My leverage has always been to leave expired cards on file when I find it difficult to cancel a subscription. It's crazy that they can get around it.
I don’t use it extensively because I’m a credit card points nerd and the only fee-free way to use it is to pull from checking with ACH. But I do use it when I’m suspicious that a business will make it hard for me to cancel.
As a bonus, you don’t need to use a real name and address — it’ll pass those checks as correct with any name or address you make up.
Note: I’m not a paid endorser or anything - I do use a free account personally.
This is an extremely popular feature with both consumers and merchants as most of the time card payment changes (card reissues, expiration etc) causes unwanted disruption. You happen to be in the minority who dislike it.
Your issuing banks is who you need to take this up with, the payment processor is acting on their behalf in this case.
The reality is I won't dislike it if I knew about it beforehand but I didnt.
They went on to list a lengthy process for what I should do just so it doesn't happen in the future. Not ideal.
What you can do instead is get an account that lets you create virtual credit cards that you can later cancel and destroy. This should prevent any future charges going through.
I was forced into this behavior by Google Pay/Wallet, and I found it extremely precarious.
With one of those virtual cards I purchased an item at a high cost, and unfortunately I had to go through a cycle of factory reset and reload everything to my phone. This necessarily wiped the "virtual cards" stored there.
Thereafter, I went back to the merchant for a refund, and we found that a credit to the "original card" was impossible because I "no longer possessed" the original card! I was rather infuriated that it would be this easy, but Google assured me there's no error and this is how it works. Google claims that they're protecting our privacy, but I basically did not ask to be enrolled in these virtual cards and, when we trust the card processors, this is a disadvantage and honestly, kind of insulting to our relationship.
This glitch cost me a long, long time as I needed to wait for a paper check to issue in the mail. Therefore, I would urge caution and being fully-informed of the corner cases, before anyone tries to use a virtual card for any serious transactions.
If your virtual card is not contingent on something like that, I'd say it's more robust. If the only way your virtual cards get destroyed is your say-so, then that's fine. But if they are, by design, ephemeral, I would say that is a different design goal, and while using an ephemeral card to pay for food or gas may be just fine, paying for a pair of glasses or other durable thing, and then expecting a refund much later on, that's perhaps risky and should be avoided where possible.
The whole point of a financial account is its stability, so that we're able to account for transactions over time. I understand that a credit/debit card is, by nature, more ephemeral than most accounts, even having an expiration date, but it infuriated me that Google sort of mandated these "virtual card numbers" and imposed them on every account I loaded into Google Wallet, rather than asking me if I needed protection or not. In an environment where I trust those vendors where I'm doing business, it only hurts both of us to virtualize those account numbers, and invalidate them at the drop of a hat!
Subscriptions linked to any of these cards fail to renew, so it seems this works differently from renewed cards you receive when the original is expired or about to expire.
Maybe this is just how banks treat cards in my country, but have you seen this work elsewhere?