This title breaks the site guidelines (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&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.)
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.
I used my credit card a few times and got burned, there is no way I give my number directly to anyone now. Especially Google was running my ads for a week after cancelling and I ended up paying almost $2000 more than I had planned (yes, this is in their ToS). Paypal is a decent intermediary that makes it easy to cancel any subscription effortlessly. Your startup doesn't offer Paypal subscriptions? Too bad for you, I won't use your service. It is completely unacceptable to shift the burden of dealing with this crap to the customer. This kind of hostile behavior shouldn't be tolerated even in the 90s when you were trying to cancel your NYT subscription, and there is no place for it now. In order to convince me to buy your service, you need to attract me with good conditions. "Free trial, credit card required" is not one of them. I don't care that much about free trial, what I want is to be able to cancel my subscription without your kind permission to do so.
I live in Oregon but changed my address on wsj.com to a California address so I could cancel without having to talk to anybody. In 2018, a law went into effect that says that if you can sign up online, you have to be allowed to cancel online. But only California has this law AFAIK.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :(
>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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.)