Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

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I disagree strongly with this. Merchants can (and often do) change the terms of monthly payments, ignore legitimate requests for account cancellations, or even incur monthly charges for things that the cardholder was led to believe was a one-time charge.

Cancelling the card has been the cardholder's tactical weapon against that nonsense. It's still a hassle for the cardholder, so I'm left wondering how much of an actual problem it is that people are canceling entire credit card accounts just to wiggle out of a contract.

And, in the case that people do that, the merchants have recourse through either collections or court. If enough such charges go to collections, the cardholder loses the ability to open new accounts.

If people are no longer able to cancel their credit cards as an item of last resort, then the merchants are left with all the leverage. Arrington's natural response to that -- as I suspect will be most other peoples' -- will be to stop using their credit card.

I don't think we want that to happen.

Merchants can (and often do) change the terms of monthly payments, ignore legitimate requests for account cancellations, or even incur monthly charges for things that the cardholder was led to believe was a one-time charge.

That's what the dispute process is for. Sign an affidavit saying the merchant violated their contract with you, and the charge goes away.

I have absolutely no reason to trust credit companies as the unbiased vanguard of consumer protection. Signing an affidavit merely begins a process where the charge might go away, and I would expect that the process will get slower while ending up in the customer's favor less often.

Except that consumers almost always win such disputes and they are really not very burdensome. So bitching about this process is really just bitching.

You've obviously never accepted credit cards as a merchant. The process is heavily in the customer's favor.

It is incredibly hard to win as a merchant in any kind of dispute. The burden of proof is on the merchant not the customer.

The merchant pays a fee regardless of the outcome, and if you end up with more than 1% chargebacks your account is cancelled. The net effect is that any merchant who is doing this on a regular basis won't be accepting credit cards for long.

Additionally, the system is so far in the customer's favor that it's causing a fairly large fraud problem for merchants. It's bad enough that my small business won't accept credit cards for very large purchases unless the customer has a history with us.

That's only an issue if you care if your account is canceled. Plenty of 'merchants' are simply there to funnel stolen credit card information and turn it into cash.

Agree. Been a merchant in a few businesses dating back pre-net.

You need documented signed proof, in general and without that the charge is not only backed out but you get hit with a $25 or so charge back fee. And yes to many chargebacks say goodbye to the account.

We spot fraudulent charges and proactively issue a void before the consumer finds out, lest we get hit with the charge back fee as well.

> You've obviously never accepted credit cards as a merchant. The process is heavily in the customer's favor.

A company I used to work for had, some years back, made its way onto MATCH (merchant blacklist) for one of the four major credit card companies. Why? It accepted a legitimate (!) payment from a customer who was at the time under 'investigation' by the credit card company for fraud. (Obviously, this was not known to my company at the time that they accepted the payment).

Apparently, we even showed the credit card company that we had provided the appropriate services in exchange for the payment, so there could be no allegation of us helping them 'embezzle' the money. No luck - we were placed on the blacklist for seven years (give or take).

The punchline: that same credit card company had no problems issuing us a credit card in the company's name - not just once, but three times since we were placed on the blacklist.

Based on my admittedly limited sample size of 1, that never actually works.

First of all, the charge does not simply go away because you sign an affidavit... there is a little bit more process than that -- you may need to invest a couple of hours into it. At the end of that the charge will, in almost all cases, be reversed.

But that only makes ONE charge go away. The merchant can then submit another. And another. Every. Single. Month. Think of it as a DOS attack. Closing the card SHOULD (but apparently doesn't?) prevent that.

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