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&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.)
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.
This is a request by the bank. If they keep letting through fraudulent charges, they can keep paying for them.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/companies-mu...
Maybe banks have some extra rights on your country, but that is actively collaborating with fraud.
You can use EU card in US with account nominated in USD.
"I did. They are continuing to make fraudulent charges."
The bank can't require you to do this. Just say you won't. Say you might do that but if you hang up without resolution your next call is to the police for identity theft (as someone else suggested).
But if you want to make a habit of lying to bank employees that's going to end up biting you in the ass sooner or later.
Amex:https://www.americanexpress.com/us/merchant/cardrefresher.ht...
Mastercard: https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/public/mastercardcom/n...
Discover: https://www.discoverglobalnetwork.com/content/dam/discover/e...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are other considerations in picking a card, though, and I'm generally happy with the overall experience with Amex.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
https://www.rbi.org.in/Scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=1166...
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.
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.
The payments API I use offers both Visa and MasterCard's services at a cost of $0.20 per updated card.
