s complaints. In other words, if they can keep charging people for a year’s worth of something they’re not using and don’t want, why not? In past years I’ve had good experiences with Chinesepod’s customer support, but lately it seems like a desire to maximize profits has taken over, at the expense of common decency and user experience. Auto-renewal tricks will only take a company so far though. With the abundance of Chinese learning resources available on the web that do not use deceitful tactics to steal their customer’s money, I hope that Chinesepod eventually realizes that listening to and respecting the opinions of their customers is a healthier way to keep their business flowing long-term.

Hi Tony,

Sorry for the late reply due to the holiday of Chinese New Year. And I am sorry to hear it. We have forwarded your thought to our Student Relation Team and our staff will kindly take care of it. Please remember to check out your e-mail. And if there’s still any thoughts, feel free to contact us at support@chinesepod.com

Best regards,

Betty

Hi @yonadaan,

I am sorry to hear that and appreciate your feedback. Our policy has been under review in light of the feedbacks. Thanks again for your comment. With these, we can make ChinesePod better and make more users like us.

Best regards,

Betty

That’s good to hear! If Chinesepod changes their policy and is able to give me a refund for the $124 yearly subscription I never signed up for, I’d be happy to start recommending them again to friends and family, as I have done many times in the past. Until then though, I’ll be warning people to go elsewhere.

Hi @yonadaan,

We have forwarded your thought to our Student Relation Team and our staff will kindly take care of it. Please remember to check out your e-mail. And if there’s still any thoughts, feel free to contact us at support@chinesepod.com

Best regards,

Betty

As an update to all, Chinesepod sent me an email apologizing for the inconvenience, and processed a 50% refund to my credit card. The best way I can explain how this makes me feel is through an example. Say there’s a person that left their garage unlocked, and as a result their 2 cars were both stolen. Then after some time, one car is returned to the owner, but not the other one. Should people remember to lock their garages? Yes! But should people who steal 2 cars get to keep one of them?

In other words, I am glad that Chinesepod at least refunded me 50% of the yearly subscription that I never wanted. But a full refund would have been much much better. Or, since I did miss the cancellation deadline by one day, I would have also been happy with a refund of 99.7%. (364 divided by 365.) In conclusion, I still feel that Chinesepod’s policy unfairly takes advantage of auto-renewal to charge people for a service they no longer wish to use.

Also, for those who have had or end up having similar experiences in the future, posting on this forum seems to get a much better response than trying to contact customer service directly.

The exact same thing happened to me, and your analogy is spot on. There is a huge change in how ChinesePod is being managed since the new structure and hosts were set up. All I can say is I miss Fiona and Gwilym.

If it helps, I came to the website after a Valentine’s promotion email. I was about to purchase the 3-month package until I saw this post. I dislike when companies do this and it’s a problem. This little gotcha trick will ruin a business in the long run, unfortunately. I haven’t explored the new website design much, but I can say the old version wasn’t very user-friendly. So, I can see why some people get confused or make a mistake. Any honest company would refund the full amount if requested within a reasonable amount of time. Having something in the TOS doesn’t make it right. Treat your customers well in these circumstances and you won’t have a problem providing refunds (within reason) because you know people want to buy from you.

Hi there,

Thank you for your feedback. If there’s a valid reason for doing so, we provide a refund to our users. Each user has different cases for asking a refund, and we provide refunds for valid cases. We value our customer that’s why we are doing everything to satisfy our users’ needs.

Betty

I’m having the same problem. I cannot figure out how to download lessons even though I have hours googling and clicking links that lead nowhere. Now I cannot cancel my subscription even though I have barely used it due to being busy. I would like my subscription refunded (I only got a 40% discount in January) since I’ve barely used it. Chinese Pod does not answer my emails regarding really basic issues like downloading lessons (instead of having to search them on their site). This is a very unwieldly site to use, very user-unfriendly. I don’t have the time, patience, or energy to jump through so many hoops for one 17-minute lesson. I would never advise anyone to use ChinesePod.

Dear Denny,

We are sorry to hear that you are unhappy with your experience here. We would like to solve this problem swiftly, so we kindly ask you to send us a mail. You can send it directly to me, susie@chinesepod.com.

Thank you very much.

Susie

I had the same experience. I cancelled my subscription two days before it was due to renew this week, but two days later my credit card was charged anyway. Even though I got an immediate confirmation via email, customer support told me that I had failed to cancel. The problem was forwarded to the responsible person on the tech side, but there has not yet been an explanation of what went wrong coming from the tech side, and there has not been a refund. I should say that unlike denny1700 I have gotten very cordial responses from customer support and others at CPod, and that I have not had problems with CPod, at least on the legacy website (not the new website). I just decided to hold off on spending more money for the time being due to life circumstances and not knowing if I would have time to dedicate to study with CPod. Over the years I have had a pleasant and very educational experience with Chinese Pod and would not hesitate to recommend it for its content. I hope they get their payments system problems fixed soon.

Hi there,

I am sorry to hear that. Yes, there are some of our users who have a problem canceling the subscription. And we are still looking for the bugs in the system. We’ll fix it as soon as possible. Although you might leave ChinesePod, I still have something to tell you…First of all, we are really glad to have you learn with us and that our lessons do help you. Secondly, it’s ok that you don’t have enough time with us. We have a channel named ChinesePod on YouTube. And all the videos there are free. If you still want to learn Chinese in your trivial time, you still can find something helpful there. And of course, we are there, too. I mean, if you have any questions about Chinese, you are welcome to leave them down there, too. As usual, we will reply to you as soon as possible.

Regards,
Betty

Betty,
Any updates on this? Was it fixed? Any refunds sent out yet?
Thanks.

Hi there,

Sorry for the late reply. Our customer service has contacted you and dealt with the issue kindly.

Betty

Thanks. I hope other users whose money was lost to the glitch can enjoy a similar outcome without having to make repeated enquiries.

I was recently charged for an annual renewal but can not find any email reminder. It was a bit of a surprise. I have not used the service for a full year essentially, so I currently do not have any desire to renew. In light of the discussion here I hope customer service can help me refund. The service is good but I am simply not using it right now and nobody should have to pay for something they are not using. Thanks.

Hi Christian, I’m very sorry to hear this. I have forwarded your issue to Mante, our student relation representative. I’m sure you will get a reply on this very soon. You can also email support@chinesepod.com for further inquiry. Again, I apologize for the inconvenience, and I hope this issue will get solved soon.

Rebecca

Thank you for helping me with my posting earlier. Customer service was able to assist me nicely and I am happy with the outcome. Looking forward to continuing my learning.

Hi Christian,

That is so great to hear! I’m glad it all worked out. Let me know if you have any other questions that I can help you with. You can also contact me at rebecca@chinesepod.com for any academic support you might need. Happy learning

I had the same experience. It is not fair to treat loyal customers this way! I did just not follow up on my emails anymore. I simply have no time. So now they take advantage of me. I also asked for assistance to remove my credit card. No assistance delivered.

Hello,

I’m very sorry to hear that. I have forwarded your message to our student relation team and they will assist you with the issue of your credit card in no time. I apologize for any inconvenience we have caused you, and I’m sure the problem will be fixed soon and you’ll be able to enjoy our service again. Please let us know if you have any more questions!

Rebecca

Hi,

I’m posting here rather than creating a new thread because have a similar issue related to billing that submitted to Support 10 days ago and still have not received any response despite multiple follow-up messages.

I took advantage of ChinesePod’s holiday sale and bought two vouchers for 6 months of premium membership. The first voucher I redeemed was automatically registered to my account and my Premium expiration date updated to June 25th 2021. I went ahead and redeemed the second voucher under the same account, but nothing happened. My expiration date remained at June 25th 2021. When I tried inputting the code again, the screen told me the voucher code was already redeemed.

Is there anything someone can do to help me with this? There was nothing on the sales page that said you cannot redeem two vouchers under the same account. If this is not allowed, I highly recommend you being clear about this somewhere on your website. If there is no way to add those additional 6 months to my account, I would at least like that second voucher code to be reactivate so I could gift it to someone else. Otherwise, I just wasted $50.

Hello,

I’m very sorry for the confusion on the limitations of the voucher and I apologize for the inconvenience. To my knowledge, multiple voucher codes can not be redeemed at the same time for the same account.

However, I have personally brought this issue to our student relation team. You will be contacted by one of our representatives, Paris. I hope you understand that during the holidays some cases got backlogged and this is also why you haven’t heard back from us for so long. But rest assured we’ve been working hard to resolve all the cases. I’m sure we will find a solution to your problem, and hopefully you can get back to your studies soon.

Rebecca

Appreciate it! Thank you!

Becca,

It’s been about a week, and I’ve yet to hear back from anyone on your team.

Hello,

Thank you for letting me know. I’ll check with our team and get back to you. I’m very sorry for the delay, please know that we are working hard to reply to all the users’ emails. Thank you for your patience and I’ll keep you posted.

Rebecca

Hello,

Let me just add my bad experience here as I dont get any response anymore on the CP support

In April 2020 I discussed some technical problems with Chinese Pod and didnt get a satisfying answer so I cancelled my membership back then (was still running till end Nov.). Unfortunately I didn’t receive a confirmation email from CP.

End November when my annual subscription expired, I suddenly saw a charge to my credit card and of course reached out to CP support. They requested to send the cancellation confirmation, which I dont have, because they dont send them anymore.

At the same time, I cancelled the renewed subscription and again and again, no email confirmation from CP about the cancellation.

I am now waiting since Christmas for an answer and the refund.

If this doesnt happen, I guess I also have to dispute the credit card charge through my bank.
Seems I am not the first one.

Many companies are making the cancellation difficult, but i have never experienced to be cheated
into another year of membership

Looking forward to getting an answer

Sven

Hello Sven,

First of all, I’m sorry to hear about your negative experience and the delay of the reply. Unfortunately a backlog of cases have been built up since the holidays and we are working very hard to reply to the users.
I have to say this seems to be a strange case. Usually if you cancel the subscription before the expiry date, your credit card would not be charged for the next subscription period. May I ask if you purchased the subscription though iOS or Google Play store and tried to cancel it on the website? This might have something to do with the cancellation issues you encountered.
I have informed Paris, our student relation team representative of your issue. Please expect an email from her in the next few days, and I’ll also keep you updated here on the forum.

Sincerely,
Rebecca

Hello Fan,

I believe your issue regarding the vouchers has been solved. Please enjoy your extended premium subscription and I’m sorry if this negative experience affected your studies in any way. If you have any academic questions, don’t hesitate to contact me at rebecca@chinesepod.com. I’ll be glad to help!
Happy learning!

Rebecca

Hi Rebecca,

Thank you for escalating the problem! Looking forward to the next several months learning with ChinesePod!

Fan

Hello,

I post this here, as I had the same issue as the other users. After some time of not using the service, I just found out my credit card was charged without a reminder. I immediately cancelled the service when I realized, but, apparently, this alone won’t help with the charges already made (not even for a proportional refund, as it used to be the case, I believe, when I first signed up several years ago).

As it’s a yearly subscription, it’s quite a lot of money, so I am rather upset. I also don’t see why an automated email can be sent upon cancellation but none is sent a few days before renewal, if not to catch people unaware. Seems a little shady, to be honest.

Apparently, notwithstanding the above talks of review of the policy, all the issues experienced by the past users are still there.

Looking forward to hearing from support.

Regards,

Giovanni

Hello Giovanni,

Sorry for the late response, I’ll forward this issue to our student representative Paris, and you can expect an email from her soon. I apologize for the inconvenience, and I believe the problem will be solved in a short time. Thank you for letting us know.

Sincerely,
Rebecca

Re: “Apparently, notwithstanding the above talks of review of the policy, all the issues experienced by the past users are still there.”

Would CPod change its policy so this does not keep catching so many users by surprise? It seems like Giovanni is making a reasonable request for all users to be notified before their subscriptions are automatically renewed for another year. Also, it just seems weird that people have to go through the forum to beg for refunds instead of getting a professional reply from customer support.

Hi Podster,

I believe an automatic notification is sent out a few days before the subscription ends, but they sometimes end up in the spam folder. If the user would like to cancel after the automatic renewal, generally the customer support team would offer an extended subscription or other benefits instead as this is not in line with our policy.
The official way to file a complaint or report an issue is still via customer support. There was a bit of a backlog six months ago but now it has gotten better, and I believe Giovanni was contacted by Paris before I replied to his post.

Rebecca

Thanks, Becca. Really appreciate everything you do for the community. I just don’t think it is the best use of your talents to try to answer all the language questions and troubleshoot what customer service should be able to handle. Maybe they can hire another person or replace the subcontractor.

In my case, I want refund immediately in same day my card was charged (because I forgot the turn off the “auto subscribe” when I’m in trial. Because I don’t think this program works for me, I asked refund immediately. Chinepaid said they “REFUNDED” me, but I never see the refund after almost one month.

It’s very shady practice. If there is any employee from Chinesepod, please READ this thread. Your company really need do things right.

Thank you for your concern Podster:) My workload is nothing compared to what our customer support team has!

Thank you for letting me know. Perhaps there is some sort of delay in the refund. I’ll forward this to Paris and if you have reached out to the customer support team then you’ll get a reply soon!

Rebecca

Same thing happened to me just now. Got charged a full year without my knowledge. This is really bad. No prior email - including in the spam folder.

Hello,

I am very sorry to hear about this and I have forwarded your comment to our customer representative, who will look into this issue. I will keep you updated on the forum. Thank you for your patience.

Rebecca

@BeccaChu pls also look at the email I sent you concerning the redeem of my gift so I can continue to study.

Hi Markus,

We have received the email and we will reply to you!

Rebecca

I had to comment here because the CS Agent named Susie did not reply to my latest email and my thread on this forum is not approved by the moderator, which I don’t know why!

I signed up for 14-day trial premium subscription. I checked very carefully that the next billing cycle will be on Aug 9, 2023. That is why I decided to cancel subscription on Aug 8, 2023.

However, when I checked my account on Aug 8, I realized that they charged me $29. Therefore, I requested for a refund, and since they have a 30-day money back guarantee, I believe this request is reasonable. They did not notify me at all about charging me, not even a reminder!

After I requested for the refund, a CS agent named Susie contacted me and promised that I would get my refund by the “following week”. Ironically, it took 3 days for my bank account to be deducted but it’s been 15 days and maybe forever and I have not received any refund! I emailed again, the agent again said she would check with Finance department and got back to me. After waiting for another 3 days, I asked for an update and she has ghosted me since.

I have never posted any public complaint about any service I’ve used, but the inefficiency of ChinesePod has given me enough motivation to spend my time and energy writing out these words!

Give my money back!

Dear Tony,

Thank you for sharing experience your. I’m sorry to hear about the issues you’ve encountered with wukong education membership renewal and customer support. It’s frustrating when things like this happen, especially after being a loyal member for many years.

Regarding the automatic renewal, it’s not uncommon for subscription services to have auto-renew settings by default, but it should be clearly communicated to users. I’m glad you were able to change your subscription settings to prevent further charges. As for the lack of response from wukong education support team, that’s definitely not acceptable. It’s important for companies to address customer concerns in a timely manner.

I hope that by sharing your story, others can learn from your experience and be more cautious about their subscription settings. It’s always a good idea to regularly review your subscriptions and payment methods to ensure everything aligns with your current preferences.

If you have any other questions or need further assistance, feel free to reach out.