In all of these case the answer is that the wrong statistics are being generated. In the first case, it should be the proportion of each age who take the driving test who pass it. In the second it should be a comparison of the proportion of drunk drivers who have an accident compared with the proportion of sober drivers who have an accident. In the last case it should be a comparison of the proportion of cars travelling at each speed who have a collision. In most cases, the comparison of the proportion of populations is more meaningful than the comparison of absolute numbers where the size of the populations are different.
This is what I find difficult to comprehend. The merchant is still able to (and clearly permitted to by the bank) deduct further amounts from your credit card. The bank has to re-credit the amount back into your account each time. I have been through this myself. And it is not considered fraud even though you have withdrawn all authorisation for them to take any payment.
As I have said elsewhere in this thread, you should avoid potentially committed payments by (credit) card - you simply do not have very much control over what happens with your own card account.
Noise, wear and tear on the road surface. Comfort levels for pedestrians etc.
Faster than the speed limit? In many cases it is not very safe to drive anywhere near the speed limit.
AFAIK speedometers are not allowed to under read but can over read by up to 10%. It is therefore easiest for car manufacturers to design speedometers to over read by around 5%.
I think the crux is that there is no concept of permission by the bank[*]. Since the bank does not give permission, it can't withhold it either. The only permission comes from the cardholder, and any merchant who has been through the process of becoming an accredited merchant (how easy is this nowadays?) will simply be trusted by the bank that they are acting with the cardholder's authority.
[*] At least not at the level of individual transactions. A merchant still has to have permission to accept credit cards at all, i.e. to go through said accreditation process. Presumably any merchant who gets too many chargebacks (relative to good transactions) will eventually lose their accreditation.
Oh but it *is* fraud if you instruct them to stop and they still carry on.
If you want to avoid the hassle of asking for chargebacks, then you should indeed avoid giving CCAs, especially with certain particular classes of merchant, but on the whole is it not the case that most people find that the ability to query/hold/cancel charges is control enough?
Driving is hardly ever "very safe". It's a bloody convenient way of getting about, though. As a society we must learn to balance risk with reward. How many road deaths and other horrific injuries are there per year? Some would argue there are too many, and that we should ban private motor cars altogether. I'm sure it would reduce the accident toll, but society appears to accept that the price in terms of lost convenience would be too high, in other words we accept that these deaths etc are a price worth paying for the convenience.
I wouldn't condone extreme excesses, but in many cases it is perfectly safe (within the bounds of acceptable risk) to go faster than the limit, because often the limit is clearly too low. The recent introduction of part-time speed limits (e.g. near schools at starting and finishing times) recognises that fact.
It *might* be fraud, but could also be incompetance. Either way - as you say they do it too often and they'll have their merchant facilities withdrawn.
Hmm... the wording seems to be slightly different now, they include "normally" before "10 working days". I'm sure all the ones I've read and agreed to said just "10 working days".
It works - I've used the DD guarantee a few times and in every case it just took a quick phone call to the bank.
We all lose free time dealing with stuff we don't want to deal with. The way credit cards work make this sort of occasional thing inevitable. We'd lose a lot more free time if credit card companies stopped CNP transactions to try to prevent this sort of thing, and we had to drive to the shops to do all our shopping we now do online.
Why, thank you!
Usually the cardholder will get to check his bill before the auto-payment comes out.
This a sily discussion. OK, forget "direct" and "indirect". Consider who loses the most as the "main" victim. The retailer (in all likelyhood) will lose the most due to the chargeback.
He also said they're sending him forms.
Irrelevant to whether or not they'll refund.
Sorry!
I've not been called that for a while :-)
OK, it was ambiguous but other stuff indicates the bank aren't refusing to refund (just making it harder than it should be)
Part of the problem is who takes the risk and who gets the reward. If it were the same person I would take less of an issue. However, with all the safety measures like seat belts, crash zones and air bags the driver takes virtually no risk to their health travelling at normal "town" speeds. The risk is mainly carried by others like peds and two wheelers.
If only people would take any notice of these advisory speed limits around schools -- or better still let their kids walk to school. It's like the dodgems outside the local schools here.
I agree this has gone off topic so I'll try to resist posting again to this thread. :-)
The issue for me is simple. Whether it's fraud or not (it is!) if the card holder hadn't originated a charge he/she should not only be able to get it reversed but should also have a mechanism for stopping future transactions. In this specific case my CC company states on the form I have to sign that no contact information is available for the trader so clearly if they cannot contact him (they can only try through the originating cc company) then nor can I.
There's issues here for all CC holders.
Luckilly I know my MP quite well and next time I'm charged I'll email him with an overview of the situation the cc company's comments and those of the FSA and ask him to help.
.. and if it is, then no matter whether the merchant *is* the fraudster or not .. :-)
This is an important aspect. Often cardholders are warned against giving a continuing authority, on the grounds that some traders are less than diligent in complying with notifications from the cardholder withdrawing their authority. But at least if they *have* given the authority they can normally be expected to have the means of getting in touch with the merchant in order to withdraw it.
In cases like yours, however, where the charge appears (like the brick wall) out of nowhere, be it through error or fraud, and where the cardholder *has never given* the authority, he can't withdraw it either, the best he can do is confirm that he never gave it, but can only notify the merchant of this fact if he has the means of contacting them.
You seem happy enough that this part is working well enough.
The whole infrastructure of the way card payments work appears inherently incapable of stopping authorities, since authorities are never registered with the cardholder's card company (unlike what is the case with direct debits). As another poster has observed, perhaps the system should be redesigned to make this possiible, but that will take time. Where there's a will, there's a way, but frankly I don't see the will yet, apart from with a few disgruntled cardholders. Perhaps in time this will snowball.
Arguably one thing that should be possible to implement relatively easily is this: At present it appears that you are expected to report (be it by phone/letter alone or by also filling in forms) any charges which you dispute. Usually these will be one-off charges. In the case of recurring charges, instead of being expected to dispute each recurrence individually, it ought to be possible to set up (with your own card company) a "recurring dispute", whereby any future charges from what appears to be the same merchant are automatically treated as if they had been disputed individually. These recurring disputes could automatically expire after a certain period during which no matching charges arose.
The only snag with that arrangement is what happens if the cardholder happens to want to use the same trader for genuine transactions too. But in that case there would be contact details available, so perhaps it's not really a problem.
There's no "they can only try" about it. They would surely do this as a matter of course, and there should be no possible circumstances in which such attempts could ever be unsuccessful. After all, if any transaction is in dispute, the "originating cc company" (by which you presumably mean the trader's merchant facility provider) *must* be able to contact the trader in order to have them produce proof of authority, or else the cardholder's cc co simply won't pay the provider.
Your recurring dispute idea seems good to me - but the whole current design is wrong because - taking it back to basics - I have absolutely no control over who debits my account, and the onus is on me to notice the amount before a direct debit payment date from my bank account. It has to be wrong.
I reiterate. CC companies are canny enough to have processes by which they prevent fraud by cancelling ALL charges (normally when I'm abroad and when putting it right involves lot's of time in queues at international phone rates) but refuse to prevent this type of fraud. The difference is that they are only interested in transactions that may cause a loss to their shareholders rather than their customers.
In my case there should be NO trader with credit card facilities who's address isn't registered with all companies. Business contact details aren't state secrets. No company with CC facilities should not be contactable by ALL cc companies.
Sometimes when I've had a problem with a transaction the CC company's CS staff get right on the phone and try and resolve it.
Anyway - thanks for your interest and intelligent (mean no patronising!) constructive comments.
Maybe through newsgroups similar to this. But I cannot remember ever having received any form of warning against giving (or taking precautions against) a continuing authority.
In my experience, it is generally felt that a continuing authority is a 'direct debit' and that the cardholder has similar control. It simply is not the case and I have yet to see any formal notification to this effect. People are slowly waking up to the difference, but not with any formal notifications that I am aware of.
[...]
Also, surely, a new and formal authorisation would be given for this new transaction, and will also be available.
A tremendous burden is being put on the cardholder. A channel of communication already exists through the process of the card transaction. I cannot believe that the card system is so archaic as to not be able to put a hold or stop on certain merchant numbers or identities - at least against specific card accounts. This business about letting the transaction go through and then having to reverse is nonsensical
It's a start. Do people come to the police with a nice package which the police only have to present to the court? If the police didn't start an investigation after that evidence they would be negligent.
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