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It's important to remember that a chargeback should be considered the nuclear option, and, when using it, one should be comfortable with the possibility that on

It's important to remember that a chargeback should be considered the nuclear option, and, when using it, one should be comfortable with the possibility that one might never do business with this company again, since it could result in being blacklisted (even if one is, in fact, in the right). I'm not saying not to do it, but one should keep in mind the potential repercussions.

mannanj 6mo ago
So the Anthropic company would blacklist you for taking your money back by force that they owe you? Ok sounds like evil should be labeled and not tolerated as anything else.
- throwanem 6mo ago
  More like, you don't sue a vendor and then expect the relationship to go back to status quo ante. A chargeback is essentially binding arbitration and it can be existentially costly for small businesses, especially those unable effectively to advocate for themselves in a fairly complex and little-known process. Excess chargeback initiations - even of failed chargebacks - will also get acquirer accounts closed, meaning the business formerly a client of that acquirer can now no longer accept credit cards. (Modern acquirers like Stripe also do this, because the card issuers and payment networks will eventually cut them off if they don't: Stripe is not "too big to fail" according to Visa, which is why you may not sell sex or porn via Stripe.) Anthropic doesn't need to care, of course. No one is going to fire them as a customer over excess chargebacks, and a hundred such fees are still cheaper than one hire. Anthropic has a burn rate. Chargebacks impinge much more heavily on businesses that need to earn money selling goods or services. It's important not to confuse one with the other.
  - Marsymars 6mo ago
    > More like, you don't sue a vendor and then expect the relationship to go back to status quo ante. Depends on the specific relationship between the parties and the nature of the lawsuit. If I sue Walmart, the only grocer in my town, for mislabelling the weight of their ground beef, we (as a society/government) probably shouldn't allow Walmart to retaliate by banning me from their stores.
    - throwanem 6mo ago
      I wasn't talking about what 'should be allowed,' rather what presently is. But your example goes rather more to my point, don't you think? As with any tenant (owner or domicilee) of a private property in the US, the management of a store has broad privilege over lawful access to the premises, the legal theory at basis being that of trespass. Stores frequently use this power to exclude known shoplifters, check kiters, etc. Not you, though, not after having prevailed in Marsymars v. Wally World - congratulations! Absent some novel obnoxious behavior on your part, the terms of the judgment are such that treating you as a trespasser would almost certainly result in a further finding of contempt of court, with penalties condign upon the franchise. (The general property right is not abrogated, but the specific judgment takes precedence where it applies.) That relationship is materially different from the one which predeceased it, and the change was a direct consequence of your suit. Granted, Wal-Mart was not to you a "vendor" in the sense we mean it here but a retail store serving the general public, and you are not a "client" but a customer, and the parallel fails of establishment in several other obvious ways besides. I'm impressed it still goes so well to my point despite those flaws. Good work!
master_crab 6mo ago
I always wondered about this. Do companies tie the credit card to an identity to block or do they just block the cc number? If the latter, seems like a small friction point for a consumer. Given how often cc numbers change and how many an (American) consumer has, this won’t block anything unless you are charging back more than once every few months.
- SyneRyder 6mo ago
  It's up to the company, but since many companies don't want to keep card numbers around (and some processors don't let you see the card number anyway), they're probably more likely to block on identity. Maybe flag the IP address of the transaction for "additional screening" on all future transactions, etc.
  - nubinetwork 6mo ago
    CC numbers are also bound to get recycled eventually as cards expire and/or get replaced... even if you block a card, it might have a new owner 6 months or so later.
    - ValentineC 6mo ago
      The number space between the first 6 digits (BIN) and the Luhn check digit is 9 digits — that's 1 billion numbers that issuers can give out before a collision happens.
      - Marsymars 6mo ago
        That doesn't seem to be more than an order of magnitude off between available numbers and issued cards - a cursory search says there are over a billion credit cards in circulation in the US alone.
        ValentineC 6mo ago
        I think you're confusing the available number space per BIN (often used for a single card product) with the number of available numbers per network. Visa and Mastercard each have 14 digits worth of permutations to play with, excluding the first and last digits. That's one hundred trillion numbers. Assuming 8 billion people in the world, each person can hold 12,500 of either Visa or Mastercard before a collision happens. (As above, the number space is smaller because of how BINs are issued, but that's still plenty.)
barkingcat 6mo ago
waiting for month for a refund (and having lost access to the pro plan immediately but no immediate refund) is definite grounds for chargeback. there is no human on the other end of the chain, and I bet that chargebacks are how they issue refunds (ie relying on the "nuclear" option as the standard practice of how refunds fundamentally works at their company. ie "don't need to answer emails about refunds, because if they really wanted their money back, they'd issue a chargeback" as part of the regular procedure. a lot of companies do this, and it's a common way of minimizing customer support budgets.
- b112 6mo ago
  Unless you're big cheese, too many disputes can get a company cut off. Disputes aren't free to mediate, there's a cost to handle each one. Visa/MC can block a company, happens for lots of reasons.
  - philipov 6mo ago
    The more people use chargebacks to get around black hole customer service the better, because it is difficult for companies to blacklist everyone. If they don't want to pay the mediation fee, they should provide customer service in the first place.
    - b112 6mo ago
      There's a misunderstanding here. I'll make it clearer. The "Unless you're big cheese" is the company you're doing the charge back against. If a company, such as Anthropic has too many chargebacks? Visa/MC can ban them from their network. It happens to smaller companies all the time, mostly because it costs Visa/MC + the banks involved to deal with each chargeback, and also, it's typically a sign of fraudulent behaviour. Visa/MC are not a charity, or are payment processors. They need profit. Take it away by creating all this extra work, chargeback work, and they're not making money any more. The "big cheese" part is, if you're amazon or google, things can be negotiated at that scale. Maybe they pay a larger settlement fee, whatever. And of course Google Play, or Amazon utterly dwarfs Anthropic CC activity at this point, even though they have a large valuation and potential future ahead. Still, I have no idea what the background metrics and profit points are for Visa/MC, only that I've seen even medium sized companies have issues with too many chargebacks. And, we've all seen Visa/MC decide they don't like gambling, or porn sites and just drop them. Some of those companies were quite large and had a lot of flow for them. So I don't think many companies will just use chargebacks as a support mechanism. That is, unless they're just completely incompetent.
yadaeno 6mo ago
If a business attempts to steal from me I instantly charge back and the onus is on them to prove that I owe them money. I do this all the time and have never been blacklisted.
- butlike 6mo ago
  Yeah that kind of seems like antiquated fear-mongering. Next they should call the BBB and leave a strongly-worded review!
  - nekusar 6mo ago
    wait, int the BBB just boomer yelp?
    - sonofhans 6mo ago
      Believe it or not, back in the mists of time we had these things called “public institutions” which were at least notionally chartered to, and in fact somewhat did, act in the public benefit. The BBB was one of those — not always perfect, but consumer-friendly and not out to scam or profit. Yelp is just another VC-backed money play. They do not now or have they ever claimed or intended to make the world a better place without regard for their own profit.
  - collingreen 6mo ago
    You joke but I got bbb involved with a scammy business insurance company that is easy to sign up for but you can't cancel or stop renewal or change billing info. Company has an infinite hold line and never responds to anything. Filed a complaint on BBB and it was responded to next business day.
- mort96 6mo ago
  I don't think it's helpful to think about this as the company "trying to steal from you". There is no intention here. It's just something that got lost in a bad IT system. You gain nothing from issuing a chargeback. You imperceptibly nudge some statistic and a "banned for life" flag might automatically get flipped in a database. There's no righteous comeuppance here. You try to contact support, pester them a bit, call someone if possible, and eventually, you may get your money back. If you don't, then you issue the chargeback.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
ssl-3 6mo ago
It's also important to remember that chargebacks aren't under our control. As cardholders, we can't issue them directly. All we can do is submit a dispute to the bank. The bank will then investigate (however they do that), and eventually act (in whatever way they choose -- which may include a chargeback). It may seem pedantic, but it's an important detail. Chargebacks are ugly. They constitute red flags on merchant accounts, and with enough of those red flags their own rates are affected (or worse). Nobody wants chargebacks. Banks don't want them (they take time, and therefore money, to deal with). Vendors certainly don't want them. And consumers don't want them, either -- they just want to be made financially whole, however that happens. --- I had a problem once with a local record store where I got charged twice for one purchase. I loved that store very much (I grew up buying my music there), and at no point did I think that they would ever deliberately rip anyone off. But somehow after repeated phone calls and at least one visit, nobody I talked was able to either fix the problem or hand it over to someone who could. So, in desperation: I called the bank and asked for help. I told them what had happened, and what I'd tried to do to resolve it, and they told me I could file a dispute and they would investigate. So that's what I did. The next afternoon, I got a phone call from the store's very apologetic bookkeeper. He informed me that he'd received a call from my bank, and that he'd fixed the problem by refunding both of the charges, asked if that made me satisfied, apologized profusely again, and thanked me for my business. That was a little bit above-and-beyond on the humbleness scale, but whatever. My problem was more than fixed and my fondness for the business was completely restored. --- Anyway, back to the point about being pedantic with nomenclature: All I did was file a dispute, all the bank did was make a phone call to the right person, and all the vendor did was fix the problem. No chargeback took place.
- ryandrake 6mo ago
  The fact that the record store could have easily handled your issue, but chose not to (and chose to not empower any of their employees to) until a bank got involved, should give a clue about what kind of company they actually were.
  - ssl-3 6mo ago
    Yeah, good point. I'll just forget about the fact that I'd spent thousands of dollars there over the course of decades, and they knew what I liked and would order inventory hoping that I'd buy it, and hold onto some of the tchotchke when it was time to take down some release date posters and put up new, just in case I wanted to take some, and I still kept giving them money until they eventually closed their doors forever because the owner was old and the building got ruined in a flood. You're right. None of that was important. I'll just focus on that one incident when the kid at the counter of a record store couldn't figure out a financial problem on their own. That's all I need to know about the place. Those fuckin' scumbags! Thank you very much. Your insight is very rewarding to me.
nitwit005 6mo ago
This is, yes you were robbed, but what if you want to partner with the bandit later? They'll just rob you in your future interactions too.
- malfist 6mo ago
  But what if the robber becomes a monopoly and you have to partner with them in the future? Who's gonna save you? Government?
  - nitwit005 6mo ago
    Then you get to enjoy mandatory robbery.

mannanj 6mo ago

So the Anthropic company would blacklist you for taking your money back by force that they owe you? Ok sounds like evil should be labeled and not tolerated as anything else.

throwanem 6mo ago
More like, you don't sue a vendor and then expect the relationship to go back to status quo ante. A chargeback is essentially binding arbitration and it can be existentially costly for small businesses, especially those unable effectively to advocate for themselves in a fairly complex and little-known process. Excess chargeback initiations - even of failed chargebacks - will also get acquirer accounts closed, meaning the business formerly a client of that acquirer can now no longer accept credit cards. (Modern acquirers like Stripe also do this, because the card issuers and payment networks will eventually cut them off if they don't: Stripe is not "too big to fail" according to Visa, which is why you may not sell sex or porn via Stripe.) Anthropic doesn't need to care, of course. No one is going to fire them as a customer over excess chargebacks, and a hundred such fees are still cheaper than one hire. Anthropic has a burn rate. Chargebacks impinge much more heavily on businesses that need to earn money selling goods or services. It's important not to confuse one with the other.
- Marsymars 6mo ago
  > More like, you don't sue a vendor and then expect the relationship to go back to status quo ante. Depends on the specific relationship between the parties and the nature of the lawsuit. If I sue Walmart, the only grocer in my town, for mislabelling the weight of their ground beef, we (as a society/government) probably shouldn't allow Walmart to retaliate by banning me from their stores.
  - throwanem 6mo ago
    I wasn't talking about what 'should be allowed,' rather what presently is. But your example goes rather more to my point, don't you think? As with any tenant (owner or domicilee) of a private property in the US, the management of a store has broad privilege over lawful access to the premises, the legal theory at basis being that of trespass. Stores frequently use this power to exclude known shoplifters, check kiters, etc. Not you, though, not after having prevailed in Marsymars v. Wally World - congratulations! Absent some novel obnoxious behavior on your part, the terms of the judgment are such that treating you as a trespasser would almost certainly result in a further finding of contempt of court, with penalties condign upon the franchise. (The general property right is not abrogated, but the specific judgment takes precedence where it applies.) That relationship is materially different from the one which predeceased it, and the change was a direct consequence of your suit. Granted, Wal-Mart was not to you a "vendor" in the sense we mean it here but a retail store serving the general public, and you are not a "client" but a customer, and the parallel fails of establishment in several other obvious ways besides. I'm impressed it still goes so well to my point despite those flaws. Good work!

master_crab 6mo ago

I always wondered about this. Do companies tie the credit card to an identity to block or do they just block the cc number? If the latter, seems like a small friction point for a consumer. Given how often cc numbers change and how many an (American) consumer has, this won’t block anything unless you are charging back more than once every few months.

SyneRyder 6mo ago
It's up to the company, but since many companies don't want to keep card numbers around (and some processors don't let you see the card number anyway), they're probably more likely to block on identity. Maybe flag the IP address of the transaction for "additional screening" on all future transactions, etc.
- nubinetwork 6mo ago
  CC numbers are also bound to get recycled eventually as cards expire and/or get replaced... even if you block a card, it might have a new owner 6 months or so later.
  - ValentineC 6mo ago
    The number space between the first 6 digits (BIN) and the Luhn check digit is 9 digits — that's 1 billion numbers that issuers can give out before a collision happens.
    - Marsymars 6mo ago
      That doesn't seem to be more than an order of magnitude off between available numbers and issued cards - a cursory search says there are over a billion credit cards in circulation in the US alone.
      - ValentineC 6mo ago
        I think you're confusing the available number space per BIN (often used for a single card product) with the number of available numbers per network. Visa and Mastercard each have 14 digits worth of permutations to play with, excluding the first and last digits. That's one hundred trillion numbers. Assuming 8 billion people in the world, each person can hold 12,500 of either Visa or Mastercard before a collision happens. (As above, the number space is smaller because of how BINs are issued, but that's still plenty.)

barkingcat 6mo ago

waiting for month for a refund (and having lost access to the pro plan immediately but no immediate refund) is definite grounds for chargeback. there is no human on the other end of the chain, and I bet that chargebacks are how they issue refunds (ie relying on the "nuclear" option as the standard practice of how refunds fundamentally works at their company. ie "don't need to answer emails about refunds, because if they really wanted their money back, they'd issue a chargeback" as part of the regular procedure. a lot of companies do this, and it's a common way of minimizing customer support budgets.

b112 6mo ago
Unless you're big cheese, too many disputes can get a company cut off. Disputes aren't free to mediate, there's a cost to handle each one. Visa/MC can block a company, happens for lots of reasons.
- philipov 6mo ago
  The more people use chargebacks to get around black hole customer service the better, because it is difficult for companies to blacklist everyone. If they don't want to pay the mediation fee, they should provide customer service in the first place.
  - b112 6mo ago
    There's a misunderstanding here. I'll make it clearer. The "Unless you're big cheese" is the company you're doing the charge back against. If a company, such as Anthropic has too many chargebacks? Visa/MC can ban them from their network. It happens to smaller companies all the time, mostly because it costs Visa/MC + the banks involved to deal with each chargeback, and also, it's typically a sign of fraudulent behaviour. Visa/MC are not a charity, or are payment processors. They need profit. Take it away by creating all this extra work, chargeback work, and they're not making money any more. The "big cheese" part is, if you're amazon or google, things can be negotiated at that scale. Maybe they pay a larger settlement fee, whatever. And of course Google Play, or Amazon utterly dwarfs Anthropic CC activity at this point, even though they have a large valuation and potential future ahead. Still, I have no idea what the background metrics and profit points are for Visa/MC, only that I've seen even medium sized companies have issues with too many chargebacks. And, we've all seen Visa/MC decide they don't like gambling, or porn sites and just drop them. Some of those companies were quite large and had a lot of flow for them. So I don't think many companies will just use chargebacks as a support mechanism. That is, unless they're just completely incompetent.

yadaeno 6mo ago

If a business attempts to steal from me I instantly charge back and the onus is on them to prove that I owe them money. I do this all the time and have never been blacklisted.

butlike 6mo ago
Yeah that kind of seems like antiquated fear-mongering. Next they should call the BBB and leave a strongly-worded review!
- nekusar 6mo ago
  wait, int the BBB just boomer yelp?
  - sonofhans 6mo ago
    Believe it or not, back in the mists of time we had these things called “public institutions” which were at least notionally chartered to, and in fact somewhat did, act in the public benefit. The BBB was one of those — not always perfect, but consumer-friendly and not out to scam or profit. Yelp is just another VC-backed money play. They do not now or have they ever claimed or intended to make the world a better place without regard for their own profit.
- collingreen 6mo ago
  You joke but I got bbb involved with a scammy business insurance company that is easy to sign up for but you can't cancel or stop renewal or change billing info. Company has an infinite hold line and never responds to anything. Filed a complaint on BBB and it was responded to next business day.
mort96 6mo ago
I don't think it's helpful to think about this as the company "trying to steal from you". There is no intention here. It's just something that got lost in a bad IT system. You gain nothing from issuing a chargeback. You imperceptibly nudge some statistic and a "banned for life" flag might automatically get flipped in a database. There's no righteous comeuppance here. You try to contact support, pester them a bit, call someone if possible, and eventually, you may get your money back. If you don't, then you issue the chargeback.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

ssl-3 6mo ago

It's also important to remember that chargebacks aren't under our control. As cardholders, we can't issue them directly. All we can do is submit a dispute to the bank. The bank will then investigate (however they do that), and eventually act (in whatever way they choose -- which may include a chargeback). It may seem pedantic, but it's an important detail. Chargebacks are ugly. They constitute red flags on merchant accounts, and with enough of those red flags their own rates are affected (or worse). Nobody wants chargebacks. Banks don't want them (they take time, and therefore money, to deal with). Vendors certainly don't want them. And consumers don't want them, either -- they just want to be made financially whole, however that happens. --- I had a problem once with a local record store where I got charged twice for one purchase. I loved that store very much (I grew up buying my music there), and at no point did I think that they would ever deliberately rip anyone off. But somehow after repeated phone calls and at least one visit, nobody I talked was able to either fix the problem or hand it over to someone who could. So, in desperation: I called the bank and asked for help. I told them what had happened, and what I'd tried to do to resolve it, and they told me I could file a dispute and they would investigate. So that's what I did. The next afternoon, I got a phone call from the store's very apologetic bookkeeper. He informed me that he'd received a call from my bank, and that he'd fixed the problem by refunding both of the charges, asked if that made me satisfied, apologized profusely again, and thanked me for my business. That was a little bit above-and-beyond on the humbleness scale, but whatever. My problem was more than fixed and my fondness for the business was completely restored. --- Anyway, back to the point about being pedantic with nomenclature: All I did was file a dispute, all the bank did was make a phone call to the right person, and all the vendor did was fix the problem. No chargeback took place.

ryandrake 6mo ago
The fact that the record store could have easily handled your issue, but chose not to (and chose to not empower any of their employees to) until a bank got involved, should give a clue about what kind of company they actually were.
- ssl-3 6mo ago
  Yeah, good point. I'll just forget about the fact that I'd spent thousands of dollars there over the course of decades, and they knew what I liked and would order inventory hoping that I'd buy it, and hold onto some of the tchotchke when it was time to take down some release date posters and put up new, just in case I wanted to take some, and I still kept giving them money until they eventually closed their doors forever because the owner was old and the building got ruined in a flood. You're right. None of that was important. I'll just focus on that one incident when the kid at the counter of a record store couldn't figure out a financial problem on their own. That's all I need to know about the place. Those fuckin' scumbags! Thank you very much. Your insight is very rewarding to me.

nitwit005 6mo ago

This is, yes you were robbed, but what if you want to partner with the bandit later? They'll just rob you in your future interactions too.

malfist 6mo ago
But what if the robber becomes a monopoly and you have to partner with them in the future? Who's gonna save you? Government?
- nitwit005 6mo ago
  Then you get to enjoy mandatory robbery.