Comment by yadaeno
5 days 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.
5 days 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.
Some companies like Activision clearly state in their terms that chargeback means you will be permanently banned, no exceptions. You'll lose your account and access to all digital "purchases" forever.
They don't need to prove anything to stop doing business with you.
In the US.
And that's only because when Activision makes a digital "sale" they have no legal obligation to follow through and give you what they promised.
I live in the EU and have read this in the terms for my region.
> they have no legal obligation to follow through and give you what they promised
Yes, they do. Contracts are contracts. They just don't promise you ownership of anything but a revocable license. Like every platform offering DRM protected content.
This is why the seven seas are so important for preserving our purchases, companies be damned.
I have a few customers like that. They sign up, forget about it, then they see it on their statement and issue a chargeback. Not only do they get their $20 back (that they very willingly signed up for), but I have to pay another $35 to Stripe for the privilege of having a forgetful customer who couldn't even be bothered to email me for a refund.
> I have to pay another $35 to Stripe for the privilege of having a forgetful customer who couldn't even be bothered to email me for a refund.
I've seen some businesses send a pre-billing email telling customers that they'll be charged on a certain date, so that customers have time to cancel if they want.
Cloudflare does that for domain renewals, sending out emails 30 and 60 days before.
Of course, there are also some businesses that hope that customers forget that they're subscribed, so that there's breakage.
> Cloudflare does that for domain renewals
That's just standard. Every domain registrar/vendor does this.
Mine is a one-off payment :( They just forget they paid for it, plus the company name isn't the same as the app name, so they just go "welp, someone must be stealing from me!" and request a chargeback.
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With some of the large companies, blacklisted is a real concern.
eBay is one known example.
I've heard the same for Amazon (forget if it was retail or AWS).
It's cheaper to lose your business than to have a proper human review every complaint.
I've charged back amazon over retail issues that they did not deem worthy of providing me a human to interact with.
It whined about it for a bit on their site but eventually just gave up. Works normal again.
Yeah that kind of seems like antiquated fear-mongering. Next they should call the BBB and leave a strongly-worded review!
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.
wait, int the BBB just boomer yelp?
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.
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.
> There is no intention here.
You don’t think it’s funny how the mechanism for taking the money is never broken?
Work with a large company who won’t pay your 30 or 45 day invoice for 90 days before you broadly decide this.
> You don’t think it’s funny how the mechanism for taking the money is never broken?
I dunno, sometimes it is.
The most broken I've seen in my favour was a ~$600 purchase where the order flow broke partway through. Customer support was a major pain to get in contact with in order to figure out how to give them my money. When I eventually managed to talk to someone, they advised that maybe their third-party fraud algorithms didn't like my email. I changed my email, the order worked when I placed it again, and I received my product a week later.
Several months later, without any communication from the company, I received a second product in the mail, presumably from the first order that I didn't pay for. Based on how much of a pain it was to contact support the first time, I wasn't about to do so again based on their mistake. To be charitable, I kept the package in my garage for a couple months in case the company contacted me to arrange return shipping. Not hearing from them, I just sold it off.
> Work with a large company who won’t pay your 30 or 45 day invoice for 90 days before you broadly decide this.
I have had this experience. I don't see how a chargeback would've helped. Typically, you would invoice someone for time you've worked for them, or sometimes you buy a product from one company and invoice another for the expense.
Chargebacks don't help you get a company to pay your invoice. Debt collectors do.
In any case, this is something different from refunding a purchase as a customer, which was the topic at hand.
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