Charged without consent after cancelling last October — 2 weeks of silence from Support. Is this normal?

Hi ​@LeonardChengHK,

We appreciate you reaching out to the Docusign Community and are delighted to have you join us.

I'm really sorry to hear about your experience, and thank you for taking the time to share it. I completely understand how frustrating it is when things don’t work the way you expect, especially when you're trying to get work done. Please allow me to help you with this and provide the necessary information.

Let’s tackle a few of the issues you raised:

1. To the Docusign team: the combination of (a) silent auto-renewal, (b) no self-serve card removal, and (c) Support that ignores evidence and closes tickets as "duplicate" is not a series of unrelated bugs. Together they form a pattern that looks indistinguishable from intentional dark-pattern billing. Someone senior needs to look at this.

• As per Docusign Terms and Conditions, 11.17.2. Cancellation rights. If you have purchased a Docusign Service or Subscription Plan, you have a right to cancel the contract within fourteen (14) days from the day after contract conclusion.  If you wish to terminate, you must provide notice, as we may instruct on our website, such as here or by contacting us here: (https://support.docusign.com). We will reimburse you without undue delay, and no later than 14 days after your cancellation request, using the same means of payment as you used for the initial transaction. You will not incur any additional fees in connection with cancellation under this section. For more information, please refer to this: Terms and Conditions 

2. To the community: if you have had a similar experience — unauthorized renewal after cancellation, inability to remove a payment method, tickets closed without resolution — please reply. I'd like to know whether this is an isolated failure or a broader pattern.

• Upon checking, based on the information provided in the screenshot, our Docusign support expert was able to submit a refund request. Once approved and processed, Docusign will notify your bank to process and refund the amount to the same payment method. Once done, your account will be closed, or you may request to downgrade it to a free account so you can still log in and retrieve documents if necessary. Your payment method will no longer be available in our system after the subscription is canceled. Please take note that the refund process might take up to 14 business days. 
• Link for reference: Docusign Refund Policy
• We normally recommend submitting the subscription cancellation request at least 5 to 14 days before the renewal date.
• 4.4.2.  Renewals.  If you purchase a Subscription Plan, you agree to pay the then-current fee for the Subscription Plan and understand that it will automatically renew for the same time period (“Renewal Term”) unless you cancel your Subscription Plan or terminate your Account in advance.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you. 

Again, I’m sorry your experience hasn’t met expectations so far. I’d love the chance to help turn it around, and the Community is here to support you.

Thank you for your patience and understanding in this matter.

Best regards,

Noralynn | Docusign Community Moderator

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Hi ​@LeonardChengHK,

I hope you’re doing well and having a great day!

I just wanted to check in and see how things are going on your end. 

If anything else comes up or you hit another roadblock, don’t hesitate to reach out here in the Community.

Thanks for being part of the Docusign Community!

Sincerely,

Noralynn | Docusign Community Moderator

Noralynn — thank you for submitting the refund request. For the record, here is the current status, and a new and far more serious development.

1. Partial progress. Following my last phone call with Support, the agent acknowledged that Docusign auto-renewed and charged me without my authorization, and agreed to refund 240 GBP to my Hong Kong bank account, and the refund arrived to my local bank account on 18 May 2026. My Docusign account front-end now shows a Freemium plan with no payment method on file.
 

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2. A SECOND unauthorized charge
Despite my account showing as a free account with no stored payment method, I was suddenly charged HKD $700 by Docusign on 11 May 2026 again. This charge appears nowhere in my Billing History. I received no invoice, no subscription record, and no notification of any kind. I discovered it myself. It was never disclosed or flagged by any of your agents — including during the call in which I was assured my account would be fully cleared.

Let that sink in: your own front-end shows me as a free user with no card on file, while your backend is simultaneously billing a credit card I was never even shown.

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3. This is now clearly a systemic backend failure, not a billing dispute. Multiple of your own agents told me my account shows a "dual identity" in your system. Combined with the above, the evidence points to a serious flaw in how Docusign stores and reconciles subscription state — most likely a mishandled data migration that duplicated accounts and left an orphaned subscription record still actively charging an old, early-bound card, invisible to the customer-facing system.

If that is correct, the implications go well beyond me: it would mean Docusign may have been silently double-charging customers for years, without it ever appearing in billing history, without a single notification, and without detection. That is not a UX problem. That is a fundamental integrity failure in your billing database.
 

4. I have now been locked out of support entirely. Because my account displays as Freemium, I can no longer open a support ticket or request a callback — those are paid-user features. So the very system error that keeps charging me has also stripped me of the only channels to report it.

Where this stands:
• I have instructed my bank to freeze the affected card.
• I have engaged legal counsel and am prepared to pursue this through formal legal channels.
 

My formal demands to Docusign:
1. Conduct a full audit of every charge made to any card associated with my account — and to any duplicate or linked "identity" of it — from account creation to today, and provide me a complete written accounting of exactly how much I have been overcharged.
2. Refund the full overcharged amount, AND pay reasonable compensatory damages for the repeated unauthorized charges, the time and cost I have incurred, and the failure of your support process.
3. Formally acknowledge, in writing, the backend/database error that caused these duplicate charges.
 

I remain willing to provide the full email chain, screenshots, and bank records to any staff member genuinely prepared to investigate.

Hi ​@LeonardChengHK,

I appreciate your response and update.

We apologize that the issue remains unresolved. No worries, I’ll be glad to help and check with our designated team.

To further assist, could we continue our conversation via private message? The Docusign Community is a public forum, and we want to make sure your privacy is protected.

Please check your message, as I need a few pieces of information to proceed.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.

Best regards,

Noralynn | Docusign Community Moderator

Hi Noralynn,

Thanks for following up. First, a clarification, because it points straight to the core of the problem.

The original refund request is already settled — the 240 GBP has been refunded, and that case (*****161) is now closed. So this is not about that charge.

The current issue is a separate, new charge on a DIFFERENT card. Here are the details:

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Account in question: ****@***********.xyz — currently showing as a Freemium plan, with no payment method on file, and I have no other Docusign accounts subscribing.

• Card ending ***2 — this is the card that was charged 240 GBP. That charge does appear in the Plan & Billing tab of my account, and it has now been refunded. Resolved.

• Card ending ***4 — this is a completely separate card that was charged HKD $700 on 11 March 2026. This charge appears NOWHERE in my account: not in Billing History, no invoice, no email, no notification of any kind. It is effectively a ghost charge against a card my account does not even show.

That is the part that needs escalating: a card I cannot see in my account was charged for a subscription that does not exist, on an account that displays as free.

The information you asked for:
• Refund request case ID (now closed): *****161
• Last 4 digits of the card charged HKD $700: 0014
• Last 4 digits of the card refunded for 240 GBP, for cross-reference: 0022

Because one charge is recorded in my account and the other is completely invisible, and because your agents previously told me my account shows a "dual identity," this strongly indicates a duplicate or orphaned subscription record in your backend that is still active and billing card ***4 outside of my visible account.

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So I would ask that your investigation does not simply match "the card on file to the account," but specifically: (1) checks for any duplicate or linked account identity tied to ****@***********.xyz, and (2) audits every charge ever made across all cards linked to it. The HKD $700 needs to be refunded AND the underlying subscription record located and shut off, so this cannot recur on yet another card.

Please confirm once you have located the HKD $700 charge and the subscription record behind it.

Best regards,
Leonard

An update for the record, and I want to be direct about my disappointment with how this is being handled.

I escalated, was asked to confirm details, and in response Docusign Support (case ****178) sent me two invoices for service periods of 28 Nov 2024 to 27 Jan 2025, presented as the explanation for the charge I am disputing.

That answers nothing, for two reasons:

1. The charge I am disputing was made in May 2026, on an account that has been Freemium for a while, after I had fully cancelled every subscription back in 2025. Invoices from more than a year earlier cannot explain a 2026 charge.

2. During that 2024 to 2025 period my account already had a separate active subscription, so those Standard Monthly invoices should not exist at all. They are not an answer to my dispute. They are further evidence of a billing problem.

Sending me year old, unrelated invoices is not an investigation and it is not a resolution. It tells me the agent did not read my previous tickets or this thread before replying.

I have now spent weeks documenting the same facts across multiple channels, only to get responses that never engage with what I actually reported. For a company of Docusign's size, this standard of support is genuinely disappointing and, frankly, unprofessional.

To be clear about what I still need:

1. A real investigation into the duplicate or orphaned subscription record that keeps generating charges and invoices I cannot see in my own account.
2. A full refund of the disputed charge.
3. Escalation to someone who will read the full history first, instead of resending paperwork that has nothing to do with the dispute.

I want to resolve this properly. That starts with someone on your side actually reading the case before they reply.
 

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HI ​@LeonardChengHK,

I know how important this is to you, and I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

For your safety, we’ve removed personally identifiable information from your message. Please refrain from posting any account-related or personal information. The Docusign Community is a public forum, and we want to make sure your privacy is protected. 

We recommend that you reply to the same case email and provide additional information to help them with the investigation, such as the credit card payment reference number for those charges. 

Because this Community space focuses on general guidance, any account changes or billing inquiries must be directed to our Support team, as they have access to your account details.

Thank you for your understanding and consideration of this matter.

Best regards,

Noralynn | Docusign Community Moderator