This is a big story affecting my business, which made me realise just how many Australians are being ripped off by big businesses and their accessories i.e., credit card companies, banks, and other financial players.

This story has been prompted by a customer-friendly decision by Westpac, which has shown their customers are more important than the big end of town.

We’ve been trying to cancel subscriptions to websites, streaming services and so on set up by employees in our business who now have left. But this isn’t just a business problem — it’s an issue for any family where kids or even adults have set up a contract for TV services, music, etc., where you’re not sure who set up the account on your card, or what the password for the account is.

Because we don’t know which employee set up the account and don’t know the password, it’s impossible to stop the automatic payments from our accounts, especially if it’s an overseas business like The New York Times.

We contacted American Express to simply stop the payments, but they told us they couldn’t stop a payment to a business, and we’d have to do it. This was a repeated message every time we called Amex. In fact, even though we ended up cancelling the Amex credit card itself, we kept getting billed for these repetitive payments for subscriptions. Amex kept telling us that we had to cancel each subscription ourselves even though the card was no longer active and that they would keep billing us until we did! Eventually after numerous phone calls, one American Express person surprisingly told us that they could block a payment if instructed to do so and she did just that!

I’ve talked to an Amex media contact who saw it as an important issue. He hasn’t got back to me, but he said he would. That was a week ago.

To be fair, it’s easier to cancel subscriptions here — I cancelled my Australian newspaper subscription directly and easily with a great employee at News Corp, ironically because my Amex card gave me a free subscription to the newspaper. However, when you try to close a subscription contract overseas, they make it hard.

I worry about a single parent or a non-IT comfortable couple who are trying to stop automatic debits from their bank accounts or credit cards, set up by their kids, or even by the adults, who forget their passwords and then see their money go up the chimney!

We need to call out financial institutions who are supporting their subscription-business customers over their consumer and business customers, who are caught up in a web of theft by some of the biggest companies in the world, that are locking unsuspecting people into payments for now unwanted services. What we had to do in one case with a Commonwealth Bank Mastercard was cancel the main holder’s credit card entirely to block these payments and then have a new card reissued. The Comm Bank told us that was the only way they could do it!

This is a job for Stephen Jones, who’s Assistant Treasurer and the Minister for Financial Services. I’ve tried to connect this guy on another matter but was ignored. I hope he’s not like Major Major in the book and film Catch-22, who was out when he was in and is in when he's out, so he never met anyone who wanted to complain.

I don’t blame him so much, but probably his staff didn’t think my issue at the time was vote important, but this one is — big businesses have little people in a near Catch 22 situation.

Catch 22 means this: It’s an impossible situation because you can’t do one thing until you do another thing, but you can’t do the second thing until you do the first thing!

In the book Catch 22, the pilots could only get out of flying more dangerous missions in World War II if they could show that they were mentally unfit, but if you’re sane enough to suggest that you thought you were mentally unfit, you had proved that you weren’t mentally fit! A mad person wouldn’t think he was mad and wouldn’t want to stop flying, but a sane person would. If you’re sane, the US air force (in the book) said you had to keep flying!

A lot of people are in a Catch 22 type situation in trying to stop these payments and the credit card companies seem caught between their loyalty to their merchants, selling subscriptions, and their consumer and business clients trapped in these contracts that suck out your money on a drip-feed basis monthly.

Yesterday, Westpac announced that it had “… introduced a new feature in mobile and internet banking which gives customers the ability to instantly stop certain scheduled direct debit payments. This will place a temporary block on a company debiting any funds from the customer’s account.

“The feature is available for consumer and sole trader business customers when they request to cancel a direct debit, by simply searching ‘cancel a direct debit’ in their banking app or online and selecting from their list of direct debits made in the past 90 days.”

Mandy Rutherford, Westpac Managing Director of Cash & Transactional Banking said: “We know cancelling direct debits can be challenging and we want to make the process easier for our customers. With 5.5 million of our customers actively using digital banking, we are giving them more choice in how they manage direct debits on their transaction accounts. Customers can now stop a payment for a future direct debit in their app, giving them greater control over their money,” she said.

“This will be particularly handy if they have multiple streaming services or subscriptions that they decide are no longer needed,” Ms Rutherford said.

This is a good start, but it should also be available to small businesses set up as a company.

After attempting to cancel our Wall Street Journal numerous times, not knowing who set it up or the password, we tried calling the recommended US number on the website. It never put you through to a person or was only available at some outrageous time in the morning. One number even diverted to another company that had nothing to do with the WSJ! Trying to cancel the New York Times was just as hard. We were Catch-22’d!

Once again, the irony was we only wanted to cancel the WSJ subscription because Amex offered it for free with our credit card, but Amex wouldn’t help us cancel the account. The irony went even further when the WSJ had stories about making it easier for consumers to cancel contracts! Here’s one of those stories headlined: “FTC proposes penalizing firms for onerous ‘call-to-cancel’ subscriptions.” It went on to read: “Customers who sign up for subscriptions in a matter of clicks should be able to cancel them just as easily, the commission says…”.

FTC stands for Free Trade Commission, and I suggest we need Minister Jones and his state counterparts to get serious about consumers being drained of dough when we are going through one of the most serious cost of living squeezes in recent history.

I’m only hoping Jonesy’s staff see this as important because I’m pretty sure that Albo and Jim Chalmers will.