Judge rules SiriusXM’s annoying cancellation process is illegal

A New York judge has determined that SiriusXM’s “long and burdensome” cancellation process is illegal. In a ruling on Thursday, Judge Lyle Frank found SiriusXM violates a federal law that requires companies to make it easy to cancel a subscription.

The decision comes nearly one year after New York Attorney General Leticia James sued SiriusXM over claims the company makes subscriptions difficult to cancel. Following an investigation, the Office of the Attorney General found that the company attempts to delay cancellations by having customers call an agent, who then keeps them on the phone for several minutes while “pitching the subscriber as many as five retention offers.”

As outlined in the ruling, Judge Frank found that SiriusXM broke the Restore Online Shoppers Confidence Act (ROSCA), which requires companies to implement “simple mechanisms” to cancel a subscription. “Their cancellation procedure is clearly not as easy to use as the initiation method,” Judge Frank writes, citing the “inevitable wait times” that come along with talking to a live agent and the subscription offers they promote.

The Federal Trade Commission has started cracking down on hard-to-cancel subscriptions as well, with a new “click to cancel” rule going into effect next year. Under the law, companies must make canceling a subscription as easy as it is to sign up. “This decision found SiriusXM illegally created a complicated cancellation process for its New York customers, forcing them to spend significant amounts of time speaking with agents who refused to take ‘no’ for an answer,” Attorney General James said in a statement.

As a result of the ruling, SiriusXM must change its cancellation process — but only for customers located in New York. SiriusXM plans to appeal the decision. “Yesterday, the Court dismissed almost all of the charges against SiriusXM, and found that SiriusXM’s policies were neither misleading nor deceptive,” SiriusXM spokesperson Maggie Mitchell said in a statement to The Verge. “While the Court found some technical violations of a Federal statute, it did not find that SiriusXM ever deceived anyone or committed any fraud.”

Mitchell said SiriusXM will also follow the FTC’s incoming click-to-cancel rule.

Update, November 22nd: Added SiriusXM’s statement.