Gourmet Society

I took out a trial with Gourmet Society in November for £1 for 3 months. I didn't use the service in the trial period and forgot I had taken it out. The first few times I went to use it the restaurants refused because it was the wrong day of the week. I made a mental note of when I started the trial and roughly when the three months was due to end. As I wasn't using it I forgot I had taken out the trial. I heard nothing more from Gourmet Society until £39.99 was deducted from my credit card. Following multiple email communications I found out that email reminders were sent to me prior to the renewal date, but they send these from a different email address to the one they routinely send their communications, so it got caught by my spam filter. I had been receiving previous emails fine, so had not 'made the address safe' because it looked all in good order. Importantly, they sent me a screen shot of their system, which shows records of the emails being set to send, and also being sent, BUT also, records that the emails had not been READ. They can tell on their system that I did not see those reminder emails. They also take the renewal fees a full week to 10 days before the end of the trial. If I were to look for this in there T+Cs I would find but it's certainly not obvious when you agree to the trial that they do this, or that it's auto-subscription at all. Gourmet Society have refused to refund my money, I desperately don't want to be their customer and feel they behave in a deplorable fashion towards customers. I'm so upset about this and it's caused a great deal of distress. I realise it's not a huge amount of money but I feel so taken advantage of. I feel Gourmet Society should be required to get verbal or written confirmation that someone wants to stay their customer before taking money from them. I also feel they should not be allowed to rely solely on email to remind cusomers they are about to be charged. This company hides behind unfair terms and conditions to say they have done nothing technically wrong, all the while taking thousands of pounds out of customers accounts without fair warning.