Audio and video services, as well as marketplaces, withdraw money from consumer accounts, taking advantage of loopholes in the law
The Russian government supported the bill protecting citizens’ bank cards from hidden debits. In the very near future, our country may introduce regulations that will oblige users to warn about debiting money from a card that a person previously “discovered” in a store, but then removed from the site. A group of State Duma deputies came up with the initiative to introduce such requirements at the legal level. About the multimillion-dollar “subscription” business, the “quiet” debiting of money from the accounts of Russians and the need to stop the lawlessness of service platforms — in the material of MK.
< p>In November 2022, one of the largest marketplaces in Russia withdrew 400 rubles from the card of a Tula resident, although the buyer herself did not order anything and did not even have an account in this online store. As it turned out, her husband had previously paid with the woman’s card. He used it only once and then deleted the entry about it from his personal account, but this was enough for the store to continue to debit money from his wife’s bank card for services that he did not provide to her.
Similar precedents served as the basis for the proceedings. In particular, in April 2023, the Office of Rospotrebnadzor for the Tula Region filed a lawsuit in the Podolsk City Court against the marketplace. Citizens who suffered from “hidden write-offs” complained to the department. It is curious that the representative of the marketplace at the trial explained this behavior of the site by the fact that deleting bank card data from the buyer’s personal account does not yet constitute a withdrawal of consent to the processing of bank card data, which is specified in the company’s rules, which, in theory, consumers agree to when they start use the online store. But the court considered that this violates the law, because the marketplace is not a credit institution, and therefore does not have the right to write off funds without the consent of the cardholder.
“The average cost of subscription to services ranges from 199 to 599 rubles per month,” says sociologist Oleg Maltsev. “Since 2020, the number of Russians who use paid subscriptions to video platforms, audio streaming, and electronic libraries has increased 3 times.” So, seemingly small amounts of write-offs bring good profits to trading platforms.
The most common problems faced by citizens who have signed up for paid subscriptions: money is debited from a remote card; the service raises the subscription fee without notifying the client about it; Automatic renewal of the subscription occurs without the consent of the consumer.
Moreover, according to the current legislation, this cannot be called a violation, because such points are one way or another spelled out in the rules of the service, but few people read them. “The user usually learns about the presence of such expenses after the money has been written off, and canceling the subscription will no longer affect their return,” explains Nikita Kulikov, CEO of the PravoRobotov company.
Such cases were the reason why State Duma deputies proposed introducing a legislative ban on hidden write-offs. The government generally approved the proposal, but proposes to refine concepts such as “regular receipt” and “regular access” from a legal point of view. As Associate Professor of the Russian University of Economics said. Plekhanov Mary Valishvili, the volume of the paid subscriptions segment at the end of 2022 was estimated at 180 billion rubles. The audience of services is increasing from year to year, today about 13% of Russians are subscribers of various ecosystems, video hosting services, etc. According to analysts, by 2025 the number of subscribers will reach about 30% of the Russian population. In this regard, the issue of regulating the operation of services and protecting user rights is long overdue.
Today, only about 40% of clients of such services consciously renew their subscription, and 60% either do not understand how to refuse renewal or simply forget to do so. If the bill is adopted, services will be required to send users a notification one day before debiting funds from a bank card, which will contain not only the date and amount of the debit, but also information on how to terminate the subscription and a link to the platform. By the way, similar rules of law exist in a number of countries: Turkey, the Netherlands, the USA, and the UK.
As Larisa Naumenko, an expert on legal protection of business of the MGO “Support of Russia”, points out, the bill proposed by deputies focuses on the need to establish the will of the user to write off funds from his account or, as in the case of marketplaces, to write off exactly from this card. If this regulatory act is finalized in the State Duma and its final version is approved at all levels, then the law limiting hidden write-offs could come into effect as early as March 1, 2024.