Amazon Prime is making it hard to cancel. What are my rights?

Federal law does not require cancelling to be exactly as easy as signing up — that stricter standard came from the FTC's 2024 "Click-to-Cancel" rule, which the Eighth Circuit vacated in July 2025 on procedural grounds. What still applies is the older, narrower law: the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act requires a business running an online subscription to provide a "simple mechanism" to stop recurring charges. That is a real, enforceable right — a cancellation flow buried behind a mandatory phone call during limited hours, an unavoidable retention gauntlet, or steps that were never disclosed can still fail that standard, even though ROSCA does not demand symmetry with the signup flow.

Before you were ever charged, the business also had to clearly disclose the price, billing frequency, and how to cancel, and get your express informed consent. If a free trial converted to a paid charge without that disclosure being clear, that is a separate ROSCA problem from the cancellation flow itself, and either one on its own is enough to act on.

Amazon itself is not a hypothetical case here: in September 2025 it paid $2.5 billion to settle FTC claims over exactly this conduct — enrolling customers in Prime through deceptive interface design and making cancellation needlessly difficult — and is now under an independent compliance monitor. Document the gap between how you signed up and what cancelling actually required — screenshots of both, with dates, are the entire case. Try cancelling in writing (email or the account portal) so there is a record, dispute any charge taken after you asked to cancel directly with your card issuer, and file a complaint with the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov, since ROSCA violations are exactly what that mechanism exists for.