I got them on a whim a few years ago after doing some survey. I have no idea which one. I tried contacting the individual magazines but they don’t have my information. Please help! The Atlantic is so boring!

Last year I bought a book as a Christmas present for my sister at a BooksAMillion store. When I was checking out the person checking me out asked if I wanted to receive 3 free month subscriptions to 3 magazines. I said yes and picked a few. What they don't tell you is that 3 months later, you will be charged for these magazines. I was going to be charged until June for 3 separate subscriptions but I caught the first charge early and canceled all of them. I had don't remember the lady saying anything about being charged and I don't remember signing anything. I just wrote my address down and picked the magazines, but I'm sure there was some fine print somewhere. I had to go to a weird 3rd party website called mags.com to cancel them.

TL;DR you will be charged for these magazines after the free months.

Edit: I was issued a refund after cancelling.

As the title says, wondering if there is a service that cancels all physical magazine subscriptions for someone? Working on clearing my moms house out, and a major issue is she has at least 5 different magazines arrive in the mail each day which is a major contributor to her clutter.

EDIT: I got everything sorted out. Thank you everyone for your help and replies!

In early April, I went to FYE to buy a figure. At checkout, the worker told me I can now sign up for 4 free magazines. I didn’t want to, so I told her no thank you, but she would not listen. So now I have 4 magazine subscriptions I don’t want. Whatever. I am very tight on money, and I checked my bank account today, and it was in the negatives. I never allow it to get in the negatives, no matter what. It turns out that I am now being charged for these magazines! The charge had a website on it, so I went to the website, mags.com, and it is the fishiest thing ever. I google it, and there is nothing but terrible things about it. I have tried calling FYE’s support number, it’s only for members. I have called the store, they did not help whatsoever. I have emailed support, absolutely nothing. I don’t know how to deal with this, and I am scared I am getting scammed. I just think it’s wild that a big, trusted store that I’ve shopped at in person my whole life would do this.

My mom is trying to cancel her people magazine and food and wine magazine subscriptions but when I try to cancel it I just get a thing that says “since your order was placed through an agency, it will be necessary for you to contact them. Our agreement with all agencies is that any such actions must be taken only with their approval.” With no other information and my mom has no idea what this “agency” is or how to contact them. There subscriptions are very expensive and we can’t afford it

I got a 2-year renewal for my Economist subscription (print+digital) from discountmags back in November for $180+tax. That's a much better deal than anything else I've found, as other in this subreddit have noted. Just now, as it was about to start, I got a message from discountmags that my order was canceled. Quote from the email:

Cancellation reason: This order has been returned by our processing center.
Refund Amount: $196.09

Does someone have a similar issue? Does anyone know what's going on?

Many people complain online about these magazine scams, so as a public service I'm posting how I dealt with it and got a full refund.

Background: Through some internet thing that she doesn't even remember, my wife somehow got subscribed to a series of magazines. We didn't even realize it until we started receiving them and her Paypal acct got billed for 3 amounts of over $60. I found that there are a number of agencies that gather subscriptions through various bogus means - small print in contest entries, etc. The magazine companies have agreements with these agents such that the magazines will not cancel the subscriptions - you have to contact the agents. (They say print is dying - well if they have to do business through scumbags to survive, then maybe print should die. Anyway...)

Some subscription agents people have been complaining about include National Readers Service, American Readers Club, Your Magazine Service, Priority One Clearing Services, and Subscriber Services Inc.

Magazines we received include Forbes, Outside, Shape, Women's Health, Entrepreneur, Motor Trend, Better Homes & Gardens, Inc, and Fast Company. Fast Company's online subscription cancel feature actually worked. The other websites said I would have to contact the agency that had created the subscription. Only one magazine (Motor Trend) identified the agency:

Subco Direct Mail
653 W Fallbrook Ave
Fresno, CA 93711 
800-258-3350 

I started by calling Subco. After maybe a 5-minute hold, the polite woman who answered took down my list of magazines and said she only had 5 of them on record, which she canceled. But she said her company had not done any billing for any of these - that was all done by another agency called Magazine Exchange Club: 877-318-9601.

Next call to Magazine Exchange Club (5-minute hold) - no, they hadn't billed us either. That was yet another company called Smart Shopper Savings Club: 877-398-5752.

More like a 10-minute hold at the Smart Shopper Savings Club number, where the hold music was classical piano that sounded like a scratchy vinyl record being played on an old Victrola. Seriously, it was like the other end of the line was in a dumpy office building in an old movie, across the hall from a sleazy detective agency.

The woman who answered at Smart Shopper had a heavy accent which I had difficulty understanding, but after a few minutes she had canceled all future billings and deleted our payment information. But she was only authorized to refund the most recent payment of $64.35, so I asked to talk to her supervisor.

This took me to a woman named Miranda, who was somewhat easier to understand. Like her underling, Miranda told me the call was being recorded to ensure that I got the best service. After checking for a minute or two she said she could refund $96.52, which was half the amount, because they had already prepaid the rest. I got what she meant, but it didn't matter to me because I wanted a full refund. Getting back whatever they had spent, if indeed they even had, was going to be their problem. So I pretended not to understand the implications of "we have already prepaid" and just kept asking when I would receive the full amount. After she repeated her story in a couple different ways I asked to speak to her supervisor. She said there was no supervisor above her, and she would be the last person who would be speaking with me.

So at this point I asked for Miranda's full name, which she gave me, and the physical address of the company (see below) so that my attorney would be able to contact them. I also asked for the name of the CEO, president, or owner of the business, which she refused to divulge. I asked several times and told her I was recording this conversation myself for my attorney's use, then repeated her full name and said, "You have to understand then that by refusing to refer me to anyone above you, you are personally taking responsibility for this. Now I'm going to wait on the line while you process the refund."

This time there was no hold music. After only about a minute Miranda returned and informed me that she was issuing a credit card refund for the full amount of $192.05. I politely thanked her, and then complimented her on being such a good and loyal employee, and added that I hoped she would find a job at a better company that deserved her more.

Bottom line - we got the credit refund and learned a valuable lesson about being more careful about who we give our information to online. Whether or not the scumbag company actually had paid out anything and ended up losing money isn't really important, but I kind of hope they did.

Hope this information helps someone. Save it in case you run into a similar situation. My advice to anyone who has to deal with things like this:

• Maintain a polite, businesslike attitude throughout the conversations. Don't even sound angry or impatient. I'm sure they deal with pissed off people constantly and it doesn't intimidate them. A cold, matter-of-fact tone conveys determination.

• Start with the attitude was that they are definitely going give you what you want. If the person you are talking to isn't authorized to do that, no problem, be willing to move along to the next person.

• Don't threaten them with lawsuits or the Better Business Bureau or anything like that. I never said anything about suing, I just used the word "attorney" in passing as I was getting the information. I don't actually even know any lawyers.

• Hang in there. I went through a similar process a few years ago when my daughter ordered some kind of tea for weight loss. If you are patient these companies will give you full refunds. They just offer it in stages, and most people take whatever is offered. Spending less than an hour on this whole thing was worth almost $200, not to mention the feeling of sticking it to some scumbags. Don't give up. And by the way, if for some reason you want to keep print magazines from dying out, go directly to magazine websites and order them there.

/edit - fyi:

Smart Shopper Saving Club 
423 E. Thunderbird Rd, suite 450
Phoenix, AZ 85022
877-398-5752

Tell Miranda I said Hi.

Location: United States, ID

About a month ago my girlfriend got a telemarketer call from a company selling magazine subscriptions. She said yes (argh) to a subscription to a few magazines for about $50. Which didn't sound too unreasonable for a couple magazine subscriptions.

A week or two later she got a call from the company saying that she had been signed up for magazines for $60 a MONTH for TWENTY MONTHS. She said that this is not what she agreed to and asked to cancel, they told her that "that wasn't possible," then they asked for my phone number and she gave it to them (double argh).

We cancelled the debit card that she had given them, but every day they try to make charges to the cancelled card for $50 (we can see this through her banking app).

Now we are getting mail from multiple different companies based from different addresses claiming that we are signed up for a bunch of different services that we did not sign up for.

These include

• Leisure Time Resources, Cape Coral, FL for 20 mo @ $60 mo

• Life Secur Inc, Cape Coral, FL (different PO box) indefinitely @ $25/mo

• Magazine Unlimited, Providence, RI for $50 mo with a "balance" of $1500

This is an obvious scam to me but I'm worried that since she said yes to the original call that they will be able to come after us for these fees and send us to collections and harass us by phone.

What do we do? Ignore it? Report it to the police/FTC?

Edit: Thanks for your comments everyone, just to clear things up, they were able to make one payment shortly after the first call, then about a month later they called her to tell her she had been signed up for some kind of an autorenewal plan, the whole call was super sketchy, and when she asked to cancel they said no. We cancelled the card then and there have been no further charges, just a bunch of sketchy mail asking exorbitant charges for crappy magazines and implying that we already owe the money, plus a sketchy identity protection company also says we're signed up with them.

Me and my girlfriend were out shopping and I wanted to go look for a particular book. So we headed over to 2nd and Charles and I picked up a few items. After check out our autistic son was having issues and I wasn't paying much attention to the attendant. She said something about a free trial of certain magazines in my frustration I readily agreed and left the store. Three months later I get a charge on my debit card for three magazine subscriptions so I go to all three magazine websites to cancel and get a refund. Unfortunately they say I have to go to the agent of the subscription to cancel. At no point was I informed this companys name or how to contact them through mail or email. So I do a quick google search to try and find the name of the parent company. At the top of the results is a Facebook post with a bunch of comments about with people complaining about being charged with no option to cancel the subscription. But in the comments I find a number and it let's me cancel all three magazine subscriptions and get a refund. But the automated process was designed to trick in my opinion older people into renewing there subscription unknowingly. They say paper print is dying and with predatory tactics like this I think it's best if it does at least in this case!

FYE is such a scam, I'm so upset I didn't realize it before I went in. They got my email for the free account stuff, I managed to cancel that before the first charge - but I'm stuck with magazine subscription. When they asked for a magazine, I said I didn't want one. But I called Mags.com, and I do have an account, but I can't cancel because I don't have any magazines attached. How should I go about stopping the subscription if I can't access the account?

So probably 10 yrs ago, I got an offer to get 4 magazine subs for free after doing some long online survey...looked thru the list, and chose 4 different cooking magazines, which if you know, aren't cheap to get. After the free year of each sub, I just ignored the renewal requests that came in the mail, but 2 of those magazine subs keep coming to me... I find it funny that I keep getting the magazines for free after...7 yrs or so now?

Has anyone else canceled a subscription to something, and then kept getting it sent to them for free for an extended period of time?

I decided to cancel my online subscription to The Economist, because it’s very expensive and I really never read it. But the only way to cancel your subscription is to have a live chat or a phone call. (They are not the only publication to do this.) Three months ago, I called to cancel and they convinced me to take a special deal instead of canceling. I even put a note on my calendar to cancel after three months, but I forgot so then I got billed again. So I contacted them again to try and cancel for real; and of course a new person took up lots of time making me all kinds of offers. You feel rude just because you have to be very assertive to merely cancel your subscription.