LastWeekTonight
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2023–2024
25:32 · 8.4M views · Mar 20, 2023
John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on timeshares covers how people get sold into them, why they are so hard to leave, and the exit-company scams that target owners trying to get out.
Cited in threads about hard-to-cancel subscriptions and timeshare scams as an informative overview of the sketchy exit industry.
4 comments from Hacker News
I am very sorry to hear that and I hope they can properly escape this situation. Maybe my opinion is biased (the media generally does not publish "everythibg is a-OK" articles), but my perception of the timeshare escape industry is that they are sketchy too. I think this Last Week Tonight episode is very informative on the topic: this video
Yeah, John Oliver just did a Last Week Tonight on Timeshares. He goes over that in the video. Also there are scam companies that exist that promise to take your money to help you exit your timeshare agreement, then disappear. So you get double-scammed. And somehow this is technically legal? Link to the Last Week Tonight video: this video
John Oliver had an interesting segment on timeshares and argues timeshare exit companies are even bigger scams: this video
Whenever this subject comes up I'm disheartened to see how many are willing to blame the victim: the consumer. We have allowed businesses to exist whose only really business model is duping customers into a subscription and then making it difficult or impossible to cancel. Just go look at timeshares [1]. I would dearly love to give money to some quality news publications to support their work but I don't. Why? Because I absolutely don't ever want to deal with their subscriptions department should I ever want to cancel. Ever tried to cancel an Equinox gym membership? I've seen half a dozen sign up constulants standing around at the entrance, someone call up to cancel and being told there's no specialist available. Cancelling a service should be no more difficult than pressing a button on an app or a website. We passed the CAN-SPAM Act to force compliance in communications for businesses [2]. The same should apply to taking their money. Speaking of gyms, it's an anti-user business model. The perfect gym customer is one who pays for a membership and never uses it. The more members a given gym can "support", the more profitable it is. If everyone used it 2 hours a day they'd go out of business. Planet Fitness took this one step further and removed their most popular equipment to dissuade people from going and charging so little that people usually can't be bothered to cancel it. All US cable/Internet start with an introductory rate that quietly gets jacked up over time. You can g