Vonage made online signup take minutes — cancellation took a phone call

Vonage let customers sign up for its internet phone service in minutes, online. Cancelling was a different journey: live agent only, with obscured contact information, circuitous and redundant steps, long waits, dropped calls, and repeated sales pitches before anyone would process it — plus early-termination fees for leaving. The FTC's November 2022 complaint called the scheme dark patterns: obstacles designed to keep subscribers paying.

The settlement turned into one of the FTC's largest consumer redress outcomes: in October 2023 the agency sent more than $99.4 million in refunds to 389,106 customers who had tried to cancel or been charged after cancelling. The order barred the obstruction tactics and required cancellation to be as simple as enrollment.

The anatomy is the whole lesson: signup friction at zero, cancellation friction at maximum. The asymmetry was not a support backlog — it was the retention strategy, priced at a hundred million dollars when the FTC measured it.