Judge rules Sirius XM’s annoying cancellation process is illegal

A New York judge has determined that Sirius XM’s “long and burdensome” cancellation process is illegal. In a ruling on Thursday, Judge Lyle Frank found Sirius XM 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 Sirius XM 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 serval minutes while “pitching the subscriber as many as five retention offers.”

As outlined in the ruling, Judge Frank found that Sirius XM 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, Sirius XM must change its cancellation process — but only for customers located in New York. Sirius XM says it plans to appeal the decision and will also follow the FTC’s incoming click-to-cancel rule, according to Reuters. The company didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.