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Netflix stops charging customers who never watch
241–250 of 519 posts
Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm getting charged by rhapsody.com every quarter for no apparent reason. I used their service like may be 8 years ago. They have a phone number in their merchant line which is invalid. When I filed request to void the charge to American Express, initially they declined! Then I filed appeal with angry comments and they finally voided it. It took over two months for the process. I just saw new Rhapsody charge again. T…
> The credit card companies literally have no control over who can charge us. That's not quite true. The card network can refuse a merchant for any reason, constantly making bogus charges would probably be a good reason for the network to refuse them and that's likely to be the result. Of course you don't see if your bogus charge was reflective of 0.01% of the charges from this merchant or 99.9% However as I've expla…
You obviously understand payment systems more deeply but to me this is like someone explaining why I need to deal with mainframes with tap drives in 2020. Many of us don't even need credit cards, we just need a way to transfer existing money from our bank account on agreed upon transactions safely. There are far more modern ways to electronically "agree" on a transaction then to use exact same 19 digit number for every single transaction for every single merchant everywhere. We need certainty for protection against frauds. Transactions should literally be instant but undoable change in bits in electronic databases without having these arcane settlements and authorization non-sense. Even if there are edge cases like offline merchant in Africa, credit card companies need to be able support all of below and there are exactly zero technical reasons why they cannot:
1. Consumer should always be able to blacklist a merchant or provide a whitelist
2. Consumer should always be able to set limit how much a given merchant can ever charge him/her and during what time windows
3. Consumer should always be able to set total limit of charges he/she wants to have at any time
4. Consumer should always be able to get phone number, mailing address and correct full legal name of any merchant who puts charge
5. Consumer should always be able to generate new electronic card number for online usage and dispose off any previous one at will
"Check your statements" is an useless advice. My experience is that even when you find out bad charge, you have to go through hoops and appeals which may take weeks or even months. There are zero guarantees same charge from same merchant won't happen again. The only single case when CC companies are willing to take off charge immediately is when you say you don't recognize merchant at all and its 100% fraudulent. If you say you once authorized that merchants a decade ago, its suddenly your fault and you are looking at writing up justifications which will likely get rejected any way.
Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Virtual Cards with set expiry numbers will end this game
I'd prefer my bank to allow me to manually approve every payment, e.g. via smartphone application. It would be easy to understand, fast enough, with some options like "approve netflix forever". That would be ideal for me. And if I don't like this particular payment, just decline and move on. Those agents who pull my money without my explicit consent every time are the reason I'm keeping my card with minimal amount of…
We have that in the EU.
Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch
#244If I have to give out my card details anywhere especially for a subscription based service I look beforehand on how I can cancel it. Companies have no shame in leaving you forget a subscription going on forever. That should be punishable by law.
Also my main bank is now Monzo (based in the UK) and there I get a notification on my phone for every transaction I make. I also see a list of all the committed spending for a month which includes all subscription based services I have (some of them I had to mark myself as such because Monzo can't distinguish if they are recurring or not). To be honest I think every mobile bank application should offer this out of the box. It's 2020...
Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch
#245Years ago, I heard of a dating site doing the opposite of this. They normally sent periodic digests and newsletters to their users to try to increase engagement, but if a user went a certain number of months without logging into their account, but still allowed monthly fees to be charged, they were labeled as a “sleeping giant” in the database. Once in this state, they would not be contacted by the site for any reaso…
Experian pulled much the same shit on me. I hadn’t locked in in six months, so they disabled my account but kept charging me. A year or so I tried to sign in and it said my account had been disabled due to inactivity. Had to escalate it more than once before I got them to refund the whole thing.
Wait you pay and they still lock your account due to inactivity?
Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch
#246This is absolutely ridiculous. As a profitable company the duty of the company is to make money for the share holders and board members. The customer is a dumb expendable resource to be exploited. Netflix stock price is down because of this. Not only should Netflix not do this, it should charge pregnant women extra because they are watching with an extra person /s
Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Experian pulled much the same shit on me. I hadn’t locked in in six months, so they disabled my account but kept charging me. A year or so I tried to sign in and it said my account had been disabled due to inactivity. Had to escalate it more than once before I got them to refund the whole thing.
Wait you pay and they still lock your account due to inactivity?
I’ve no idea if this is still the case, but yes, that was the situation.
Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm getting charged by rhapsody.com every quarter for no apparent reason. I used their service like may be 8 years ago. They have a phone number in their merchant line which is invalid. When I filed request to void the charge to American Express, initially they declined! Then I filed appeal with angry comments and they finally voided it. It took over two months for the process. I just saw new Rhapsody charge again. T…
Companies that make it difficult to unsubscribe should be penalised, I live in Europe and got the New York Times on a 12 month trial for €4 a month. Trial just ended and it's now €8 a month, only way to cance is to ring them, have tried once so far and was on hold for 20 mins before I hung up. There should be a law that if you can sign up online you can cancel online.
It would be interesting to see a credit card company differentiate on this. Have an internal team which works through the various companies (presumably in order of popularity) and does the leg work of figuring out how to subscribe. So the customer would be presented with: Go to these locations and upload this information. Or even: Enter your username and password and this information and our scripts will unsubscribe you.
Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies that make it difficult to unsubscribe should be penalised, I live in Europe and got the New York Times on a 12 month trial for €4 a month. Trial just ended and it's now €8 a month, only way to cance is to ring them, have tried once so far and was on hold for 20 mins before I hung up. There should be a law that if you can sign up online you can cancel online.
One reason I try to never give my card to lots of websites. If they have paypal, good. Or playstore subscription, sure. A one time/non recurring payment via a platform/provider/bank, ok. But never the card. Reading such user horror stories, or Terms & Conditions, makes me turn around and never come back.
I use a separate credit card for paying on dodgy services. Restaurants and small stores abroad, online payments not via PayPal, things like these.
Relatively few monthly statements on it make anything funny stand out, and it's easy to just report/cancel the card.
Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe it’s fine to simply email them. The self service on the Economists website is notoriously bad. It’s not really because it’s not working or that hard to use, it’s just insanely poorly organized.
Cancelling my Economist subscription was the biggest hassle. You need write an email with order date, current billing cycle, reference number and more. All the while there you can manage parts of your subscription through a portal. They just try to make cancellation as laborious as possible.
That’s just insane, other than trying make cancellation harder there’s no reason that your supscription number shouldn’t be sufficient.