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I’ve started stopping charges from my card rather than dealing with that kind of “customer service” ever again. When the company finds they literally can’t char

I’ve started stopping charges from my card rather than dealing with that kind of “customer service” ever again. When the company finds they literally can’t charge you, suddenly they have the time to call you. If you’ve tried to cancel a service, stopped using it, and stop payment... well, the rest is their problem.

ekianjo 8y ago
How do you stop individual payments? Is that something that you get as a service? Because in my (limited) experience in different countries I don't think I can do that.
- gizmo686 8y ago
  My bank (Bank of America) lets you create temporary credit card numbers. They are linked directly to your actual card, but can be revoked individually.
  - codetrotter 8y ago
    I wish my bank offered that as well but another option offered in some countries including mine is to buy a prepaid MasterCard gift card. Now such gift cards aren’t perfect — you have to pay a bit extra, but for the purpose of signing up for a trial period with any company that automatically turns your trial into a subscription and which is known to make it difficult to cancel the trial it might be a good idea. However, before even signing up for a trial with a prepaid gift card one needs to be sure that one is not entering into an agreement that legally binds you to a subscription. I recently bought a prepaid gift card that I intend to use for a 7-day trial with a company that is known to make it difficult to cancel. But I will only sign up for the trial if the automatic subscription is not legally binding.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
      > However, before even signing up for a trial with a prepaid gift card one needs to be sure that one is not entering into an agreement that legally binds you to a subscription. This gets to the heart of the matter: it shouldn’t be possible to sign up for a legally binding automatic subscription for a pure service. Customers should have the liberty to leave at any time without incurring a fee. If I can sign up in under a minute I ought to be able to leave in under a minute.
  - tokyodude 8y ago
    Dumb question. How much longer till we run out of credit card numbers? Sure 1,000,000,000,000,000 (1 quadrillion) is a large number but the actual usable number is smaller isn't it since there is some kind of checksum system
    - LeoPanthera 8y ago
      The key is credit card number + expiry date. Cards can share numbers as long as the expiry date is different.
      - AmericanChopper 8y ago
        This isn’t true, the same PAN (Primary Account Number) is never issued to two different accounts. Even if you wanted to solve all the payment routing problems this could cause, it wouldn’t be possible to implement. The expiry date can change while the PAN stays the same, so you’d never be able to gurantee a unique key today stays unique in the future.
        tyfon 8y ago
        I used to work in a bank where we had to specifically implement routines for when visa reused the PANs... There was a period between the old expiration and the new issue and not common, but it did happen from time to time.
        AmericanChopper 8y ago
        I should have been a bit more verbose. Two accounts won’t have the same PAN at the same time.
        Dylan16807 8y ago
        Which is notable, but doesn't matter in the context of "running out of numbers"
  - hbcondo714 8y ago
    Citi offers the same but their UI is still in Flash
  - virgilp 8y ago
    I don't know about that... I was sure it would work, but I'm not so sure anymore, after Avis managed to charge me 25EUR on an _expired_, _debit_ Mastercard that had 0 EUR in it (bank simply took upon themselves to automatically perform currency conversion from one of my other accounts so that they'd cover the negative balance). I never thought something like this would be possible. (it was a fee for supposedly "processing" a traffic ticket; they didn't pay it for me, or send the ticket to me - the fee was for taking the time to inform authorities who drove the car; they said I'd receive the ticket separately from the police, which I never did). I contacted the bank, and they said if the charge was not fraudulent (1), there's nothing I or they can do. Apparently the merchants can back-date transactions like that to a time when you interacted with them and the card was valid; I'm not exactly sure how they can charge an empty debit card though, but apparently they can do that too (because they pre-validated that I had a certain amount at the time of rental?). (1) It wasn't; the contract said that they can do that, and I actually could use a ticket reference number that they quoted to verify on the police site that there was indeed a parking ticket issued to the car on the day that I dropped it. To this day I'm not sure if it was me who committed a parking violation, or the next person who rented the car, after me. It is mildly plausible that it was me - that morning I parked in a legal parking space, but slightly outside the allowed "lines" (another car was taking a third of the only remaining slot, and I parked a bit outside of it).
    - tialaramex 8y ago
      The payment card system consists of two entirely parallel mechanisms, with different purposes. One of them ("Authorization") is about verifying that the payment has been authorised by a cardholder, and is there to protect the issuer against fraud by their own cardholder and perhaps if you squint, to indirectly protect you from thieves. This has been the focus of technological innovation, up to and including EMV ("Chip and PIN"). It's also completely optional, most cardholders have no idea that's the case. The other mechanism ("Settlement") is about taking money from the cardholder's account and putting it in the merchant's account. This is done entirely on the honour system, always has been, probably always will be, none of the technological improvements touch it significantly. It's mandatory in the sense that without it the merchant can't get their money. Avis doesn't need Authorization to get your money, they only need Settlement. And like I said, it's on the honour system. Any merchant in the system can just tell the card network "Hi, card number X gave us $418.26" and they'll get $418.26 of X's money in their account. No need for any other steps. Now, if you dispute the transaction the issuer _might_ say, well, wait, how do we know they agreed to pay $418.26? And then Authorization matters, the Authorization can prove somebody swiped a card, or typed in a PIN, or whatever. Without Authorization the issuer might choose not to pay. But there's no guarantee as you found, unless a government regulation forces their hand why should they care - it isn't their money? This reliance on the honour system means that e.g. even though EMV has anti-replay features that mean Authorizations can't be re-used about once a year or so in the UK you'll have a news story where some big merchant like a supermarket or fast food chain will double charge all card customers for a day. What happens is the Settlement data just gets accidentally run twice, maybe it's a physical magnetic tape, or a backup copy of a file, or some new server boots up and re-runs yesterday's Kafka stream. Settlement has no replay resistance so even though all these transactions are duplicates that goes undetected until customers start phoning up angrily and their bank realises what happened. To a first approximation nobody checks Authorization. If you wanted to be an asshole you could try it out, ask your bank to reverse a random fraction of all your transactions. When you get a bill, pick some at random, phone the bank. Insist those are bogus and you've never heard of them. In most cases the vendor has no usable Authorization records and will just write it off, they were entirely reliant on getting paid on the honour system. Obviously if you're unlucky you'll pick someone who can prove you owed them money and is angry about it, so you may not want to try this after all. You might think this situation is crazy but it's more common than you realise. There have been a lot of grave problems with SSL/TLS over the years. But there aren't many examples of actual consequences in practical terms. Mostly it seems as though there actually aren't bad guys trying to break your secure communications, so even if it would be possible they didn't try. Huh.
  - presto8 8y ago
    I tried this feature from my bank (not BofA) several years back. It didn't work as I expected. Even after revoking the card, the merchant was still able to charge me and the amount was just posted to my "real" card number. I called and complained and the customer service told me that once I had authorized the merchant to charge me, they would accept any future charges even if the card number was closed. Just curious, have you actually used BofA's service? Maybe the implementation is different now... If it works, it would be a great way to limit those automatic renewal situations.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- libtek 8y ago
  https://privacy.com https://privacy.com Been using it for years. Great service.
  - igetspam 8y ago
    Came to reply with this. I've been using it for years and even managed to get my wife on board. Don't tell them but I'd be willing to pay a small amount for this service. Any company I deal with that has a recurring payment and makes cancellation painful just gets cut off instead. Major time saver. My one complaint is that some large vendors identify their cards as gits cards and won't accept them.
  - pengstrom 8y ago
    Unfortunately only for US residents.
- toufiqbarhamov 8y ago
  I just speak to my credit card company, tell them exactly what’s going on and that I’ve tried to stop a subscription or service, that I’ve stopped using said service and have recordings of the attempts. This is in the U.S. for the record, I don’t know about any other country’s credit card companies, sorry.
oh_sigh 8y ago
Usually your credit card company will ask you if you've at least tried to cancel before doing a stop
- toufiqbarhamov 8y ago
  I honestly tell them yes, because I’ve never done this without making (and recording) at least one good faith attempt to stop a service with full disclosure of the date I intend to stop payment if they don’t. I then don’t use the service if they fail to stop it, which at least morally is a key point.
  - briandear 8y ago
    I 100% agree with you if you’ve made a good faith effort to cancel. My earlier comment wasn’t about people that intend to cancel. It was about people that retroactively try to “cancel.” As far as free trials auto-converting, I am not sure why anyone would sign up with a credit card for a free trial in the first place. For my little business, a free trial is just that. You don’t give a card number until we have a reason to need it: meaning, you want to pay us. I am complaining about people that actually agree to pay and then attempt a retroactive cancellation by disputing the charge. The way I run my business is that I will gladly refund people that actually forgot but when their course of action is to dispute the charge, then I fight it fiercely because chargebacks cost me actual money. If I lose a chargeback, it costs me $15. A courtesy refund is gladly provided but accusing me of theft with a charge dispute — that’s an entirely different case.
    - gingerlime 8y ago
      As a very small B2C subscription-based service, we bump into this too. And it's rather frustrating. It seems like banks are super happy to let their customers dispute the charges, and so far we were never able to reverse this. Despite sending server logs, our terms and conditions, proofs of emails sent, etc. For the record, we make cancellation very easy (one-click), and we send emails whenever we renew. And if someone forgot to cancel and emails us a few days or a couple of weeks later, we'll refund happily. But going to your bank and disputing charges is just too easy for people it seems, even for services that they clearly consumed. I saw your other comment saying that you were able to "fight" this, but can I ask how? we basically gave up submitting evidence on Stripe, because the manual effort is pretty big, and we were basically never able to "convince" the bank (which seems to have the last word). The amounts aren't worth pursuing outside of Stripe, so we just eat those charges from time to time. Overall, they are still a fraction, but still frustrating.
Silhouette 8y ago
If you’ve tried to cancel a service, stopped using it, and stop payment... well, the rest is their problem. If you're going to play that game, you'd better be very sure that you can prove you made all reasonable efforts to cancel the service. Otherwise, blocking a payment method does not absolve you of any obligation to pay for something you agreed to, and you can be pursued for the money (and often interest/fees/legal costs), and if that's all there is to it then you will lose in court if things get that far.
- matte_black 8y ago
  In practice this never happens. I wouldn’t worry about this unless it has happened to you at least once.
  - Silhouette 8y ago
    In practice this never happens. Why do you think that?
    - matte_black 8y ago
      Because I’ve done it a few times and nothing happened.
      - Silhouette 8y ago
        Then perhaps you've just been lucky. Sometimes merchants might decide it's not worth the trouble to go after you for a small amount, for example. For comparison, I work on a service that uses recurring billing, and we have wording in our legal terms specifically so we can go after you for things like the cost of recovery as well if you abuse us like this. Our lawyer didn't include those words just for fun.
        matte_black 8y ago
        How many users do you go after per month?
jasonkester 8y ago
Please don't do this. I get customers doing this for Twiddla every few months despite sending monthly receipt mails explaining how I'm happy to cancel their service and even refund as many months of it as they like if they're not happy for any reason. But no. Some people would rather call their bank and accuse me of fraud than reply to a mail (or click a prominent link on their account page). No amount of reaching out to ask them to cancel a chargeback has ever worked. It's baffling. Sure, it's a (way more complicated) way of cancelling your subscription. But it affects my ability to run my business. So yeah. Don't do this until you at least try clicking the cancel button on the website.
- bemmu 8y ago
  Those customer might be using leaked card numbers? The person who contacted the bank might have been the real owner of the card instead of the person who signed up for Twiddla.
  - gnicholas 8y ago
    This is possible, but in my experience this has never come up. Most of the time, a subscriber will indicate that they weren't expecting a charge, and it will be categorized as an unrecognized charge and I'll have to prove (to Stripe) that the customer signed up for this subscription. But if the subscriber indicates that they think it's fraud, it's always been the case that they think it's fraudulent to have a subscription or some such thing — never that someone took their credit card and signed up for my service. The worst incident was where a subscriber accurately described what happened — that he didn't remember it would be a renewing charge — and his credit card company insisted on categorizing it as fraud, even though he explicitly said not to. When a charge is categorized as fraud, Stripe makes you prove all sorts of things that are totally irrelevant where fraud/identity theft have not happened. I think they even asked me to provide a photocopy of the subscriber's driver's license. So it's a real bummer when people flag transactions instead of taking a second to cancel their subscription.
    - thecatspaw 8y ago
kyrra 8y ago
Chargebacks are a good way to get your account closed with service providers. Google, Apple, Steam, and many others will lock your account without a second thought when you start issuing chargebacks.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mehrdadn 8y ago
Don't you have to lie at some point that a vendor is committing fraud in order to do this?
- criddell 8y ago
  If you don't recall signing up in the first place it isn't fraud. Fraud requires intent.
  - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
    So you wouldn't consider having #f0f0f0 color text on a #ffffff background in 2pt font stating that it's a recurring $bignum payment each month as a fraud? Dark patterns are certainly a thing... Just how much notification and approval is needed before it's not fraud or otherwise deceitful and questionable legality?
    - criddell 8y ago
      If a user disputed a charge that was presented in that way, then the chargeback isn't fraudulent IMHO. The user didn't know that the charge was recurring. Services shouldn't be telling users a charge is recurring, users should be telling websites that they want to auto-renew. The default should always be a non-recurring charge and selecting anything else should require an email confirmation.
- toufiqbarhamov 8y ago
  As I’ve had to say several times in this discussion, no. I am not using the chargeback festure. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18932956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18932956

ekianjo 8y ago

How do you stop individual payments? Is that something that you get as a service? Because in my (limited) experience in different countries I don't think I can do that.

gizmo686 8y ago
My bank (Bank of America) lets you create temporary credit card numbers. They are linked directly to your actual card, but can be revoked individually.
- codetrotter 8y ago
  I wish my bank offered that as well but another option offered in some countries including mine is to buy a prepaid MasterCard gift card. Now such gift cards aren’t perfect — you have to pay a bit extra, but for the purpose of signing up for a trial period with any company that automatically turns your trial into a subscription and which is known to make it difficult to cancel the trial it might be a good idea. However, before even signing up for a trial with a prepaid gift card one needs to be sure that one is not entering into an agreement that legally binds you to a subscription. I recently bought a prepaid gift card that I intend to use for a 7-day trial with a company that is known to make it difficult to cancel. But I will only sign up for the trial if the automatic subscription is not legally binding.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    > However, before even signing up for a trial with a prepaid gift card one needs to be sure that one is not entering into an agreement that legally binds you to a subscription. This gets to the heart of the matter: it shouldn’t be possible to sign up for a legally binding automatic subscription for a pure service. Customers should have the liberty to leave at any time without incurring a fee. If I can sign up in under a minute I ought to be able to leave in under a minute.
- tokyodude 8y ago
  Dumb question. How much longer till we run out of credit card numbers? Sure 1,000,000,000,000,000 (1 quadrillion) is a large number but the actual usable number is smaller isn't it since there is some kind of checksum system
  - LeoPanthera 8y ago
    The key is credit card number + expiry date. Cards can share numbers as long as the expiry date is different.
    - AmericanChopper 8y ago
      This isn’t true, the same PAN (Primary Account Number) is never issued to two different accounts. Even if you wanted to solve all the payment routing problems this could cause, it wouldn’t be possible to implement. The expiry date can change while the PAN stays the same, so you’d never be able to gurantee a unique key today stays unique in the future.
      - tyfon 8y ago
        I used to work in a bank where we had to specifically implement routines for when visa reused the PANs... There was a period between the old expiration and the new issue and not common, but it did happen from time to time.
        AmericanChopper 8y ago
        I should have been a bit more verbose. Two accounts won’t have the same PAN at the same time.
        Dylan16807 8y ago
        Which is notable, but doesn't matter in the context of "running out of numbers"
- hbcondo714 8y ago
  Citi offers the same but their UI is still in Flash
- virgilp 8y ago
  I don't know about that... I was sure it would work, but I'm not so sure anymore, after Avis managed to charge me 25EUR on an _expired_, _debit_ Mastercard that had 0 EUR in it (bank simply took upon themselves to automatically perform currency conversion from one of my other accounts so that they'd cover the negative balance). I never thought something like this would be possible. (it was a fee for supposedly "processing" a traffic ticket; they didn't pay it for me, or send the ticket to me - the fee was for taking the time to inform authorities who drove the car; they said I'd receive the ticket separately from the police, which I never did). I contacted the bank, and they said if the charge was not fraudulent (1), there's nothing I or they can do. Apparently the merchants can back-date transactions like that to a time when you interacted with them and the card was valid; I'm not exactly sure how they can charge an empty debit card though, but apparently they can do that too (because they pre-validated that I had a certain amount at the time of rental?). (1) It wasn't; the contract said that they can do that, and I actually could use a ticket reference number that they quoted to verify on the police site that there was indeed a parking ticket issued to the car on the day that I dropped it. To this day I'm not sure if it was me who committed a parking violation, or the next person who rented the car, after me. It is mildly plausible that it was me - that morning I parked in a legal parking space, but slightly outside the allowed "lines" (another car was taking a third of the only remaining slot, and I parked a bit outside of it).
  - tialaramex 8y ago
    The payment card system consists of two entirely parallel mechanisms, with different purposes. One of them ("Authorization") is about verifying that the payment has been authorised by a cardholder, and is there to protect the issuer against fraud by their own cardholder and perhaps if you squint, to indirectly protect you from thieves. This has been the focus of technological innovation, up to and including EMV ("Chip and PIN"). It's also completely optional, most cardholders have no idea that's the case. The other mechanism ("Settlement") is about taking money from the cardholder's account and putting it in the merchant's account. This is done entirely on the honour system, always has been, probably always will be, none of the technological improvements touch it significantly. It's mandatory in the sense that without it the merchant can't get their money. Avis doesn't need Authorization to get your money, they only need Settlement. And like I said, it's on the honour system. Any merchant in the system can just tell the card network "Hi, card number X gave us $418.26" and they'll get $418.26 of X's money in their account. No need for any other steps. Now, if you dispute the transaction the issuer _might_ say, well, wait, how do we know they agreed to pay $418.26? And then Authorization matters, the Authorization can prove somebody swiped a card, or typed in a PIN, or whatever. Without Authorization the issuer might choose not to pay. But there's no guarantee as you found, unless a government regulation forces their hand why should they care - it isn't their money? This reliance on the honour system means that e.g. even though EMV has anti-replay features that mean Authorizations can't be re-used about once a year or so in the UK you'll have a news story where some big merchant like a supermarket or fast food chain will double charge all card customers for a day. What happens is the Settlement data just gets accidentally run twice, maybe it's a physical magnetic tape, or a backup copy of a file, or some new server boots up and re-runs yesterday's Kafka stream. Settlement has no replay resistance so even though all these transactions are duplicates that goes undetected until customers start phoning up angrily and their bank realises what happened. To a first approximation nobody checks Authorization. If you wanted to be an asshole you could try it out, ask your bank to reverse a random fraction of all your transactions. When you get a bill, pick some at random, phone the bank. Insist those are bogus and you've never heard of them. In most cases the vendor has no usable Authorization records and will just write it off, they were entirely reliant on getting paid on the honour system. Obviously if you're unlucky you'll pick someone who can prove you owed them money and is angry about it, so you may not want to try this after all. You might think this situation is crazy but it's more common than you realise. There have been a lot of grave problems with SSL/TLS over the years. But there aren't many examples of actual consequences in practical terms. Mostly it seems as though there actually aren't bad guys trying to break your secure communications, so even if it would be possible they didn't try. Huh.
- presto8 8y ago
  I tried this feature from my bank (not BofA) several years back. It didn't work as I expected. Even after revoking the card, the merchant was still able to charge me and the amount was just posted to my "real" card number. I called and complained and the customer service told me that once I had authorized the merchant to charge me, they would accept any future charges even if the card number was closed. Just curious, have you actually used BofA's service? Maybe the implementation is different now... If it works, it would be a great way to limit those automatic renewal situations.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
libtek 8y ago
https://privacy.com https://privacy.com Been using it for years. Great service.
- igetspam 8y ago
  Came to reply with this. I've been using it for years and even managed to get my wife on board. Don't tell them but I'd be willing to pay a small amount for this service. Any company I deal with that has a recurring payment and makes cancellation painful just gets cut off instead. Major time saver. My one complaint is that some large vendors identify their cards as gits cards and won't accept them.
- pengstrom 8y ago
  Unfortunately only for US residents.
toufiqbarhamov 8y ago
I just speak to my credit card company, tell them exactly what’s going on and that I’ve tried to stop a subscription or service, that I’ve stopped using said service and have recordings of the attempts. This is in the U.S. for the record, I don’t know about any other country’s credit card companies, sorry.

oh_sigh 8y ago

Usually your credit card company will ask you if you've at least tried to cancel before doing a stop

toufiqbarhamov 8y ago
I honestly tell them yes, because I’ve never done this without making (and recording) at least one good faith attempt to stop a service with full disclosure of the date I intend to stop payment if they don’t. I then don’t use the service if they fail to stop it, which at least morally is a key point.
- briandear 8y ago
  I 100% agree with you if you’ve made a good faith effort to cancel. My earlier comment wasn’t about people that intend to cancel. It was about people that retroactively try to “cancel.” As far as free trials auto-converting, I am not sure why anyone would sign up with a credit card for a free trial in the first place. For my little business, a free trial is just that. You don’t give a card number until we have a reason to need it: meaning, you want to pay us. I am complaining about people that actually agree to pay and then attempt a retroactive cancellation by disputing the charge. The way I run my business is that I will gladly refund people that actually forgot but when their course of action is to dispute the charge, then I fight it fiercely because chargebacks cost me actual money. If I lose a chargeback, it costs me $15. A courtesy refund is gladly provided but accusing me of theft with a charge dispute — that’s an entirely different case.
  - gingerlime 8y ago
    As a very small B2C subscription-based service, we bump into this too. And it's rather frustrating. It seems like banks are super happy to let their customers dispute the charges, and so far we were never able to reverse this. Despite sending server logs, our terms and conditions, proofs of emails sent, etc. For the record, we make cancellation very easy (one-click), and we send emails whenever we renew. And if someone forgot to cancel and emails us a few days or a couple of weeks later, we'll refund happily. But going to your bank and disputing charges is just too easy for people it seems, even for services that they clearly consumed. I saw your other comment saying that you were able to "fight" this, but can I ask how? we basically gave up submitting evidence on Stripe, because the manual effort is pretty big, and we were basically never able to "convince" the bank (which seems to have the last word). The amounts aren't worth pursuing outside of Stripe, so we just eat those charges from time to time. Overall, they are still a fraction, but still frustrating.

Silhouette 8y ago

If you’ve tried to cancel a service, stopped using it, and stop payment... well, the rest is their problem. If you're going to play that game, you'd better be very sure that you can prove you made all reasonable efforts to cancel the service. Otherwise, blocking a payment method does not absolve you of any obligation to pay for something you agreed to, and you can be pursued for the money (and often interest/fees/legal costs), and if that's all there is to it then you will lose in court if things get that far.

matte_black 8y ago
In practice this never happens. I wouldn’t worry about this unless it has happened to you at least once.
- Silhouette 8y ago
  In practice this never happens. Why do you think that?
  - matte_black 8y ago
    Because I’ve done it a few times and nothing happened.
    - Silhouette 8y ago
      Then perhaps you've just been lucky. Sometimes merchants might decide it's not worth the trouble to go after you for a small amount, for example. For comparison, I work on a service that uses recurring billing, and we have wording in our legal terms specifically so we can go after you for things like the cost of recovery as well if you abuse us like this. Our lawyer didn't include those words just for fun.
      - matte_black 8y ago
        How many users do you go after per month?

jasonkester 8y ago

Please don't do this. I get customers doing this for Twiddla every few months despite sending monthly receipt mails explaining how I'm happy to cancel their service and even refund as many months of it as they like if they're not happy for any reason. But no. Some people would rather call their bank and accuse me of fraud than reply to a mail (or click a prominent link on their account page). No amount of reaching out to ask them to cancel a chargeback has ever worked. It's baffling. Sure, it's a (way more complicated) way of cancelling your subscription. But it affects my ability to run my business. So yeah. Don't do this until you at least try clicking the cancel button on the website.

bemmu 8y ago
Those customer might be using leaked card numbers? The person who contacted the bank might have been the real owner of the card instead of the person who signed up for Twiddla.
- gnicholas 8y ago
  This is possible, but in my experience this has never come up. Most of the time, a subscriber will indicate that they weren't expecting a charge, and it will be categorized as an unrecognized charge and I'll have to prove (to Stripe) that the customer signed up for this subscription. But if the subscriber indicates that they think it's fraud, it's always been the case that they think it's fraudulent to have a subscription or some such thing — never that someone took their credit card and signed up for my service. The worst incident was where a subscriber accurately described what happened — that he didn't remember it would be a renewing charge — and his credit card company insisted on categorizing it as fraud, even though he explicitly said not to. When a charge is categorized as fraud, Stripe makes you prove all sorts of things that are totally irrelevant where fraud/identity theft have not happened. I think they even asked me to provide a photocopy of the subscriber's driver's license. So it's a real bummer when people flag transactions instead of taking a second to cancel their subscription.
  - thecatspaw 8y ago

kyrra 8y ago

Chargebacks are a good way to get your account closed with service providers. Google, Apple, Steam, and many others will lock your account without a second thought when you start issuing chargebacks.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mehrdadn 8y ago

Don't you have to lie at some point that a vendor is committing fraud in order to do this?

criddell 8y ago
If you don't recall signing up in the first place it isn't fraud. Fraud requires intent.
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  So you wouldn't consider having #f0f0f0 color text on a #ffffff background in 2pt font stating that it's a recurring $bignum payment each month as a fraud? Dark patterns are certainly a thing... Just how much notification and approval is needed before it's not fraud or otherwise deceitful and questionable legality?
  - criddell 8y ago
    If a user disputed a charge that was presented in that way, then the chargeback isn't fraudulent IMHO. The user didn't know that the charge was recurring. Services shouldn't be telling users a charge is recurring, users should be telling websites that they want to auto-renew. The default should always be a non-recurring charge and selecting anything else should require an email confirmation.
toufiqbarhamov 8y ago
As I’ve had to say several times in this discussion, no. I am not using the chargeback festure. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18932956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18932956