DoorDash charged a woman’s credit card for a subscription she never signed up for, their own customer support confirmed no record of the charge existed in her account, and then they told her the only solution was to cancel her credit card.

A $9.99 Charge That Broke Two Promises at Once

Kristine Divney opened the Caviar app — a food delivery service owned by DoorDash — and did exactly what a careful, privacy-conscious consumer would do. She skipped entering her Capital One credit card directly into the app. She set up Apple Pay as her payment method instead, specifically because Apple Pay advertises on its website that Face ID, Touch ID, or a passcode is required for every purchase made on an iPhone.

She had never subscribed to DashPass. She had never created a DoorDash account — only a Caviar account. She had never, under any circumstances, used her Face ID to authorize a DashPass charge.

On May 29, 2025, her Capital One statement showed a $9.99 (the price of a fast-food combo meal, or roughly what a gig worker earns in tips after a 30-minute delivery) charge from DoorDash labeled as a DashPass subscription.

The Customer Service Call That Made Everything Worse

Divney called DoorDash support at 8:26 p.m. on May 29, 2025. The representative confirmed three things: DoorDash had no record of a DoorDash account for her. DoorDash had no record of her ever purchasing a DashPass subscription. She had no active DashPass subscription in her account.

She asked for the charge to be reversed. The representative said they had no way to do that. Their only suggested resolution: cancel your credit card.

The complaint goes further, citing reports from other users who faced the same charge. According to those accounts, even canceling the card would not stop the charges — DoorDash would simply begin charging whatever new card replaced it. The only true fix, according to those reports, was to call the credit card company and permanently block all DoorDash and Caviar charges.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What the Charge Actually Cost

The complaint centers on $9.99 (roughly what a worker making minimum wage earns in about 70 minutes). On the surface, that sounds trivial. That is exactly the point. DoorDash and Apple Pay built a system where the charge is small enough that most people absorb it, question it briefly, and move on. The financial injury per person is designed to fall below the threshold where a lawsuit feels worth it for any single individual. The only way to fight it is together.

But the real cost is not counted in dollars. Kristine Divney did everything right. She read the fine print. She chose a payment method specifically because of its security promises. She set up Face ID authorization as her personal firewall against exactly this kind of charge. The complaint confirms she never entered her Capital One credit card directly into the Caviar app. Apple Pay was her protection layer. That protection failed. And when it failed, she found herself on a customer support call being told, in effect, that the only way to protect herself from a company that had already taken her money without permission was to blow up her own financial infrastructure by canceling her credit card.

There is a particular kind of helplessness that comes from being told a problem is your responsibility to solve after a corporation created it. The DoorDash representative confirmed: no account, no subscription, no purchase record. They had the receipts that proved she owed nothing. They still refused to refund her. The complaint describes the representative as stating they had “no way” of reversing the charge. A billion-dollar corporation, processing millions of transactions a day, told a single consumer in New York City that a $9.99 (the cost of a large pizza slice and a soda) reversal was simply beyond their capabilities.

The complaint further details what happens if a user follows DoorDash’s own advice and cancels their card. According to reports from other affected users cited in the lawsuit, DoorDash would then charge the replacement card. The subscription that does not exist in the account, that was never authorized, that customer support has no record of — that subscription apparently survives card cancellations. The only way to stop it is to call the credit card company and place a permanent, indefinite block on all DoorDash and Caviar charges. This is not a bug. The complaint states it directly: “This is by design.”

Legal Receipts: What the Complaint Actually Says

“Defendant DoorDash has charged users without their consent for subscriptions that are immensely difficult to cancel. This is by design.” — Verified Class Action Complaint, paragraph 34

“Defendant Apple Pay, meanwhile, has allowed users’ credit cards to be charged without Face ID verification or any other form of verification, despite advertising otherwise.” — Verified Class Action Complaint, paragraph 35

“The Defendants engaged and continue to engage in the aforementioned deceptive, ‘bait-and-switch’ marketing and pricing scheme with the full, premeditated knowledge of: (i) the inability of consumers to receive properly anticipated benefits from the goods or services involved; (ii) the gross disparities between the price of goods or services and their value measured by the price at which similar goods or services are readily obtained by other consumers; and (iii) the fact that Defendants’ acts and practices may enable the Defendants, as they have, to take advantage of the inability of consumers to reasonably protect their interests by reason of physical or mental infirmities, illiteracy or inability to understand the language of the agreement, ignorance or lack of education, or similar factors.” — Verified Class Action Complaint, paragraph 69(c)

“At all times mentioned herein, it is alleged that Defendants were engaging and continue to engage in a scheme to coerce, induce, and defraud the common Consumer, and unjustly enrich themselves as outlined hereinabove.” — Verified Class Action Complaint, paragraph 37

“The present matter is reminiscent of a 2023 ‘non-consensual enrollment’ case before the Western District of Washington in which Amazon.com, Inc. tricked consumers into enrolling in its automatically-renewing subscription service, Amazon Prime, and knowingly complicated the cancellation process.” — Verified Class Action Complaint, paragraph 33

Societal Impact: Who This Actually Hurts

Economic Inequality: The Tax on People Who Can Least Afford to Fight Back

The complaint makes a clear structural argument: individual class members lack the financial resources to adequately prosecute separate lawsuits against Defendants. That sentence is the entire class action justified in one line. A $9.99 (equal to about two hours of work at federal minimum wage) charge is not worth a lawsuit on its own. Legal representation, filing fees, and time costs make individual litigation economically irrational against a multi-billion-dollar corporation. That math is not an accident. It is the business model.

The complaint specifically identifies a vulnerability the corporations exploited with what it calls “premeditated knowledge”: the inability of some consumers to reasonably protect their interests due to physical or mental infirmities, illiteracy, inability to understand the language of agreements, ignorance, or lack of education. DoorDash and Apple Pay are not accused of stumbling into a system that harms vulnerable people. They are accused of building one that does it on purpose.

DoorDash and Apple Pay each have millions of active users. The complaint states this directly in establishing class numerosity. At $9.99 per unauthorized subscription, per month, across even a fraction of those users, the revenue generated from people who never signed up, never consented, and cannot easily cancel represents an enormous transfer of wealth from working people to two corporations already sitting on staggering valuations. The complaint frames this as unjust enrichment — meaning the corporations kept money they had no legal right to keep.

Public Health: The Stress Economy

There is a documented, measurable relationship between financial insecurity and physical and mental health outcomes. For people living paycheck to paycheck — and tens of millions of Americans are — an unexpected $9.99 (the difference between a full tank of gas and a quarter tank for some budgets) charge is a genuine source of anxiety. It triggers the mental overhead of disputing a charge, waiting on hold with customer support, navigating a system deliberately designed to exhaust you, and ultimately being told the resolution is your problem to manage.

The complaint describes a customer service call that resolved nothing and instead added a new burden: cancel your credit card. Canceling a credit card means updating autopay accounts, waiting for a new card, potentially affecting your credit utilization ratio, and re-entering payment information everywhere that card was on file. For a $9.99 (the price of two weeks of a streaming service) charge that the company itself admits has no record of, the labor and cognitive cost imposed on the consumer is wildly disproportionate.

What Now: Don’t Let Them Keep the Money

Named Defendants

• DoorDash, Inc. d/b/a Caviar — CEO: [REDACTED – Not in Source]
• Apple Payments Services LLC — [REDACTED – Not in Source] (subsidiary of Apple, Inc.)

Regulatory Watchlist

• Federal Trade Commission (FTC) — already has precedent from FTC v. Amazon; this case fits the same pattern.
• New York State Attorney General — GBL §§ 349 and 350 are state-level consumer protection laws; the AG’s office can act independently.
• New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection — NYC Administrative Code Title 20 violations alleged in the complaint fall within their jurisdiction.
• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) — unauthorized charges processed through a digital wallet constitute a financial product harm.

You Can Take Action Right Now

Check your credit card and bank statements for any DashPass charges you did not authorize. If you find one, document it, screenshot your account to show no active subscription, and file a complaint with the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov, with the NY AG if you are in New York, and with your credit card’s dispute department. You do not need a lawyer to file a complaint with a regulator. Do it today.

Connect with local consumer rights organizations and tenant/worker unions in your area. These groups already have infrastructure for coordinated complaints, media pressure campaigns, and legislative lobbying. A single complaint is easy to ignore. A thousand coordinated ones are not. The class action lawsuit is one tool. Community organizing is another, and it does not require a filing fee.