We stand up for your legal rights
Can you help me cancel my Norton subscription?
Q A year ago, I bought a Norton subscription at the special price offered by Computeractive (www.snipca.com/49532, pictured). But when I recently checked my bank account Norton had taken £99 for renewing it – without telling me. I can’t work out how to cancel and Norton has ignored all my emails, so can you help?
Ramalitse Sakoane
AWe’ll do our best. Although we work with companies such as Norton to bring discounted offers to our readers through our Software Store, we’ve no control over what they do after the original subscription or offer ends.
Norton should have given Ramalitse 30 days’ notice of his subscription renewal, but this may have ended up in his junk or spam email folder. We’ve asked him to look for this. Sonny would have been allowed to cancel within 14 days of being contacted, as long as he hadn’t downloaded any updates relating to the renewed subscription.
However, he might still have a case even though the 14-day deadline has passed. Ramalitse would need to prove that he tried to cancel and that Norton ignored him, or made it too difficult to do so. We’ll contact Norton to point this out.
Problems like this should become rarer once the Government’s Digital Markets Competition and Consumers Bill becomes law. It states that companies must make it easier to cancel rolling subscriptions, though we don’t have details yet. Amendments are likely, but hopefully the Bill will become law by the end of the year. It can’t come a minute too soon because it’s estimated consumers lose £1.6bn each year on subscriptions they can’t cancel or have forgotten about.
CASE ONGOING
I don’t like my radio, so can I get a refund?
Q The RF-D15 radio that I bought from Panasonic for £40 won’t let me set functions such as alarm, sleep and volume due to existing settings. Plus, it’s useless as a bedside radio because the buttons are on the back, and you have to press functions multiple times to switch off the alarm. Do I have a case for a refund?
Barry Gregson-Allcott
A No, we don’t think Barry has a case, though we sympathise with him. He’s clearly not happy with the radio and regrets buying it, but it doesn’t appear to be inherently faulty.
Barry says Panasonic hasn’t been helpful and has refused a refund. But he’s unlikely to persuade the company to unless he can prove the radio was faulty when he bought it, or that it doesn’t match its de
