Siriusxm sued over cancel policies
ALBANY — The state attorney general’s office filed a lawsuit Wednesday against Siriusxm Radio, Inc., over its allegedly predatory subscription plans that for years would increase automatically unless a customer waded through a “deliberately long and burdensome cancellation” process that required them to call or chat online with an agent.
The attorney general’s civil complaint alleges the satellite radio company then “deliberately draws out those interactions as part of its strategy to prevent subscribers from canceling.”
The complaint also alleges the company trains its customer service agents to use sales tactics to discourage customers from canceling, including offering them lower subscription rates that in the past would usually automatically renew at a higher rate unless the customer cancelled it.
Recently, the company has changed that practice and has been offering subscription plans that do not automatically increase rates upon renewal — but still they require someone to contact an agent to cancel, rather than simply having that option by logging into their online account. (In previous years, Siriusxm did not offer a customer the option of cancelling a subscription using an online agent and required that it be done by calling the company — which often led to customers waiting on hold for long periods.)
The lawsuit seeks restitution, penalties and disgorgement from Siriusxm for allegedly violating New York’s business laws.
“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,” state Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement. “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.”
In a statement from Siriusxm, the company noted that it has an A rating from the Better Business Bureau and that is offers a variety of options for customers to cancel their subscriptions, including an online dashboard for those with streaming-only plans to end their service with a click of a button.
“It’s telling that the New York attorney general issued a press release before providing Siriusxm with a copy of the complaint,” said Jessica Casano-antonellis, a spokeswoman for Siriusxm. “Like a number of consumer businesses, we offer a variety of options for customers to sign up for or cancel their Siriusxm subscription and, upon receiving and reviewing the complaint, we intend to vigorously defend against these baseless allegations that grossly mischaracterize Siriusxm’s practices.”
According to the attorney general’s office, Siriusxm, which is headquartered in New York City, has approximately 35 million subscribers, including 2 million from New York.
The investigation was launched after the attorney general’s office and other agencies received hundreds of complaints from consumers that they could not easily cancel subscriptions. Investigators said they found the company “trains its agents to keep customers on the phone or in the chat for a lengthy sixpart conversation that includes asking a series of questions and then pitching the subscriber as many as five retention offers, all to delay cancellation. When customers decline the offers, agents are trained not to take ‘no’ for an answer and to keep bombarding customers with questions or offers until they either relent or become frustrated.”
The lawsuit found that Siriusxm’s internal data indicates it takes subscribers an average of nearly 12 minutes to cancel by phone, and 30 minutes to cancel online, although for many it takes far longer. The attorney general’s office said wait times regularly reach more than 20 minutes for someone to connect with an online chat agent, which often leads someone to give up trying to cancel a subscription — even when their rate had increased significantly.
It takes a “click of a button” for the company to cancel a subscription, according to the attorney general’s office.
Siriusxm responded that many of the statistics cited by the attorney general’s office are “mischaracterized and exaggerated” and based on an investigation from 2020 that occurred during the pandemic. In 2021, online chat agents responded to consumer messages within an average of 36 seconds to just over two minutes, the company said.
The attorney general’s complaint includes citations from customer affidavits about their frustration with the company’s cancellation procedures.
“In one case, a Siriusxm agent kept a subscriber in a chat for 40 minutes, despite the subscriber’s clear and repeated requests to cancel… (and) after that, the company continued to charge the customer anyway,” according to the attorney general’s office. “When the consumer then filed a complaint, Siriusxm said that it was not able to locate any cancellation request from him (even though he had saved a log of the online chat to verify what happened). Another complaint — handwritten by a consumer on behalf of her 92-yearold mother — described a maddening phone call with a Siriusxm agent that lasted nearly 40 minutes.”
The lawsuit, filed in state Supreme Court in New York City, alleges Siriusxm violated state and federal laws governing automatic-renewal subscriptions by failing to provide subscribers with a simple cancellation process. The filing also accuses the company of “fraud and deception by misleading subscribers seeking to cancel.”
The litigation seeks restitution for subscribers nationwide for “the time Siriusxm wasted by putting its subscribers through a deliberately lengthy cancellation process.” It also seeks penalties and court costs and an order requiring Siriusxm to implement a simple cancellation process.