NY AG Sues SiriusXM Over Cancellation Complaints

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article was modified from its original version to include a statement and information from SiriusXM.

NEW YORK — New York’s attorney general has sued a satellite radio broadcaster because of consumer complaints about the length of time it takes to cancel a subscription.

Attorney General Letitia James said she recently filed a lawsuit against SiriusXM Radio Inc. for trapping consumers in subscriptions and the deliberately long and burdensome cancellation processes.

An investigation by her office found that SiriusXM forces its subscribers to call or chat online with an agent in order to cancel a subscription, James said. Then the agents deliberately draw out those interactions as part of the company’s strategy to prevent subscribers from canceling.

The attorney general said she also found that the company trains its agents to not take “no” for an answer when customers try to cancel, making it extremely difficult and frustrating for consumers to end their subscriptions.

Patch reached out to SiriusXM for a comment about the lawsuit. In response, the company said the allegations were “baseless.”

“Like a number of consumer businesses,” a spokesperson for SiriusXM said, “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.”

James said that, through the lawsuit, she seeks restitution, penalties and disgorgement from SiriusXM for violating New York’s business laws.

She said that 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 is illegal.

“Consumers should be able to cancel a subscription they no longer use or need without any issues,” James said, “and companies have a legal duty to make their cancellation process easy.”

SiriusXM, which is headquartered in New York City, has about 35 million subscribers, of which nearly 2 million are New Yorkers.

James’s office opened an investigation into the company after hundreds of consumers reported that they could not cancel their subscriptions.

The investigation found that the company trains its agents to keep customers on the phone or in a chat for a lengthy six-part conversation that includes asking a series of questions and pitching the subcribers as many as five retention offers, all to delay cancellation, the attorney general’s office said.

When the customers decline the offers, agents are trained not to take “no” for an answer and to keep bombarding the customers with questions or offers until they either relent or become frustrated.

James said that, according to SiriusXM’s own data, it takes subscribers an average of 11.5 minutes to cancel by phone and 30 minutes to cancel online — although for many subscribers it takes far longer.

Customers submitted affidavits to the attorney general’s office describing how hard it was to cancel subscriptions. In one case, an agent kept a subscriber in a chat for 40 minutes, despite the subscriber’s clear and repeated requests to cancel, according to a log of the chat. After the chat, the company continued to charge the customer. When the customer filed a complaint, the company said it could not locate a cancellation request from the customer.

Another complaint, which was handwritten by a consumer on behalf of her 92-year-old mother, described a maddening phone call with a SiriusXM agent that lasted nearly 40 minutes.

The SiriusXM spokesperson told Patch that many of the statistics the attorney general cited were mischaracterized and exaggerated and, based on the 2020 time period that the state investigated, were aggravated by the COVID pandemic. In 2021, according to SiriusXM, on average, online chat agents responded to consumer messages within 36 seconds to 2.4 minutes.

James’s lawsuit said SiriusXM violated state and federal laws concerning subscriptions that renew automatically by failing to provide subscribers with a cancellation mechanism that is simple, timely and easy to use. The lawsuit also claims that SiriusXM engaged in fraud and deception by misleading subscribers who want to cancel.

The attorney general’s office is seeking full restitution for all impacted subscribers nationwide, including compensation for the time SiriusXM wasted by putting its subscribers through a deliberately lengthy cancellation process. It also seeks disgorgement, penalties and costs and requires SiriusXM to implement a simple and easy-to-use cancellation process.

James said any consumers who have been affected by SiriusXM’s cancellation practices, or the deceptive or fraudulent cancellation practices of any other automatic-renewal sevice, should file a consumer complaint online.