7 ms·

Merchants can keep charging your card even if it's cancelled/expired

65 points by jongunter1 5y ago

ragingrobot 5y ago
I've always suspected so. Many times I have had a card expire and be replaced, and recurring payments under the old expiration dates continue to charged to the account. I have at least one such payment that I probably have not updated payment information in over 10 years, so that expiration date is long expired. At one time I suspected in such cases that the bank automatically provided the payee with the new information. Last year I had a payment issue with E-ZPass. The payments were suddenly being rejected. I came to find it this was due to out of date expiration information. The card number had remained the same, but the expiration on record was June 2012. Yes, it took over 8 years for the bank (Chase/Visa) to start rejecting payments.
- conductr 5y ago
  My toll tag is linked to an expired card and I've been curious how long this thing will keep going. I think I still have a couple years based on your experience
  - ragingrobot 5y ago
    I guess it depends on your bank, and who the toll tag issuer is. I wrote earlier about a long standing account I had never updated, and just realized it may just be cellular phone with Sprint. I don't believe have never updated that info since I started service with them in 2008 - for a long while I think their site was a PITA to use so I just never bothered.
linsomniac 5y ago
I've been told this by credit card customer support. In several instances over the last 3-4 years I've disputed charges from companies I have no relationship with, and as part of the dispute process been told I need to reach out to these companies to prevent future recurring charges. Calling a company I've never heard of to try to get them to stop charging me sounds likely to lead to further problems rather than resolving them, but I digress. On the other hand, I've switched over to using a bank that gives me fine-grained control over virtual cards and ACH accounts. I can create a "pocket" for a vendor or a class of charges, create an associated virtual card, and put a specific amount of money into that pocket. I can enable or disable an "overdraft protection" per pocket that will pull funds from another pocket if I run out. And I can close those pockets as well. This is great for the subscriptions that make it hard to cancel. You know, the places: "Click this button to subscribe, auto renewing", but "If you want to cancel, call this number between 8am and 5pm". I had a couple newspaper subscriptions on dedicated pockets, and after notifying their subscriptions dept that I wanted them to cancel it and was told to call a person about it, I just closed the pocket. I have gotten notifications about their continued attempted charges, but they haven't gone through.
- morpheuskafka 5y ago
  What bank is this? I'm using Privacy.com to do this with debit cards, but I've never heard of anything that lets you do it for ACH.
  - basch 5y ago
    I searched google for the word pocket, and One came up https://www.onefinance.com/features/ https://www.onefinance.com/features/
    - imwillofficial 5y ago
      Yup, OneFinance is awesome. A true replacement for Simple Bank
  - linsomniac 5y ago
    As another reply surmised, it is OneFinance. Been with them for around 3 months as my primary bank after Simple got acquired by BBVA which got acquired by PNC. I've been very happy with them. If you decide to sign up, check to see if you have a friend that has an account, you can both get $50 on your first direct deposit. Slide into my DMs if you don't have any friends. :-D
    - morpheuskafka 5y ago
      I’ll take a referral and thanks for letting me know which company it was! (my email is in profile)
  - resynthesize 5y ago
    hey - One employee and engineer here. happy to answer questions if anyone has them!
- thatcat 5y ago
  How did you find a bank that gives you that level of control?
nixpulvis 5y ago
I learned this the hard way once when I tried to get rid of a $5 subscription I didn't understand with Discover. I naively figured I would just request a new card and that would be that... Nope, it's like a direct debit or something, they are linked to the actual account, despite being setup through the card. Totally broke my head to the point I actually talked myself into closing my account, which was another mistake :(
- gruez 5y ago
  >I learned this the hard way once when I tried to get rid of a $5 subscription I didn't understand with Discover. I naively figured I would just request a new card and that would be that That's a bad idea anyways. Just because your credit card was declined doesn't mean you're off the hook. Most businesses are reasonable and won't chase you further, but some persistent ones (eg. gyms) are known to continue your subscription and send your bill to collections.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- SilasX 5y ago
  Similar deal. I had one service that (to their credit) canceled my subscription when they saw I wasn't using it, then months later tried to charge it again, which got flagged as a fraud alert. I contacted them and they apologized and refunded. Then charged again the next month. This time I filed a dispute. The credit card sided with the merchant, who claimed I started a new subscription, and their proof was a shot of "my" webpage form, which showed me entering my very new CC number (old had expired) that I never gave the merchant, but with an old address that wouldn't have gotten the transaction approved if I had really entered that in a new. SMH
mdp2021 5y ago
It is also worth mentioning that similarly, it was reported that NFC based transactions do not stop when card services are cancelled. One may think that the process of payment transaction checks for flags of expiration, service cancellation etc. before actually transferring money. Instead, it is possible that a stolen NFC-equipped card is used successfully long after the emitter was informed that the card is to be invalidated, and money should be recovered through the financial services (insurance) instead of, simply, never have been moved.
whiddershins 5y ago
I hate this policy. It harmed my credit deeply for years, because all I did to restart charges was log into an old website (email management) And since I didn’t even have the card anymore I didn’t see the charges for months. And nothing I could do would resolve it.
1MachineElf 5y ago
Recently I discovered that they can also send refunds to a cancelled card.
- gowld 5y ago
  Cancelled card, or account via the cancelled card's number?
  - 1MachineElf 5y ago
    An account via the cancelled card's number.
- decremental 5y ago
  Someone obtains your CC info and makes a series of purchases that clear online. After the fact, your CC company contacts you and asks was this fraud? You say yes. CC is canceled. The business that accepted the charges does an audit of orders and identifies weird charges. Probably fraud. Refunds the orders. This maybe takes place in just a few days from start to finish. That's what you're describing. In the last 6 months a new system was put in place that checks before issuing refunds to see if it's even possible to issue the refund. All merchants have been notified of this change. The only thing I'm thinking of is how this sucks for merchants who are doing a better job at detecting fraud than the processors. You cannot issue a refund. You may only eat the chargeback fees and (of course) loss of the original funds. The credit card system is so fucked from the ground up. It must be replaced.
ocdtrekkie 5y ago
One of the things I find absolutely infuriating is the modern push to subscription services for things that aren't generally subscription. Like dog food. I've been... pushed into... more subscriptions lately... and I've never had to file so many credit card disputes in my life as I have in the past couple years, because half these subscription services absolutely refuse to stop charging you even after you've called them to cancel two or three times. The EU has far superior legislation surrounding subscriptions and cancellation methods that are really woefully lacking in the US. I'd bet subscription businesses wouldn't be nearly as popular a model if it wasn't for the number of people paying who can't cancel.
martinesko36 5y ago
Does this happen with MasterCard too?
- dlubarov 5y ago
  Yep -- see Mastercard Automatic Billing Updater.
- dangrossman 5y ago
  Yes. Theirs is called Automatic Billing Updater. The payments API I use offers both Visa and MasterCard's services at a cost of $0.20 per updated card.
acaloiar 5y ago
This is not Visa-specific. All major issuers support the same or similar features: Amex:https://www.americanexpress.com/us/merchant/cardrefresher.html https://www.americanexpress.com/us/merchant/cardrefresher.ht... Mastercard: https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/public/mastercardcom/na/us/en/documents/Mastercard-Automatic-Billing-Updater-Merchant-Global-2017.pdf https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/public/mastercardcom/n... Discover: https://www.discoverglobalnetwork.com/content/dam/discover/en_us/dgn/pdfs/account-updater.pdf https://www.discoverglobalnetwork.com/content/dam/discover/e...
ubermonkey 5y ago
I've found this more useful than harmful -- like, if I had to get a new Amex because of someone's data leak, I didn't have to go through and update literally EVERY SINGLE AUTOBILL bc Amex was smart enough to let (e.g.) my cell bill or my cable bill continue to process on the old number while blocking new charges on it. But it still sucks that it's difficult to block charges like this from the consumer/credit-card side. I see references to OneFinancial in the thread here, and I'll definitely look into that.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  Then make it optional or give fine-grained control over it. When you get a new card number, you should get a list of merchants that have recurring payments on the old one, and get to choose yes or no to transfer each of them.
  - ubermonkey 5y ago
    It'd be nice, but almost nobody does that. Wish they would, obviously, but there's apparently no market call for it. There are other considerations in picking a card, though, and I'm generally happy with the overall experience with Amex.
- Stevvo 5y ago
  Personally I having to update all of the recurring payments very useful; I was supprised by the amount of shit I had forgotten I was paying for every month. e.g. a VPS that I hadn't had anything running on for years, Apple music long after switching to Spotify.
  - ubermonkey 5y ago
    This is one reason I enjoy the fact that I really only use one card. It's dead simple to review one bill every month. 99% of all my economic activity (excluding my mortgage) goes through my Amex. I have a MasterCard, as a backup, but I almost never use it for anything meaningful (it actually lives in my cycling wallet, so I have a card there Just In Case). My actual bank account sees very, very, very few transactions by comparison: I get paid there, I transfer out to savings, I pay the mortgage, I pay any tiny charges on the MasterCard, and I pay the Amex bill, and that's about it. This makes it VERY easy to keep track of recurring charges.
coldcode 5y ago
What if you no longer have an account at the issuing bank and the cards were cancelled. How would this even work given there is no business relationship anymore?
- dqv 5y ago
  It only works if you have an active account with the issuer. It's simply a convenience feature for subscriptions to go to the new card since it would be rather annoying to have to go through 20 different subscriptions to add the new card.
  - pc86 5y ago
    I actually viewed this annoyance as a feature. Wait for the Dunning email and either log in to update or do nothing.
    - dqv 5y ago
      That's fine. Most people don't want to have to re-enter their new credit card everywhere, so you can always call your issuer and ask them to issue a new card, but stop all subscription charges.
tsjq 5y ago
Reserve Bank of India added provisions to protect customers exactly against this kind of situations. https://www.rbi.org.in/Scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=11668 https://www.rbi.org.in/Scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=1166...
dang 5y ago
This title breaks the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), which ask: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." Cherry-picking a detail, especially a sensational detail, and making that the title is the main way that people break this guideline, so please don't do that. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... In a case like this, though, it would be much better to find a blog post or article specifically about this issue with expired credit cards. (Or, if this has been your experience, to write one.) A thoughtful discussion needs more information than just a title. (If anyone can dig up a suitable article, we can change the URL.)
- em-bee 5y ago
  maybe one of these https://bucksandcents.com/will-canceling-a-credit-card-stop-recurring-payments/ https://bucksandcents.com/will-canceling-a-credit-card-stop-... https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/amazon-can-take-payments-from-expired-cards/ https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/amazon-can-take-pay... https://ficoforums.myfico.com/t5/Credit-Cards/Companies-charging-credit-card-after-it-has-expired/td-p/682831 https://ficoforums.myfico.com/t5/Credit-Cards/Companies-char...
jasonlotito 5y ago
I'm surprised at the number of people here who aren't reading or otherwise paying attention to anything related to credit cards. This isn't some new thing, and it's well known. I can only imagine the people posting here are dealing with credit cards for the first time. Listen, this is your credit, take some responsibility and spend some time to understand what you are signing up for and agreeing to. These aren't hidden features and they exist for a reason: convenience.
- dqv 5y ago
  Right. I'm always checking statements to see if there is anything fishy. If I don't know what it's for, I probably don't need it and should investigate further. There are even features to notify you when pending charges post just to follow up on anything weird going on.
- ragingrobot 5y ago
  I think quite a few people monitor their accounts, but what comes as a surprise is that they can get charged after expiration. I have checked my cardholder agreement with Visa, and can find nothing about this "convenience" of continuing to allow a recurring charge after a card has expired. Although, I will say I'm not ungrateful it's there as changing a whole bunch of such charges is not something I would look forward to. After noticing banks/card issuers have done this, I have treated the expiration date as affecting new purchases only.
tlogan 5y ago
I love this - I have my internet, mobile, Amazon prime, Netflix. etc. setup via CC and this really helps. Saves a lot of time. I see that HN readership do not like this but I think this is common for young adults. The point is that after some point in their life one will get more organized and more disciplined (like one will not be signing up for random services using company email address - yea I did that as young adult. Terrible idea.). Also as one gets older one will learn that just canceling the credit card or disputing charges might get bills reported to collection.
evo_9 5y ago
I typically use a test visa number to replace/remove my cc and it’s crazy how often this works. Aka no check that it’s a test cards
kodah 5y ago
Context: I filter nearly all purchases I make through my credit card. This card is in place as a proxy to frontload transactions through as well as it helps me budget in a net sense. tldr: I don't need to microscrutinize my budget because if my monthly budget approaches certain thresholds then I know something is wrong, given all purchases go through this singular budgetory mechanism. Someone got hold of my card and started a series of multi-thousand dollar transactions on Amazon.com. I noticed this almost immediately because of the above and mint.com -- which provides category-based budget alerts. I contacted my credit card vendor and told them these were not my purchases and they immediately cancelled the card. I was given an interesting tidbit of information: "Despite the card being cancelled you can still use it. We will roll transactions to your new card over the next x days, and those transactions will be scrutinized to ensure you are no longer experiencing fraud from other sources. Amazon.com, however, cannot be purchased from at all until you have a new card." In this way, I wasn't fucked from buying groceries, but I could tell the definition of "cancelled" was much different from what I thought it was.
motohagiography 5y ago
I'm bearish on cryptocurrencies as lacking legitimate use cases, but metered services and honest subscriptions appears to be a pretty appealing one when card networks have policies like these. Volatility is a big issue, but using cryptocurrency for subscriptions could create more stable longer term demand characteristics where the subscription fee gets indexed to a cost at the time of purchase, with the small matter of who influences that index as it becomes a defacto peg. Card network policies just aren't something I think can be repaired.
nysv 5y ago
Good to hear my distrust of credit card companies hasn't been in vain. I've made all even remotely recurring sounding payments via paypal just for the ease of cancelling. I really don't want to have to contact someone to cancel a payment when I can just do it myself.

65 points by jongunter1 5y ago

I've always suspected so. Many times I have had a card expire and be replaced, and recurring payments under the old expiration dates continue to charged to the account. I have at least one such payment that I probably have not updated payment information in over 10 years, so that expiration date is long expired. At one time I suspected in such cases that the bank automatically provided the payee with the new information. Last year I had a payment issue with E-ZPass. The payments were suddenly being rejected. I came to find it this was due to out of date expiration information. The card number had remained the same, but the expiration on record was June 2012. Yes, it took over 8 years for the bank (Chase/Visa) to start rejecting payments.

conductr 5y ago
My toll tag is linked to an expired card and I've been curious how long this thing will keep going. I think I still have a couple years based on your experience
- ragingrobot 5y ago
  I guess it depends on your bank, and who the toll tag issuer is. I wrote earlier about a long standing account I had never updated, and just realized it may just be cellular phone with Sprint. I don't believe have never updated that info since I started service with them in 2008 - for a long while I think their site was a PITA to use so I just never bothered.

linsomniac 5y ago

I've been told this by credit card customer support. In several instances over the last 3-4 years I've disputed charges from companies I have no relationship with, and as part of the dispute process been told I need to reach out to these companies to prevent future recurring charges. Calling a company I've never heard of to try to get them to stop charging me sounds likely to lead to further problems rather than resolving them, but I digress. On the other hand, I've switched over to using a bank that gives me fine-grained control over virtual cards and ACH accounts. I can create a "pocket" for a vendor or a class of charges, create an associated virtual card, and put a specific amount of money into that pocket. I can enable or disable an "overdraft protection" per pocket that will pull funds from another pocket if I run out. And I can close those pockets as well. This is great for the subscriptions that make it hard to cancel. You know, the places: "Click this button to subscribe, auto renewing", but "If you want to cancel, call this number between 8am and 5pm". I had a couple newspaper subscriptions on dedicated pockets, and after notifying their subscriptions dept that I wanted them to cancel it and was told to call a person about it, I just closed the pocket. I have gotten notifications about their continued attempted charges, but they haven't gone through.

morpheuskafka 5y ago
What bank is this? I'm using Privacy.com to do this with debit cards, but I've never heard of anything that lets you do it for ACH.
- basch 5y ago
  I searched google for the word pocket, and One came up https://www.onefinance.com/features/ https://www.onefinance.com/features/
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    Yup, OneFinance is awesome. A true replacement for Simple Bank
- linsomniac 5y ago
  As another reply surmised, it is OneFinance. Been with them for around 3 months as my primary bank after Simple got acquired by BBVA which got acquired by PNC. I've been very happy with them. If you decide to sign up, check to see if you have a friend that has an account, you can both get $50 on your first direct deposit. Slide into my DMs if you don't have any friends. :-D
  - morpheuskafka 5y ago
    I’ll take a referral and thanks for letting me know which company it was! (my email is in profile)
- resynthesize 5y ago
  hey - One employee and engineer here. happy to answer questions if anyone has them!
thatcat 5y ago
How did you find a bank that gives you that level of control?

nixpulvis 5y ago

I learned this the hard way once when I tried to get rid of a $5 subscription I didn't understand with Discover. I naively figured I would just request a new card and that would be that... Nope, it's like a direct debit or something, they are linked to the actual account, despite being setup through the card. Totally broke my head to the point I actually talked myself into closing my account, which was another mistake :(

gruez 5y ago
>I learned this the hard way once when I tried to get rid of a $5 subscription I didn't understand with Discover. I naively figured I would just request a new card and that would be that That's a bad idea anyways. Just because your credit card was declined doesn't mean you're off the hook. Most businesses are reasonable and won't chase you further, but some persistent ones (eg. gyms) are known to continue your subscription and send your bill to collections.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
SilasX 5y ago
Similar deal. I had one service that (to their credit) canceled my subscription when they saw I wasn't using it, then months later tried to charge it again, which got flagged as a fraud alert. I contacted them and they apologized and refunded. Then charged again the next month. This time I filed a dispute. The credit card sided with the merchant, who claimed I started a new subscription, and their proof was a shot of "my" webpage form, which showed me entering my very new CC number (old had expired) that I never gave the merchant, but with an old address that wouldn't have gotten the transaction approved if I had really entered that in a new. SMH

mdp2021 5y ago

It is also worth mentioning that similarly, it was reported that NFC based transactions do not stop when card services are cancelled. One may think that the process of payment transaction checks for flags of expiration, service cancellation etc. before actually transferring money. Instead, it is possible that a stolen NFC-equipped card is used successfully long after the emitter was informed that the card is to be invalidated, and money should be recovered through the financial services (insurance) instead of, simply, never have been moved.

whiddershins 5y ago

I hate this policy. It harmed my credit deeply for years, because all I did to restart charges was log into an old website (email management) And since I didn’t even have the card anymore I didn’t see the charges for months. And nothing I could do would resolve it.

1MachineElf 5y ago

Recently I discovered that they can also send refunds to a cancelled card.

gowld 5y ago
Cancelled card, or account via the cancelled card's number?
- 1MachineElf 5y ago
  An account via the cancelled card's number.
decremental 5y ago
Someone obtains your CC info and makes a series of purchases that clear online. After the fact, your CC company contacts you and asks was this fraud? You say yes. CC is canceled. The business that accepted the charges does an audit of orders and identifies weird charges. Probably fraud. Refunds the orders. This maybe takes place in just a few days from start to finish. That's what you're describing. In the last 6 months a new system was put in place that checks before issuing refunds to see if it's even possible to issue the refund. All merchants have been notified of this change. The only thing I'm thinking of is how this sucks for merchants who are doing a better job at detecting fraud than the processors. You cannot issue a refund. You may only eat the chargeback fees and (of course) loss of the original funds. The credit card system is so fucked from the ground up. It must be replaced.

ocdtrekkie 5y ago

One of the things I find absolutely infuriating is the modern push to subscription services for things that aren't generally subscription. Like dog food. I've been... pushed into... more subscriptions lately... and I've never had to file so many credit card disputes in my life as I have in the past couple years, because half these subscription services absolutely refuse to stop charging you even after you've called them to cancel two or three times. The EU has far superior legislation surrounding subscriptions and cancellation methods that are really woefully lacking in the US. I'd bet subscription businesses wouldn't be nearly as popular a model if it wasn't for the number of people paying who can't cancel.

martinesko36 5y ago

Does this happen with MasterCard too?

dlubarov 5y ago
Yep -- see Mastercard Automatic Billing Updater.
dangrossman 5y ago
Yes. Theirs is called Automatic Billing Updater. The payments API I use offers both Visa and MasterCard's services at a cost of $0.20 per updated card.

acaloiar 5y ago

This is not Visa-specific. All major issuers support the same or similar features: Amex:https://www.americanexpress.com/us/merchant/cardrefresher.html https://www.americanexpress.com/us/merchant/cardrefresher.ht... Mastercard: https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/public/mastercardcom/na/us/en/documents/Mastercard-Automatic-Billing-Updater-Merchant-Global-2017.pdf https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/public/mastercardcom/n... Discover: https://www.discoverglobalnetwork.com/content/dam/discover/en_us/dgn/pdfs/account-updater.pdf https://www.discoverglobalnetwork.com/content/dam/discover/e...

ubermonkey 5y ago

I've found this more useful than harmful -- like, if I had to get a new Amex because of someone's data leak, I didn't have to go through and update literally EVERY SINGLE AUTOBILL bc Amex was smart enough to let (e.g.) my cell bill or my cable bill continue to process on the old number while blocking new charges on it. But it still sucks that it's difficult to block charges like this from the consumer/credit-card side. I see references to OneFinancial in the thread here, and I'll definitely look into that.

josephcsible 5y ago
Then make it optional or give fine-grained control over it. When you get a new card number, you should get a list of merchants that have recurring payments on the old one, and get to choose yes or no to transfer each of them.
- ubermonkey 5y ago
  It'd be nice, but almost nobody does that. Wish they would, obviously, but there's apparently no market call for it. There are other considerations in picking a card, though, and I'm generally happy with the overall experience with Amex.
Stevvo 5y ago
Personally I having to update all of the recurring payments very useful; I was supprised by the amount of shit I had forgotten I was paying for every month. e.g. a VPS that I hadn't had anything running on for years, Apple music long after switching to Spotify.
- ubermonkey 5y ago
  This is one reason I enjoy the fact that I really only use one card. It's dead simple to review one bill every month. 99% of all my economic activity (excluding my mortgage) goes through my Amex. I have a MasterCard, as a backup, but I almost never use it for anything meaningful (it actually lives in my cycling wallet, so I have a card there Just In Case). My actual bank account sees very, very, very few transactions by comparison: I get paid there, I transfer out to savings, I pay the mortgage, I pay any tiny charges on the MasterCard, and I pay the Amex bill, and that's about it. This makes it VERY easy to keep track of recurring charges.

coldcode 5y ago

What if you no longer have an account at the issuing bank and the cards were cancelled. How would this even work given there is no business relationship anymore?

dqv 5y ago
It only works if you have an active account with the issuer. It's simply a convenience feature for subscriptions to go to the new card since it would be rather annoying to have to go through 20 different subscriptions to add the new card.
- pc86 5y ago
  I actually viewed this annoyance as a feature. Wait for the Dunning email and either log in to update or do nothing.
  - dqv 5y ago
    That's fine. Most people don't want to have to re-enter their new credit card everywhere, so you can always call your issuer and ask them to issue a new card, but stop all subscription charges.

tsjq 5y ago

Reserve Bank of India added provisions to protect customers exactly against this kind of situations. https://www.rbi.org.in/Scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=11668 https://www.rbi.org.in/Scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=1166...

dang 5y ago

This title breaks the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), which ask: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." Cherry-picking a detail, especially a sensational detail, and making that the title is the main way that people break this guideline, so please don't do that. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... In a case like this, though, it would be much better to find a blog post or article specifically about this issue with expired credit cards. (Or, if this has been your experience, to write one.) A thoughtful discussion needs more information than just a title. (If anyone can dig up a suitable article, we can change the URL.)

em-bee 5y ago
maybe one of these https://bucksandcents.com/will-canceling-a-credit-card-stop-recurring-payments/ https://bucksandcents.com/will-canceling-a-credit-card-stop-... https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/amazon-can-take-payments-from-expired-cards/ https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/amazon-can-take-pay... https://ficoforums.myfico.com/t5/Credit-Cards/Companies-charging-credit-card-after-it-has-expired/td-p/682831 https://ficoforums.myfico.com/t5/Credit-Cards/Companies-char...

jasonlotito 5y ago

I'm surprised at the number of people here who aren't reading or otherwise paying attention to anything related to credit cards. This isn't some new thing, and it's well known. I can only imagine the people posting here are dealing with credit cards for the first time. Listen, this is your credit, take some responsibility and spend some time to understand what you are signing up for and agreeing to. These aren't hidden features and they exist for a reason: convenience.

dqv 5y ago
Right. I'm always checking statements to see if there is anything fishy. If I don't know what it's for, I probably don't need it and should investigate further. There are even features to notify you when pending charges post just to follow up on anything weird going on.
ragingrobot 5y ago
I think quite a few people monitor their accounts, but what comes as a surprise is that they can get charged after expiration. I have checked my cardholder agreement with Visa, and can find nothing about this "convenience" of continuing to allow a recurring charge after a card has expired. Although, I will say I'm not ungrateful it's there as changing a whole bunch of such charges is not something I would look forward to. After noticing banks/card issuers have done this, I have treated the expiration date as affecting new purchases only.

tlogan 5y ago

I love this - I have my internet, mobile, Amazon prime, Netflix. etc. setup via CC and this really helps. Saves a lot of time. I see that HN readership do not like this but I think this is common for young adults. The point is that after some point in their life one will get more organized and more disciplined (like one will not be signing up for random services using company email address - yea I did that as young adult. Terrible idea.). Also as one gets older one will learn that just canceling the credit card or disputing charges might get bills reported to collection.

evo_9 5y ago

I typically use a test visa number to replace/remove my cc and it’s crazy how often this works. Aka no check that it’s a test cards

kodah 5y ago

Context: I filter nearly all purchases I make through my credit card. This card is in place as a proxy to frontload transactions through as well as it helps me budget in a net sense. tldr: I don't need to microscrutinize my budget because if my monthly budget approaches certain thresholds then I know something is wrong, given all purchases go through this singular budgetory mechanism. Someone got hold of my card and started a series of multi-thousand dollar transactions on Amazon.com. I noticed this almost immediately because of the above and mint.com -- which provides category-based budget alerts. I contacted my credit card vendor and told them these were not my purchases and they immediately cancelled the card. I was given an interesting tidbit of information: "Despite the card being cancelled you can still use it. We will roll transactions to your new card over the next x days, and those transactions will be scrutinized to ensure you are no longer experiencing fraud from other sources. Amazon.com, however, cannot be purchased from at all until you have a new card." In this way, I wasn't fucked from buying groceries, but I could tell the definition of "cancelled" was much different from what I thought it was.

motohagiography 5y ago

I'm bearish on cryptocurrencies as lacking legitimate use cases, but metered services and honest subscriptions appears to be a pretty appealing one when card networks have policies like these. Volatility is a big issue, but using cryptocurrency for subscriptions could create more stable longer term demand characteristics where the subscription fee gets indexed to a cost at the time of purchase, with the small matter of who influences that index as it becomes a defacto peg. Card network policies just aren't something I think can be repaired.

nysv 5y ago

Good to hear my distrust of credit card companies hasn't been in vain. I've made all even remotely recurring sounding payments via paypal just for the ease of cancelling. I really don't want to have to contact someone to cancel a payment when I can just do it myself.