Payment taken after Credit Card Cancelled

he shoul dread the T+C for his card.

I had a similar question many years ago. The T&C for my card did indeed say that, if I authorised a repeated payment, then the CC company could not stop it, even if the card were cancelled. I had to persuade the recipient to refrain from withdrawing money.

Having learned this, I have never since authorised such payments.

Robert

That's correct. The moral of this story is never set up a repeating payment on a credit card.

Rob Graham

"RobertL" wrote

"Persuade"? You make it sound like you couldn't cancel your authority with the merchant!

Surely all you need to do is write to the merchant, cancelling the authority -- and for good measure also send a copy of the revocation to the CC co. Job done!

Probably correctly. Gotta read the small print.

I had a similar problem years ago with fraudulent payments being taken from a card. I cancelled the card and took a new one. The fraud continued and payments passed to the new card.

In sorting it all out, which took months, the CC advisor told me that in such circumstances he would burn the card and report it stolen. The system for dealing with sloen cards and requested payments are apparently much more robust.

Of course it would mean making the fraudulent claim that the card had been stolen, but if the card has been burned...

FoFP

"M Holmes" wrote

Don't they deal with *lost* cards in the same way as

You could, ahem, "lose" the burned card afterwards, and then report that you lost it - without making any fraudulent claim...

If a card has been lost or stolen *after* a continuing authority had been given to a merchant, the theft or loss of the card would not affect the validity of the original authority, would it, even if the merchant (or their bent staff) subsequently made fraudulent payment requests perportedly under said original authority.

There'd be a credibility problem with one's evidence if one were to claim to have lost one's card prior to a date after which legitimate transactions were made with it, unless one were to attempt to disown all those transactions too. Might as well hang for a sheep as a lamb.

There seem to be two problems here:

It can be buried in the T&Cs (which you may not find if you order on-line) or there may be no mention of it at all. There does not seem to be a requirement that the cardholder actively gives permission. A form of inertia selling.

Inform the CC company and the insurer and if a charge appears, immediately ask for a chargeback and tell the insurer that you are doing so.

Flop

Similar thing happened to me with an _expired_ card.

Remember that when cancelling the "Account" and "Card" have different meanings.

Continuous Authority payments are a menace...

Oh bless....

At 08:29:38 on 12/12/2007, Ken delighted uk.finance by announcing:

He has been correctly advised. It is up to him to cancel any recurring payments.

"Yellow" wrote

What are you trying to say? Do you think the merchants & CC co's are above the law?

No, but the idea that they will instantly react to your letter(s) etc. is maybe a little naive.

wrote

Of course, but it doesn't matter even if they don't react instantly. Any subsequent transaction that might occur would *not* have been authorised, and so would then have to be reversed. See?

Yes, but "write to the merchant" isn't always easy to do is it, do you have the postal address of that insurance company you used via the internet? The entity with the continuous authority is rarely a "merchant" as you put it, with a nice simple single address.

wrote

Eh? Just look at their 'contact' page on their website...

wrote

Now you're clutching at straws.... Assuming they are a company, then they'll have a **Registered Office** address -- write to *that*, if you have no other.

Do you regularly transact business with an entity that you don't even know who/where they are?

It really isn't that simple. I had a few direct debits going out from an account every month for 14 years. Very recently I wanted to close that account and change the direct debit to a new account.

Despite me having the original paperwork (IIRC AA Accident Cash Plan) and the policy number it took me literally half a day of research to find out who was actually collecting the money (and responsible for the insurance). Another one, fortunately, the 0800 number still worked (although a completely different company now) so that one was fairly simple.

And at least these were going out every month so they were easy to spot and also to tell if and when the changes had actually been made.

When you've got several changes of address on your end and several changes of company on the other end and a tiny payment that only goes out once per year it's almost impossible to spot them.

I could understand the logic if my ex bank/cc charged me to write to me to tell me they had refused a payment because my account had been closed but I cannot see the logic of the bank/cc being able to continue to honour payments on my behalf once I've ended my relationship with them.

Tim.

Seems to depend on the card. I recently found my Sky TV was stopped because the card it was supposedly charged to had expired. Example 2: A couple of years earlier, my ISP pulled the plug because the card I was paying (the annual charge) on was replaced by the CC issuer as an anti-fraud measure.

ISTM there are no hard and fast rules, some CC companies will allow charging to continue and others (e.g. mine) don't.

They claim the honour payments to save customers 'embarrassment'.

Credit card companies have long held that they cannot cancel continuing authorities and that the only way forward is actually to get the merchant to stop and in many cases that can prove to be quite a challenge.

That all depends on what you imagine the law has to do with it.