Ask HN: AWS refuses to stop billing me for a compromised account

Yup.

> By the way, if you can't authenticate with Amazon as the rightful owner of that account, it sounds unreasonable for them to comply to a stranger asking them to simply remove a credit card number of some account.

I disagree. If I can provide a full credit card number, they should be able to remove it from all accounts. Either the card is compromised, or I'm telling the truth.

Generally speaking, this is a bad idea. Credit cards have more legal protections than debit cards[1], giving you more avenues for recourse.

Banks can also choose to honor a transaction and and overdraw your account. This can result in a negative balance, leaving you with fewer legal protections on the original transaction (since it was debit instead of credit) and owing money to your bank. Plus possible overdraft fees.

> Or do you mean that you requested a new card without closing the old one? If they're both open, it's not that charges are being forwarded, but rather that the old card is still valid and both are linked to the same credit account. Maybe you can ask them to close it?

It's a feature of the processing networks called account updater[2]. It sounds like the credit line itself was not canceled, only the card. With a new card issued against the same credit line. The link at [2] mentions the logic for when account updater can happen, but essentially if a merchant has successfully processed your card in the last year and it gets declined on subsequent transactions (because you canceled it or it expired), they can request the new card information to retry the transaction against. It's designed to prevent lapses in recurring payments when cards expire or get re-issued, while limiting exposure to fraud since new merchants without a history of transactions on your account can't get the new account info.

If you're ever in this situation, what you want to do is 1) initiate a chargeback dispute on the initial transaction and 2) explicitly request your bank to decline future transactions from that merchant (referencing the initial transaction so they know explicitly which merchant). The merchant should then get hit with this[3] decline code next time they attempt to charge you, which will be a hard decline that indicates it was due to a cardholder-requested block.

That way you only have to deal with one dispute involving your credit card company and any subsequent transactions are prevented from even getting to that point (and if one slips through, the fact that you requested a merchant block becomes it's own supporting evidence for disputing a charge). As OP experienced, repetitive disputes tend to shift over time from the consumer's favor to the merchant's favor, so only disputing the transactions after they occur only tend to work the first few times.

[1] https://www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/news/cnwin1213/stopp...

[2] https://articles.braintreepayments.com/guides/account-update...

[3] https://articles.braintreepayments.com/control-panel/transac...

The implementation is very shoddy - a mapping of old to new cards is distributed to any big provider who has charged the old card.