Westpac New Zealand says it is now stopping more than $75,000 a day in payments to websites that sign shoppers up to recurring charges they did not knowingly agree to, and that the block has prevented more than $40 million of those payments since it was switched on in April 2024.
The bank released the updated figures on Tuesday. It describes the problem as a subscription trap, where an online business sells something that may be perfectly real but pushes the customer into authorising a repeating card payment that is then difficult to cancel.
Westpac NZ head of customer care operations Peter Barnes said the businesses involved are usually operating inside the law, which is part of what makes them so hard to deal with.
“These types of businesses aren’t necessarily acting fraudulently, because they do disclose the subscription details in their fine print, but typically they don’t offer this information up front,” Barnes told RNZ. “So, in our view their money-making model is unethical.”
Because the terms are technically disclosed, a customer who complains is not usually the victim of a crime. They are a customer who agreed to something without reading it, which leaves them arguing with a merchant that has no particular reason to make cancelling easy. Barnes said the value of payments the bank prevents has doubled as it has refined the block over the past two years.
The other change he pointed to is where these sites claim to be. “In the past two years we’ve seen more and more digital subscription services and e-commerce sites misleading shoppers by portraying themselves as being New Zealand-based,” Barnes said. Prices shown in New Zealand dollars, a local-sounding trading name and a delivery promise aimed at this country all lower a shopper’s guard, even when there is no business here at all.
The pattern usually starts with something free. A trial, a sample, a one-off report or plan. The card details are taken to verify identity or cover postage, and the recurring charge begins once the trial quietly ends. Barnes said artificial intelligence meal plans and training programmes have been common recent examples.
Consumer NZ has been measuring how widespread the underlying tactics are. Its research published in November 2025 found nearly one in four New Zealanders had kept a subscription for longer than they wanted because the cancellation process was confusing or obstructive, one in three had spent more than they intended online, and three in four had found fees at the checkout that were not in the advertised price.
Consumer’s senior investigative journalist Chris Schulz said the scale is hard to pin down but plainly large. “It would be conservative to say that dark patterns cost New Zealanders millions,” he said. New Zealanders spent about $6 billion online in 2024.
The Commerce Commission has treated this as an enforcement priority. In October 2025 HelloFresh New Zealand was fined $845,000 after the commission found it had cold-called former customers under the guise of seeking feedback, then offered discount vouchers without making clear that accepting one restarted a paid subscription. About 80,000 subscriptions were reactivated off the back of more than a million calls over 18 months.
Commission deputy chair Anne Callinan said the conduct was not accidental. “Consumers have the right to make informed choices, and that includes knowing exactly what they’re signing up for,” she said.
A year earlier the commission warned Kogan Australia, which trades here as Dick Smith, over a pre-ticked box that added a 14-day free trial of a membership to shopping carts. Customers who did not notice and untick it were charged $149 a year once the trial ended. The company removed the pre-selected field and refunded customers who asked.
Both of those cases involved businesses with a real presence in New Zealand and a reputation to protect. The offshore sites Westpac is blocking have neither, which is why a bank-level block does work the regulator cannot easily do.
Parliament is part way through a rewrite of the law that sits underneath all of this. The Fair Trading Amendment Bill was introduced in May and is before the Finance and Expenditure Committee, with public submissions having closed on 16 July. It would lift the maximum penalty for most breaches from $200,000 for an individual and $600,000 for a company to $1 million and $5 million, and shift most of the regime from criminal to civil liability. Consumer NZ has argued the bill should go further and include a general ban on unfair trading practices, along the lines Australia has been developing.
Until any of that takes effect, the practical defences are unglamorous. Read what you are agreeing to before you hand over a card number, especially where the offer is free. Check whether the business has an address and a phone number in New Zealand rather than just a New Zealand-looking name. Take a screenshot of the terms at the point of signing up, because they can change afterwards.
“Everyone should also keep a close eye on their transaction history, and if you think you may be caught up in a fraud or scam, call the bank immediately,” Barnes said. “The sooner we know, the better our chances of recovering your money.” He added that shoppers should “make sure you’ve read the terms and conditions of any subscription service offer before proceeding”.
If a charge has already appeared, cancelling the card is not always enough on its own, because some recurring card payments can follow a reissued card. Contacting the bank directly is the faster route, and banks can pursue a chargeback where the merchant has misrepresented what was being sold.
Have you been caught by a subscription you did not realise you had signed up to, or had a fight on your hands trying to cancel one? Tell us what happened in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
Leave a Reply