I'm Canceling My Wired Subscription
(Revised -- written out in full and edited, 2026-04-01)
The Email
I liked the reporting WIRED does and wish I could support the journalists who do it. However, Wired is owned by Conde Nast - which was weird to me straight away when I first subscribed, and which turned out to be a pretty big problem for me.
This morning I got (sophisticated!) phishing emails telling me my Robinhood account (which I did have, briefly, in 2020, but probably deleted) had been accessed from an unusual device/location. Pretty clever. I could not at this time be sure if I really had a Robinhood account anymore.
There was a TFN button in the email to call for support if the login wasn't me. It wasn't, obviously. I did not click this button immediately - although I was approaching panic, I wanted to see a fuller picture of my account from the web site.
I went to robinhood.com to try to log in, and failed. I couldn't log in with either of the 2 sets of credentials I had saved in Bitwarden - neither of which used the same email that received the phishing attempt. Ok, maybe I updated my email, let me at least try both saved passwords with the email address that received the "warning".
The Sender
At this point I actually went to call the support number in the email, but then figured it would be better to call whatever number was on the actual site. This got me to slow down, and saved me from a Swiss Cheese mistake. I looked at the email again... the from address was @roofingsupplies4u.co.uk - obviously not Robinhood.
I didn't remember ever ordering UK roofing supplies in my life, so I figured someone else must have leaked or sold my address. Because I use a unique email address for almost everything I sign up for, I could search the address in my inbox. (Of course I could have done this sooner, but I wasn't yet looking for evidence of deception.) Doing so pulled up a bunch of emails from Wired, and only Wired - which means they or their parent company leaked or sold my email address.
Ok, that's certainly a big strike against Wired. (In the last 3+ years of using almost entirely unique email addresses, I have not noticed a single one actually get passed to spammers/scammers until now. I have gotten spam at some of my "primary" email addresses that I either used in the past or felt compelled to give to "important" online forms.) But maybe I update my address with them and block the original? Shit happens and I like their coverage.
Well! No, unfortunately, it's not possible to update your email address with Wired. There's no option on account management, and their FAQ tells you to call a call center for support.
I have to take a break here to recap that. Wired (or Conde Nast) fucked up leaking my email address (assuming it wasn't actually sold), but won't even let me change my email address on file. That's not ok! And it gets worse!
The Call
Ok, fine. I will call the number and try to change my email address. For some reason I still want to keep my Wired subscription. Apparently I am still moving a little quicker than my brain this morning.
The number takes me to an AI which asks me for my account number. I've never seen my account number, and isn't visible on my account management page. I don't know what it's talking about. I tell the AI to fuck off, and that takes me to an agent.
Now, the agent's script is weird. She needs my last name which I'm happy to spell. Then she needs my billing zip code, which I'm confused about (I still haven't given them my email address which is the primary identifier of my account and indeed the only one I have that isn't tied to my payment information - and I don't think my payment information is what they should be looking up first), but I comply. Then she needs my first name and my full billing address. Ok... I'll give that, but it's extremely weird. This is all "public" info so far at least.
Finally she asks for my email address - the first thing that should have been requested, right? And then a very cool thing happens: She can't find my account. She asks if I used a different email address to subscribe. Obviously I did not.
So, what the fuck is going on with Wired's subscription management? What even is a user account in their backend?
In order to move forward, now the agent wants the last 4 digits of the card I subscribed with. I take a moment. This is also semi-public, frankly. It's used as an identifier for purchases in many places. And it makes sense to ask for it here. But I was already almost scammed once today and I'm currently extremely confused (and disgusted, frankly) with Wired's account management.
I thank her for her time and hang up.
Canceling
Now all I want to do is just cancel my subscription, then block the address in Protonmail. But in order to cancel my subscription, I must pass the gauntlet of multiple please-don't-go discounts on a whole separate page before getting to the cancellation page proper. Notably, these deals all cost more than my current subscription. (Somehow I locked in a $10/year rate a while back, so the great journalists at Wired aren't going to miss me anyway; they probably saw pennies of my subscription.)
On the cancellation page proper, I'm asked to choose my reason. Finally, I have a voice :) I click "Other," ready to write in my reason. A modal pops up.
It's begging me to stay with a discounted rate (which is higher than my current rate, again). Now, dear reader, you may recall that I endured multiple such pleas before even getting to this page. Honestly, this is one of the worst subscription cancellation experiences I've ever seen. On its own, it might not be infuriating, but considering all I went through to get here - starting with almost getting scammed because this company sold or leaked my email, it's downright user-hostile.
Of course I decline, and I click "continue to cancel". Mistake! This submits the form without letting me type in my reason for canceling, and I'm taken away from the page. Remember, what happened here is:
- I focused an input
- This triggered a modal to pop up
- This modal contained a button that navigated me away from the page that contained the input
This is, shall we say, a web design no-no.
That's the end of their bullshit, but mine is not done. I un-cancel my subscription. I endure the gauntlet again. When the popup appears, I press the Escape key to simply close it. (I am half surprised to find that doing so actually works! You have to specifically program that behavior into a modal - or use a library which handles it for you, I guess.) Now I finally have my chance to tell this story (in condensed form) to the uncaring corporate machine. It probably got "read" by an AI and discarded immediately.
Sorry to the journalists who do such good reporting at Wired, but, like I said, it turns out I wasn't really paying you anything anyway. It's sad that your company is such a creep. Sounds like the kind of bullshit someone could do some investigative journalism on. Good luck to you all; we live in corporate Hell.