On Oct. 15 2009, Xing sent me a renewal invoice notification for my "premium membership." I immediately asked that this be cancelled, as I foolishly enrolled in Xing on someone else's referral. This site is useless, and appears to exist for the sole purpose of ringing up deceptively-billed membership fees.

I went back and forth with Xing about their alleged "inability" to immediately cancel my membership in this clearly fraudulent site. They wouldn't budge, claiming that my "premium membership" now goes until January. I'm contacting my credit card company to cancel the charge.

Two days ago I received an invoice from Xing, a business Network similar to Linkedin but focused on Germany and Austria. It has about 8 million members compared to LinkedINs 43 million members.

The invoice was part of an auto renewal which was automatically added as I signed up for Xing. I thought I remembered that I went in to my account to untick the box but cannot be 100% certain since this was 1 year ago. The renewal invoice was for EUR 71.40 for the next 12 months.

I no longer see a benefit for using the Premium Version of XING so I decided to send an email to the support / invoice team there to cancel the unwanted auto renewal. I stated

* That the charge is for a subscription in the future which I have not yet consumed
* I do not want to renew my subscription
* Asked politely for a refund

To my surprise I received a negative answer within 24 hours.

Your Premium Membership is a subscription which is automatically renewed at the
end of the contract for the length of time you specify. Unfortunately, we are
unable to cancel your last invoice, as we did not receive a cancellation from you
within the cancellation period (up to 14 days before the end of the contract).

This automatic extension is part of a Premium Membership and was a condition you
accepted when you agreed to the contract. This automatic extension is clearly
indicated when a Premium Membership is selected and can be seen in the "My
Account" section on the Web site.

To cut a long story short my second email was also declined.

What I would have expected.

* At the time of signing up -> A choice if I want auto renewal or not
* A reminder that my subscription will be automatically renewed 4 weeks before the end of the contract.

What will  I do next?
I am a Disgruntled Customer and I am angry so of  course I am going to make some noise. Further to that I might have used Xing again in the future. There has to be a very compelling reason that I will sign up again in future and third a link to this Blog article will be featured on both my Xing and LinkedIN accounts. I will also try to do a charge back with my Credit Card Company which I am positive will go through. 

More on this topic in German: Vorsicht Abzocke Xing