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Comment by equinoxnemesis | Hacker News Reader

Considering they explicitly said they had some photos of yours ("You shared them. We protected them."), this seems like chargeback territory.

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Right?? I mean again, I could have gotten a refund in 48 hours, per the smallprint... But I noticed it about ~3 months too late, while writing about this.

But it's okay. Getting those $5 back would make Photobucket look slightly better in my mind, and I don't want that.

You can charge back months after. Best to ask for refund first (as in now, despite their legally irrelevant time limit) as the CC would expect you to do that first.

Huh, never did a charge back in my life (I'm not from the US, charge backs aren't a big thing here). I'll give it a shot, just for fun :).

I use a debit card and I wasn't even sure you can do charge backs with them. But yes, apparently!

It's not an automatic thing. The bank has to review your case and decide if photobucket committed fraud. But the odds are higher than you think.

I've done a couple on a debit card and it's gone pretty smoothly. I paid around £200 for an online service who they effectively ghosted me, so I submitted a chargeback to my bank, and they said they'd get in contact with the provider. I never heard back about it other than getting my money so I'm guessing they ghosted my bank too

Chargebacks are a pain and as a seller you almost always lose them, Stripe advices to refund based on signal's they get that a disput is requested.

As a company there is just no point in fighting them. I even had emails of clients they made a mistake and didnt realise it was our payment, but even that wasn;t enough.

As a consumer who has only tried honest chargebacks within their 'consumer rights' and has never won them, apparently you can fight them, and apparently companies deem them worth fighting.

> Stripe advices to refund based on signal's they get that a disput is requested.

I think that's if you're lucky enough to receive an early fraud warning, in which case, you have maybe ~12 hours to refund the money, but who knows, it's completely opaque to the merchant. As a merchant, I've even had previously refunded payments become disputes hours after issuing the refund.

Most of the time, the charge back is sprung on the merchant without warning. It can be worth fighting some. I've successfully countered several, it feels like I win maybe around 50% of those that I counter. I usually counter when the reasons are nonsensical, such as "Subscription renewed after cancelling", yet there was only one payment for the subscriptions creation.

To add insult to injury, Stripe charges an additional fee to counter the dispute (which you might get back if you win).

The whole process is infuriating. Charge backs are a tiny % of transactions, but cause a large amount of distress. I can't see why Stripe / banks don't offer an early dispute window, in which the merchant has say 7 days to refund without penalty. If they ignore or decide not to, it becomes a standard dispute.

Yeah if the refunds are automated Ive had it prevent a dispute, if I had pre-emptively refunded myself it didnt prevent the dispute. I think only mastercard and visa use the early fraud warning system, I have rules that auto refund on a warning.

Just FYI, my wife has to fight a lot of outright fraudulent Stripe disputes filed against the company she works for (things like a customer claiming they never received <digital goods> when she has an extensive paper trail of them receiving, using, and thanking the business for said goods) and she's mentioned how Stripe's signals aren't especially accurate--in the past month she's won several major disputes that Stripe predicted she had a low chance of winning. You can't win them all, but it's not totally futile!

I just refund autmoatically when there is a early fraud warning, not worth the fight. We had lot of issues from Brazil, who all just falsely claimed their creditcard was stolen.

If we get our dispute rate down, might consider trying fighting it again, they are always our lowest tiers of 19 or 29 usd. So not really worth it. Just frustrating it's such a terrible process on our end. Also twice users are open to withdraw it when I contacted them, yet their bank / card doesnt make that easy or possible, so they still count to our dispute rate.

Revenge after they fucked around with you is what makes doing this procedure worth it...

I'm honestly genuinely surprised that you care so much about $5 ($3 in 2006 money, when people last used photobucket) that you wrote this article over it, but cared so little to just ask for the refund 15 seconds after finding the account was unused.

Haha, that's fair! I wrote the post because I thought it was actually kinda funny. And when I found out the account was empty, I did stop the subscription. But I guess I didn't realize in time that I could go even further and request a refund. Not really a refund kind of person :P.

You can absolutely do a chargeback months later. This is fraud, and credit card companies are usually very willing to address that! Typically they'll put the onus on Photobucket to demonstrate that you received the service you paid for, and they won't be able to do that in your case.

100% issue a chargeback

Fully agree, that's just straight up fraud and it's covered by chargebacks.

And for an amount that low it would be automatically approved and cost photobucket a lot more. Only real way to punish companies for doing this is

The ToS is what binds. Good luck getting most card companies to allow you to do a chargeback these days.

I’ve been sold counterfeit or defective merchandise on eBay thrice in the last year. eBay’s guarantees are totally worthless even with evidence, and it was like pulling teeth to get my bank to do a chargeback. In one case they wouldn’t at all.

> The ToS is what binds.

Sure. Now provide a notarized statement showing THEY agreed to those exact terms.

Cause guess what... they cant prove shit.

ToS are rarely binding.

> The ToS is what binds.

I don’t know where you’re from but this isn’t the case in any normal country at all.

People always treat ToS as some god-given mandate that’s valid just because it’s written somewhere, but in reality there obviously are limits to what you can enforce.

You can’t just circumvent customer protection laws by denying them in the ToS.

Your bank sucks. The few times I've done a chargeback, it's been totally pain free. I do advise trying to get a refund informally first as that is expected by the CC networks.

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