Twitter/Joshua Browder
- Josh Browder, the 22-year-old entrepreneur behind DoNotPay, an automated legal assistant for small legal claims, has created a virtual credit card that automatically cancels your free trials.
- Customers can sign up for the "Free Trial Card" with a bogus name, address, and email address and use it to register for free trials. Once the trial period ends, the card will automatically decline payment.
- Browder came up with the idea after he realized he was being charged for a gym membership that he never used.
- Earlier this month, DoNotPay raised $4.6 million in its first funding round, which included Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.
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Josh Browder is the 22-year-old Stanford dropout behind DoNotPay, a robot legal assistant that he invented to disputes small legal claims like parking tickets.
Earlier this month, DoNotPay raised $4.6 million in its first funding led by Felicis Ventures, with participation from Index Ventures, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Highland Capital, Tuesday, and Coatue Management.
And on Wednesday, Browder announced a string of new products on Twitter.
This included a new virtual credit card that allows customers to sign up for free trials and have these automatically canceled when the trial period ends. It means you could sign up for Netflix without worrying about it rolling you into being a paying customer after the month’s trial is over.
Browder told Wired reporter Emily Dreyfuss that he came up with the idea for "Free Trial Card" after realizing he had been paying for a gym membership for more than a year without using it.
Companies that offer free trials that automatically turn into paying memberships are betting on the fact that people won’t remember to cancel their subscription after signing up. This isn’t how an opt-in service should work, he said. "Why should you have to give a credit card in the first place?" he asked.
You can use any name, address, and email address to sign up for his new card. However, you’ll need to provide DoNotPay with your real email so that it can forward on any emails sent to your bogus credit card account.
When the trial period ends, the card automatically declines any payments; DoNotPay will send you an email to let you know when the trial starts and ends, in case you wish to sign up for the service afterward.
Wired reporter Dreyfuss tested the new service with success. She also tested whether the card would let her make a genuine purchase online and this was rejected, she wrote.
DoNotPay
Browder told Wired that his card is backed by a network of community banks, which have given DoNotPay a business credit card that allows the company to use it to "act as an agent paying for consumers."
When pressed, Browder wouldn’t tell Dreyfuss which banks are backing the new card. And it’s because they don’t know that the card is being used in this way for free trials, he said."They might shut us down if we mention their name," he said.
As the issuing bank doesn’t know anything about the people who are using the service, it would be DoNotPay that is liable to pay if there is a glitch and the customer is charged.
Financial experts expressed their concern over this new service and said it could be seen as deceptive. "It’s basically a product that’s designed to defraud the free trial providers," a fintech lawyer for a major payments company told Wired. They spoke on the condition of anonymity.
But Browder said it is the free trial companies that are being deceptive.
Still, it remains to be seen whether the banks that are unknowingly backing the credit card will continue to be involved if they find out. "I’m confident that this is at least going to go on for a few months," he told Wired. "I hope we don’t get shut down. We’ll see."
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Source: Business Insider – feedback@businessinsider.com (Mary Hanbury)