I have heard of companies reacting to a chargeback in situations like this by banning your account.
Having a dispute, especially one which is so reasonable like this, being grounds for banning is insane to me. Companies as large as Airbnb cannot be just banning whoever they want.
This whole notion of, we don't agree with you, so we'll just ban you thing has got to stop.
Once you file a dispute through the credit card company, the dispute process is moved to the credit card company and now the company has a LOT less power on what might be happening. They also get severely impacted from having a high amount of charge back and hurts them the next time they want to negotiate their credit card rate.
So from a market perspective, it makes total sense for a company to ban you. You're causing them problems, refuse to follow procedure on how to handle the dispute, and hurt their bottom line in ways that could impact them at the rate of millions of dollar. They would rather not have you as a customer at all than deal with you again. Statistically, a customer that uses charge back is a lot likely to end up using it again, so they avoid themselves future trouble as well.
A chargeback is the burn-all-the-bridges, fuck-you-pay-me nuclear option, and you will be banned from any business that you use it against. You should not use it against any business you intend to patronize in the future.
Yes, sometimes you need to break relationships with certain companies as well. But that should be fine in general.
I struggle to think that a person should bear literally any consequences if they weren't in the wrong, which AIUI in this case he isn't.
You can fire that business as a vendor, they can fire you as a customer.
Blows my mind; reshipping the item would (given they sell it for a profit) cost HD less than me doing a 100% chargeback, and it would be better customer service. I guess they use the friction of doing a chargeback to be their fraud prevention.
The only time I made a charge back the CC company actively told me to not add any documentation.
It sounds to me like they refuse to follow the law.
From a contract point of view, merchants who ban consumers for charge backs are in violation of card association rules.
> refuse to follow procedure on how to handle the dispute
The merchant agreed to accept charge back rulings when they signed their merchant agreement. The chargeback process is a pain for consumers - they have to do a quite a bit of paperwork to file one.
> Statistically, a customer that uses charge back is a lot likely to end up using it again
A business that forces consumers into charge backs and loses deserves the charge back. Consumers don't automatically win. Source: owned an MSP for about a decade.
BTW, Visa, MC, AMEX and others can fine and ban merchants who fail to comply with card association rules (including chargebacks). Likewise, card associations can also cancel cards on consumers who file abusive charge backs.
Hotel owners, however, can and do ban individuals for chargebacks.
If you disagree, you need to change the definition of "utility" then; a utility such as an electricity company can't just cut you off for no reason.
And to what end? To be a dick? To piss off the false-positive customers your system inevitably flags incorrectly? There are reasons it's hard to have an accurate, effective no-fly list and that list costs a lot to maintain.
There's also the part where the merchant agreed to abide by chargeback rulings and not ban the cardholder.
A ban is very easy to do, what you're describing is a ban unable to be circumvented. Most customers will give up with a small amount of effort - ban their email address and phone number and they'll give up.
If you're a company that collects and collates govenment IDs and their associated addresses, names, etc (which AirBNB are), then you can build something much closer to an uncircumventable ban.
The purpose for such a list is generally to remove low value, high cost customers who rate too high on your risk meter.
Reporting this back to your bank, better yet, with your state financial regulator and maybe a federal copied, usually gets this swiftly reversed.
In this case, the chargeback was just the last resort solution for the customer because they were stonewalled by customer "service", but they otherwise didn't want to chargeback and would rather just be able to cancel their booking properly and keep using the service.
Consumer protection law has limited anti-retaliation protection. Banks also want to know if unsavoury behaviour is being suppressed.
Nobody must do business with anyone else. But banning after someone exercises a consumer right in respect of potential fraud you facilitated (and profited off) is not something one wants scrutinised.
Maybe I still have too much of that 90's internet mentality, dunno.
Everything is trivial when you aren't the one who actually has to implement it.
If you ban a billing address: what if someone else moves to that address?
If I get banned as Joe Smith and address X, what if I register my new account as Joseph Smith?
There are any number of ways to represent the exact same address (apt vs. unit vs. suite vs. '#', 5 digit zip vs. 9- digit zip, st. vs. street), and there are cases where the same address serves multiple people (private/virtual mail boxes). A billing address is a loose identifier at best.
I have a couple slightly different addresses. One of which is probably 30+ years old but is still used by the two local telcos and a few local businesses.
We used to run 'zip correct' jobs for large merchants at the service bureau I worked at just out of high school. Just 'correcting' thousands/millions of addresses at a time.
Again, it just isn’t that easy.
PMB 123 456 Main st.
May or may not be the exact same mailbox as:
Suite 123 456 Main st.
My official address is on “XXXX Boxwood Cres”. Not Boxwood Cr., not Boxwood Crescent, not “Boxwood Cres.”
Of course all of those will work for mail, but if I want to transfer the deed, or do anything of legal relevance, the government needs the address to be exactly like the first one.
For every way you can think of trying to standardize it, there is an exception.
Half addresses, letters in addresses, addresses with no number, etc. All this and we haven’t even left the US yet, other countries have their own variety of whacky shit.
Verizon, Comcast, and some local businesses like my propane delivery still use N. Main and I would periodically get scolded when I first moved in pre-GPS because I would give businesses coming to my house my official USPS address which was different from what was still on many maps.
- Only one person can live at an address
- Two people with the same name can't live at the same address (Jr/Sr)
VPN to the rescue!
You'll need a clean, residential IP. Thankfully if you're on a dynamic IP all you need to do is restart your router, or just use your phone as pretty much every carrier only uses dynamic IPs for mobile devices.
I think the card was replaced after a Home Depot breach, but not sure. Was definitely in or prior to 2015.
But yes, these companies will lie and break the law when it suits them, no reason to feel bad about giving them a taste of their own medicine.