All you need to do is write "cancel" on the subscription bill and mail it back and always check your entry form before submitting. These forms are just made up by some Joe Schmo employee, and set up the way he sets it up. If the company itself were trying to be sneaky, it wouldn't be very cost effective for them after sending out all these magazines just to be cancelled and eating up the magazine and postage costs.
Any magazine offers I receive in the mail gets sent back to the sender...using their own Postage Paid return envelopes. I just fold up the entire mess, including the original mailing envelope...and seal it...and mail it back. No mess, no fuss, no cost to me.
Back in the day when most every magazine had those little loose subscription/renewal cards stuck in the pages -- (these little cards always fell out of the magazines. Highly annoying. Although it still happens with many mags, it is slowly going the way of the dodo bird I think. Most of those little cards are now stuck in the mag so that they just don't fall out. A small step in the right direction. Still a waste of trees though.) I would sometimes be so annoyed that I would gather up all the little fallen cards and then drop them off in various mail boxes on the street...unfilled, of course. Hell, the post office doesn't care; I doubt they even notice most of the time. Those little cards get sent to the magazine companies, which they paid for. I considered it a small act of revenge.
