Comment by dglass | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dglass | Hacker News Reader

I downloaded the do not pay app a week ago because I wanted to use their temporary card number feature to sign up for a free trial.

This feature automatically declines the charge when the trial finishes.

The app was free to download and I was immediately asked to enter my credit card on the onboarding flow. I was a bit annoyed but reluctantly entered it and figured I could cancel this before the trial.

Then I went to create one of these fake cards and got a notification that my actual credit card was charged $3. What? Turns out activating one of these fake cards automatically activated my free trial. I had no idea and was annoyed by this dark pattern, and even more annoyed I fell for it.

Then I tried to cancel and the only thing I could find is a chat bot that kept presenting the same options. Ironic that the article talks about bypassing a bot when they use one themselves to handle customer service.

After going through the chat of flow a few times I was able to cancel my subscription, but the chat it didn’t know how to handle my refund request. I ended up finally finding a form I could send an email to someone asking for a refund.

This app has dark patterns all over the place to trick you into paying for their products that save you money. I would not recommend it.

Since I closed my BoA account I've been using privacy.com for temporary credit card numbers. It "just works" - for me at least - and I haven't been charged a dime. They make their money from interchange fees.

OMG yes! Second this! Privacy.com is amazing! Been using it for months and have to say it's outstanding. I didn't realize they made their money on interchange fees. I thought they were just selling my data...and the app is so good was ok with that.

Just assuming (not unreasonably) that Privacy.com is selling your data. What a world we live in!

Yeah seriously. Literally everything collects/uses/sells your data these days. I figured what a great way to do that by having access to the actual purchases themselves. But who knows they may sell it in the future. Still going to use it. It's great!

BoA has also stopped doing ShopSafe now.

Citibank still offers the disposable card number thing. I am forgetting the official name they have for it.

Except last time I tried using that feature it required something crazy... I think like either a Java applet or a Flash something or a Windows download... so I didn't get far with that.

BoA just sunsetted their "ShopSafe" virtual CCN tool last month, which had a UI that required Flash. They didn't offer any explanation (or more than about 20 days' notice...), but I had to wonder if they just didn't want to port it to something modern...

It requires flash. It’s annoying but not enough to stop me from using it, as it has saved my ass countless times.

PayPal used to have this feature too. It was very useful.

Virtual Accounts. I have a desktop app that can generate new numbers on demand

What made you close your BoA account? (Just curious, I have a BoA account and I have no issues with it)

Schwab pays interest on checking balances, offers instant transfer between your brokerage and checking accounts, and waives all ATM fees. No reason to stick with BoA.

Standard reminder that privacy.com contains some anti-consumer TOS clauses, including a binding arbitration requirement.

I don't trust a company that explicitly goes out of its way to avoid accountability to do something as sensitive as manage credit cards for me.

It's at least fairly on the side of "only trying to avoid class actions" by having:

- "arbitrator provided by the American Arbitration Association"

- "[individuals] may elect to pursue their claims in their local small-claims court rather than through arbitration"

- arbitration care heard in your local county

- they pay for the arbitration fees

It's the same as online game store companies having binding arbitration, there are some cases where class actions would be detrimental to a company due to no fault of the company themselves.

Can you give an example for the online game store?

Blizzard (Activision): https://www.blizzard.com/en-us/legal/b2e0b082-fddb-4824-93fa...

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/#11

Epic Games: https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/tos (they run a storefront for third-party games alongside their first-party games)

Privacy.com can ban class actions without binding arbitration agreements, many companies already do this.

To go a step farther, waiving my right to a trial by jury and telling me I can go to a small claims court instead does not engender trust from me. That's not avoiding a class action, that's removing my ability to have a trial decided by my peers.

To go even one more step, I don't get the hate for class action lawsuits.

Class action lawsuits are one of the only really effective ways consumers have to punish companies that misstep. They're not perfect, and they often end up profiting lawyers more than consumers. But at the same time, suing companies is expensive, and companies bank on that fact. They commit small violations, counting on the fact that most consumers will realize that it's not economically feasible to file claims for a few hundred dollars.

Aggregating multiple claims into a single lawsuit (for all of its flaws), solves that problem. It's pretty much the only thing we have right now that helps solve that problem. We've seen that with Equifax, Verizon, Yahoo, etc... the class action lawsuits hurt those companies a lot more than any regulation or criminal probes or boycotts did. If high-profile mistakes like the ones these companies made anger you, there's potentially an argument there for making class-action lawsuits even more powerful, not less.

I get that our legal system in the US is messed up and expensive. I don't understand why the consequences of that have to fall specifically on consumers.

Do you have an example of a ToS that prohibits class actions, but otherwise does not contain binding arbitration? I've never seen something like that.

> They commit small violations, counting on the fact that most consumers will realize that it's not economically feasible to file claims for a few hundred dollars.

Maybe not feasible for your time in going through the hassle of filing a claim, but the point of small claims court is intended to be inexpensive. The fee should be under $100, but I understand that still might be prohibitive for low-income users.

Unreal Engine is the first one that springs to mind[0]. No class actions or jury trials, and jurisdiction is restricted to North Carolina, but also no arbitration requirement.

> You agree not to bring or participate in a class or representative action, private attorney general action, or collective arbitration related to the Licensed Technology or this Agreement. You also agree not to seek to combine any action or arbitration related to the Licensed Technology or this Agreement with any other action or arbitration without the consent of all parties to this Agreement and all other actions or arbitrations.

[0]: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula

BoA just got rid of their temporary credit card number feature, and since it was flash based it was extremely difficult to get to run anyway.

Needing flash is an annoyance, I wouldn’t call it “extremely difficult” (especially on HN) though.

Luckily Citi still offers the service. It also requires flash. However the feature is worth the inconvenience. I’ll run a small windows vm for the purpose if I had to.

Citi is weird: the Citi Costco card does not support this functionality. Not sure why.

It’s laughable that they could not find anyone in the past ten years to write a JS version.

For reference, they spend about $10B (billion with capital “B”) last year on tech projects: https://www.ciodive.com/news/bank-of-america-keeps-pace-with...

Shows how valuable they considered it to their business (i.e. zero).

ADP is still using flash for their web app. Their entire business revolves around it.

I wonder how much profit they make from fraudulent transactions that people don’t notice.

Question: when there’s a chargeback, does the customer|fraud victim’s bank lose out, or do they get a part of the chargeback fee that Visa/MasterCard levy into the merchant?

Chargeback fees are a profit centre for banks from what I have observed over many years.

The one who loses out is the product seller's business (i.e. the company who processed the charged-back transaction, via their their merchant account).

IME, regardless of who is at fault and who perpetrated the fraud, and regardless of merchant sending irrefutable proof to the bank, the merchant account owner always loses out.

First it pays back the bank for the missing funds.

Secondly the business loses the value of the goods they shipped

Thirdly, the bank slaps a significant fraud fee on the business as well e.g. $35 penalty applied for every chargeback, which is where the bank profits from chargebacks (by never reviewing merchant submitted evidence in chargeback claims, and simply making the merchant business pay for the fraud plus penalty fee on top of that, every single time)

Logged in just to agree with this. Privacy.com is underrated. Really cool product for a team that consist of like 10 people.

My bank has a feature to give my card a temporary CVV for 5 minutes which I can then use to authorize a payment. Without that, I need to manually verify the payment. So this dark pattern would not have worked on me, or they'd have committed fraud and had a 0,1% chance of succeeding. Nice try, though.

>Then I went to create one of these fake cards and got a notification that my actual credit card was charged $3. What? Turns out activating one of these fake cards automatically activated my free trial. I had no idea and was annoyed by this dark pattern, and even more annoyed I fell for it.

Were you actually charged, or was it an authorization?

Sounds like you would need a DoNoPay temporary card number, to sign up for DoNoPay.

That's also a terrible feature. A card declining a charge does not in any way absolve you of the debt incurred by using a service and can even be sent to collections, it's always better to cancel your trials / subscriptions properly.

In person and signed in triplicate.

That is rarely the case because most subscription services charge you up front.

You get the free trial, and then if your card charge doesn't go through, you don't receive further service. So you don't owe anything to anyone.

Did you try using DoNotPay to cancel DoNotPay for you? It sounds like they can write ominous legal letters threatening themselves.

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