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Be careful with your credit cards!

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Carol Haynes:
A great (new) feature of PayPal
-parkint (February 15, 2010, 10:29 AM)
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Is that just a US PayPal thing - haven't seen it PayPal (Europe) ??

SKesselman:
I love the idea of a credit card number that can be used only once.
As long as the numbers don't run out (like GUIDs).-parkint (February 15, 2010, 10:29 AM)
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That's the best idea ever.
Too bad, the banks should know by now that if it's a dispute with a magazine subscription, to assist he bank customer, to assume they're correct.
I'm in the US, & I've never had a magazine subscription that didn't rip me off.
They even had to make laws here that prohibited companies from 'auto-renewing because the customer didn't mail a card back requesting to cancel'.

I'll go to the bookstore and send you the monthly issues if turns our that nothing works out for you, if you like.
It would help me get gifts out by getting me to the post office and help me actually go buy books I'm interested in.
If I wanted a monthly issue of any magazine, I'd do that for myself.
I'm also suspicious of them selling your name & address to junk mail companies here in the US.
As much as people hate spam, junk mail is even worse.
At least with spam, most of it gets sorted from you regular mail and I've often found my important paper mail buried inside junk mail.
But that's another issue. Anyway, you have another option.  :)

Target:
interesting that everyone has taken issue with the banks stance in this instance, yet no one seems to query the fact that Carol responded to a publicised offer to renew at a given price

In this case there it would seem there is an obligation on the seller to substantiate their claim (the bill!!) and/or meet the advertised price, or to refund your purchase.

I don't know what the consumer laws are where you guys live but here it's called false advertising when you advertise at one price and charge another. 

International purchases will undoubtedly make things more difficult, but it may be worth inquiring to the relevant authorities about the magazines (not necessarily the banks) behaviour...

KynloStephen66515:
This happened to a good friend of mine, but instead of a Magazine Subscription it was to pay a brokerage firm to arrange a personal loan.  The fee quoted was £49.95 but they had £128.50 taken from their account, when asked why, they refused to answer and upon looking into it he found that there where several forums dedicated to people who had lost money to the same firm and received no results.  The banks will not do anything if you paid via credit card, but will reverse the payment if you use Direct Debit.

Carol Haynes:
The banks will not do anything if you paid via credit card, but will reverse the payment if you use Direct Debit.
-Stephen66515 (February 15, 2010, 04:55 PM)
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Actually in the UK the banks should respond to both claims as credit cards purchases are covered by the Consumer Credit Act.

The problem I encountered was the the bank insisted I get the magazine to confirm that they charged me the wrong amount. This seems an unlikely scenario to be acheivable and they wouldn't accept a copy of the order form I submitted as proof of price.

After arguing and insisting on speaking to a supervisor I got the bank to refund the difference on a temporary basis whilst they request further information from the magazine. I also contacted the magazine subscriptions department.

Strangley the subscription department never responded to my request but they did refund the overcharged amount to my credit card without further comment (about 6 weeks later). They obviously never responded to the bank requests either because the temporary refund the bank made has never been recinded so ironically I ended up with a double refund.

It still didn't really compensate for the bad feeling about future renewals via credit card (next time if I renew with an offer I will simply send a UK cheque for the amount specified) and it certainly doesn't compensate for the hassles, time and effort involved trying to convince a difficult credit card company and an uncommunicative subscription department.

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