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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

FYI, this isn't always bulletproof. I got a new card number from my bank a couple years ago and was still charged for a subscription I had set up prior to that. I know the company involved wasn't doing anything shady because I run the company.

I emailed Stripe (my payment processor) to find out how my subscription had migrated to the new card and they said that the feature had been added some time back. So even if you get a new card number, don't be surprised if your subscriptions follow you around.

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Had this happen with an LA fitness membership a few years back. After spending hours trying to jump through their hoops to cancel, i got fed up and requested a new Visa card from WF. Well, Visa in all its wisdom decided to give my new number to the vendor without my permission or knowledge, and because i happened to not check my statement for several months, was charged a few hundred dollars for a gym membership i wasnt using.

You could assemble the finest legal minds in the world and they'd never convince me that this shouldn't be 100% illegal.

Well, I would like to submit that we should not need a third party like Visa to do digital payments.

Because now we have math and computers. I am looking forward to Ethereum scaling out with 2.0.

Yep, this happend to me with a LinkedIn trial. I had my credit card changed but somehow LinkedIn was able to charge the new number, which defeated the entire point. Trying to contact LinkedIn revealed they don't have any humans to contact. They even have a fake "3 minutes until you can chat with someone" that always errors out. Chargeback to the rescue, but in the future I will just switch banks entirely.

When I'm worried about a charge, I use a virtual number generator that my bank offers. It allows me to put a time limit and dollar limit on any charges.

Switching banks frequently can mess with your credit score, so I'd try not to do that too much (especially if you're considering buying a home/car/etc.).

That's not quite accurate. You average account age for credit lines affects your credit score. Banks do not report depository accounts to the credit bureaus because they are not lines of credit, they are liabilities.

They do report to a separate group of risk-scoring companies, but this is mostly to gate fraudsters. Frequently switching checking/savings accounts will have no bearing on your ability to make large purchases on credit. If you happen to close credit cards frequently enough, regardless of whether they are issued by banks, your score could be impacted by reducing your average account age.

Sorry for not being clear — I was just referring to switching banks with whom you have credit cards. I don't know if GP was referring to "banks" in the context of credit or debit, but it seems most people in the US who are savvy about such things use credit cards because of the available rewards.

I think you may find that the swindler may be able to present the old CC number and still charge your account (which hasn't changed). Gym indenture companies are notorious for this.

I had this occur with Capital One and a scam fax-to-email company who refused to accept a trial cancellation. Even after lodging a dispute the scammers could still bill more charges, and I'd have to dispute each one until the bank made a ruling.

If you report your card lost/stolen, then there is no way anyone should ever be able to charge it again.

Did you report your old card lost or did they issue a new one because it expired/etc?

I seem to recall some credit card companies will reroute recurring charges for the old number to the new card.

If they do that for cards reported lost/stolen then that's a lawsuit waiting to happen. Thankfully it hasn't happened to me or anyone I know and this is the first I've heard of it.

My chase sapphire card number was stolen while on vacation out of the country before covid. Reported the fraudulent charges and got a new card and number.

Recurring subscriptions transferred for about 12 months then I had to update the card number.

I’m not a payments expert but presumably the subscription is tied to some authorization and not necessarily the number itself.

Not really. If you authorized a recurring charge, it isn't unauthorized, and you are liable. Most people want recurring charges to continue. Just because you lose your card doesn't mean you want to forget paying your phone bill or something. Merchant disputes are a thing, but they are not the same as an unauthorized charge.

As long as the recurring charge wasn't created while the card was lost/stolen, what's the problem?

There are reoccurring payment vendors that offer this as a feature. At one point I had to cancel bank account. Got a call for a recruiter for such a company. Not a chance.

My card was not lost, so I didn't report it. This was when the banks migrated to chip cards here in the US, and for whatever reason the new card had a different number.

I wouldn't be surprised if Stripe enabled this functionality because with the chip migration, they would have otherwise lost tons of revenue (as would their vendors).

That makes sense. This is why I specifically reported my card lost - so that it would be invalidated, instead of reissued, had I reported it damaged for example.

If the new card with a new number still goes to the same underlying account the VISA and MasterCard account update services will try to give the new number to merchants who were using the old card and number for recurring payments.

Yep. If you process payments online, you have a few options for subscribing to feeds of updated card numbers. At one of my previous jobs, we sent Vindicia cards that we have on file and they’d send us back cards that those banks have changed (I.e. not stolen or lost, merely changed)

Very interesting. Thanks for the tidbit.

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