Club Fitness intentionally deceives customers about how to end contract, will continue to charge for years. Internet

Club Fitness intentionally deceives customers into believing their gym membership has been canceled by going to the store and signing a paper.  The only way the company accepts a cancelation of the membership is on the internet, or also I believe by mail.  

I was told specifically by employees at the location I attended both when I signed up and when I went in to cancel my membership that after a year my membership would expire unless I renewed.  I moved out of state a couple months before my membership would have been over, and they told me that I would just have to wait for it to expire, and then it would end.  Thankfully I had my payments set up on auto-pay, so I watched as month after month the payments continued to come out.  I couldn't remember exactly what month I had started but after too many months I called and questioned them on it.  Meanwhile I had gotten several calls from people from the gym about why I had not been in in so long, and I told them I was just waiting for my membership to expire, and that I had moved and therefore would not be renewing.  Nothing was said to me about this.  Finally, when I called and questioned them, this was the first time that I had heard ANYTHING about only being able to cancel online.  I then did so, but the more I thought about it was not happy about loosing all that money, when I was misinformed about how to cancel the account in the first place, so I decided to call the local corporate office to see if they would be kind enough to reimburse me those months, after all it clearly was their employees mistake for misinforming me, otherwise why would I knowingly continue to pay them for months I wasn't using, that would be illogical, and it's not like I had cost them any money since I hadn't been to the gym in 6 months.  The woman I spoke to first was immediately on the offensive with me, very rude, and treated me like I was an idiot, that that is not possibly what happened at all, I must be lying, why would their people say that, and they never make cold calls to people like I said they did.  She also treated me like a fool because I couldn't remember the name of the person who signed me up over a year ago, and the person that told me that my contract would just expire, and if I couldn't remember there names that i had no case or proof and must be lying, and wouldn't receive any money.  I asked for a manager, and she said the exact same.  The whole thing was so frustrating, on principle, so I did some investigating to find that this is a common practice.  Thankfully I had auto pay, so I saw what was going on, but people who don't continue to get charged without their knowledge, sometimes for over a years worth, and then the first they hear of it is once it gets sent to a collections agency and is hurting their credit.  This happened to a friend of mine, who even sign a form at the store and still had a copy saying that she was ending her membership.  The company still would not accept this as "Adequate proof", and made her pay hundreds of dollars.  

This company, which is national, and from what I see has been involved in many types of frauds, and has over 50 BBB complaints in the St Louis region alone, needs to be called out for their greedy fraudulent business practices and be put to a stop!  It's disgusting that a company that parades itself as a reputable nationwide business is ripping people off right and left, knowing that most people are too busy to make a stink about it and will just end up paying in the end cause they feel they have no choice at the risk of their credit.