I'm getting charged by rhapsody.com every quarter for no apparent reason. I used their service like may be 8 years ago. They have a phone number in their merchant line which is invalid. When I filed request to void the charge to American Express, initially they declined! Then I filed appeal with angry comments and they finally voided it. It took over two months for the process. I just saw new Rhapsody charge again. The credit card companies literally have no control over who can charge us.
If anyone at stripe is reading this, I think this is golden opportunity for consumer focused payment service. One should be at least able to block a merchant from charging my card. I can do that for spammer email but can't do that for spam charge on my card - in 2020!
Companies that make it difficult to unsubscribe should be penalised, I live in Europe and got the New York Times on a 12 month trial for €4 a month. Trial just ended and it's now €8 a month, only way to cance is to ring them, have tried once so far and was on hold for 20 mins before I hung up. There should be a law that if you can sign up online you can cancel online.
In France, Le Monde (most famous daily newspaper) requires you to send a paper mail (and not a regular mail, but a registered mail, which costs around 5-10€) to cancel your subscription. Even if you subscribed on the website, for a 100% online subscription.
I had a case with another company. They required a letter to cancel, so I sent an email. Got automated reply that they have received it and later an email that they required a letter. I sent back an email pointing to the law. After some weeks I got a claim from a debt collection agency. I sent the email history to the agency, it did take less than 1 hour before they answered that all claims where dropped since it wasn't a legal claim
> "In France, Le Monde (most famous daily newspaper) requires you to send a paper mail (and not a regular mail, but a registered mail, which costs around 5-10€) to cancel your subscription."
What is it with French companies? BlueCity, the UK arm of the French "Autolib" car sharing service, had this same ridiculous "send us a letter in the post to cancel" policy. Since they charged to a credit card rather than use direct debit like most UK companies would, you couldn't easily cancel the payments through your bank either.
Since I'm quite lazy I never got around to sending them the letter and the £5/month continued (and I did use the service, occasionally). Finally a few months ago they went out of business and the charges stopped.
yeah, when i saw that i got so mad that I created a virtual credit card, changed the billing method, and then deleted the card. You can not imagine the big smile on my face when i received the email "we cannot charge you"....
I tried that with rebel.ca (domain reg) a few years ago. They setup this dark pattern where domains wouldn't expire they get renewed two months before they were due.
In my case they froze the account preventing me from moving domains. I called support and they unfroze it. The next night the system it froze again. It became a race, manually moving 200 domains over in 12 hours. They don't allow bulk moves and you can't quickly open each domain for editing in a separate tab.
Fyi: Why move. There prices went up to some crazy amount $30 for a .org 60% more for[a .ca it ended up costing me hundreds extra one month. Glad I caught it...
Some credit card companies have card generators (Capital one has Eno, Amex has one I believe, Citi calls it Virtual Card Generator etc) but you can also use privacy.com, revolut and I think there's an app called token or something?
I think I pay for everything online with my privacy cards now. It's just easier to keep track of stuff when you get alerts after a company charges a closed card, or tries to charge you more than your card limit that you set up.
I’ve been using this not only for subscriptions, but also when I’m making an online purchase at a store that I think may not have the best security in place.
You can but they won't stop charging your card. They have the credit card number, so the only way would be to change the payment method to an invalid card.
Another comment actually says that he managed to create a virtual credit card, change the payment method, and delete the card. Quite clever. It's a shame that methods like this have to be used instead of just the click of a button.
Can't you start issuing chargebacks? Chase is not the most Lawful Good of banks but I have to admit that on the times I needed someone to GTFO my credit card, they had my back.
In the EU you can ask your bank or credit card provider to block subscription payments from specific merchants. This is something EU requires them to support.
Do people really have the same credit card number for that long? I feel like every year I end up with a new card for one reason or another and suddenly I have to track down all the places that can no longer process my payments.
I learned that you can request a replacement card with the same number, which I was initially very excited about. But when you get the new card it has a different expiration date, so it still needs to be updated most places.
There's a process for some card providers by which merchants can automatically update their card details for recurring purchases. Visa calls it Account Updater and at least Braintree has had support for it for over a decade.
Well that would be super convenient for me. At this point I'm just slowly transitioning to always using my checking account number directly for payment since that is stable.
The risk with that is you have no ability to contest a charge. With a credit card, you can contest and the card issuer will do a chargeback to return the funds.
Netflix US charged our new Citibank credit card at least 3 times based on a fraudulent purchase (somehow someone had made a Netflix account with our credit card number).
On top of that it wasn't even activated because we'd stopped using Citibank to simplify our accounting and just hadn't cancelled entirely yet. Backdoors exist apparently for recurring charges that roll over onto new cards for "customer convenience" because you wouldn't want to miss your bills and lose access to Netflix.
In my (recent) experience, periodic charges are automatically applied to a new card, even if it has a new number. For your convenience, if you forgot to update your payment info...
Amex is particularly good at these things. Not in the last place because they have actual humans answering the phone and fixing things. On the other hand, their fees are much higher than the others so you're paying for it as well.
It may not be followed in every country, but at least in Denmark the "forbrugerombudsmanden" slams down on things like that, I think that they recently sent out a message that online services should be able to be unsubscribed online as well.
Let them come after you. Just cancel the service in the same way you signed up (send an e-mail if you've signed up online), and then stop paying them (or block the direct debits, or reverse the credit card charges). I haven't had any company that actually bothered to send it to collections (or even sue me). Only once I got a mail that I hadn't payed, and when I replied with the cancellation e-mail attached, they said "oh, ok" and never bothered me again.
As for media companies with cheap offers and shady cancelation tactics, I discovered the following:
I send them a cancelation by eMail citing a german court ruling that states (roughly) "If you subscribe electronically, you must be able to unsubscribe electronically". I additionally cc one or two journalists writing about consumer issues (sometimes on cancelation oh joy) on the topics from that exact media.
Works every time.
And if you want to rub salt in the wound, request a detailed gdpr information about you and your account. gdpr even applies if it is not a european country based media company.
Which basically means that if the foreign company tries to collect, sends to an EU collection agency, .... they come in jurisdiction. So they can only bark but not bite.
That's like saying American law doesn't apply to Russian citizens in Russia when it clearly does.
The court may struggle to apply it's judgements, especially if there isn't an applicable extradition situation, but all it takes is one representitive of the company to go to Europe and they are open to things like arrest for not following the judgement of the court
Only if you have no people or capital in the EU. If you were a small business that sounds correct, but every medium to large business I have worked at has had at least something important going on in europe (clients, suppliers, offices, etc).
Almost certainly false in practice. It would be shady bordering on illegal to detain a mere employee of a GDPR violator. Unless you are a famous employee of a big company that was egregiously flouting the GDPR but also had no other ties to the EU, then maybe you’d rethink your holiday plans.
If you want to say: This does not apply to a non EU citizen in an non EU country, you are correct.
But if you do business in the EU - i.e. have advertising from EU companies inside your media website or you are already dealing with the EU AND you have readers/users in the EU that pay for your service, it makes you instantly responsible for being GDPR compliant if you like it or not.
This is why some media companies block EU ip-address ranges not to fall into that "trap".
Only if there’s a clear link to the EU. Not refusing to sell to EU residents isn’t sufficient to show targeting—but offering Euro pricing or Swedish language options might be.
And at the end of the day, all law fits into the cross-section of jurisdiction and motivation. If you’re a Singaporean company offering global services, there’s no jurisdiction and (unless your activities are especially egregious) no prospect of motivation.
I know only a law in germany where you have to be able to cancel your phone contracts with the same medium you accepted them... But I don't know anything about more broad laws.
There is a similar sounding provision in GDPR, which requires that it is as straightforward to withdraw consent as it is to grant it (i.e. it must be possible through the same procedure, so preventing postal letters being sent to a dedicated address). Not sure if there's a similar provision for cancelling paid services, but potentially if the service relies on consent for data processing, you could use GDPR grounds to force a cancellation through the same means you signed up.
It's worth a try, but GDPR specifically excludes contractual information. So if you have pending bills, whatever info they need to charge you is not protected by GDPR. And even after you pay, they still need your name for accounting purposes (you received $100 last year? from whom exactly? will the law ask, and you have to be able to answer)
We need a law that requires it to be no more difficult to unsubscribe from anything then it is to subscribe to that thing. If you can subscribe with one click on the website then you must be able to unsubscribe with one click on the website. The law should make it individually actionable in small claims court for each subscriber that is inconvenienced to recover damages and not allow arbitration clauses to override that right.
This reminds me of my gym membership. They said I had to come in person to cancel it instead of by phone. So I cancelled my credit card naively thinking that my gym membership would be cancelled. After a few months I get letters and calls from a collection agency demanding the monthly payments and an additional late fee of $100
I really like reading nytimes and have a digitial subscription since a year back (EU citizen) but wanted to cancel it to get away from the news cycles for a while, but now found out that there is no option to cancel other than calling a phone number.
The signup page mentions canceling subscriptions several times, which isn't false, but it isn't what you expect from a subscription-based page in 2020. This is in my opinion a dark pattern today. It probably would have been ok...20 years ago!
One reason I try to never give my card to lots of websites. If they have paypal, good. Or playstore subscription, sure. A one time/non recurring payment via a platform/provider/bank, ok.
But never the card. Reading such user horror stories, or Terms & Conditions, makes me turn around and never come back.
Paypal allows canceling subscription but they have hid this link deep inside. I don't know how well that even works. Also, Paypal payment protection is basically a joke. If you get dupped by someone and try to get refund through their payment protection, you get nothing no matter how right you are. That's my first hand experience.
After my kid was banned on Fortnite, I filed a bunch of paypal chargebacks on Epic Games for all the packs and extensions we bought, going back like 8 months. Got all of them back.
Not to say that Paypal won't screw you over, just that it doesn't do so all the time.
Always makes sense of having a separate card for online stuff (shop, subscriptions, etc). But having to go to the bank and renew, create a new one, the waiting lines.
Some banks have web/mobile banking where you can restrict actions/limits/transactions, so it's a good option too.
Others have virtual cards for this purpose, but these are not offered in a lot of countries (revolut, privacy, yandex money, etc).
I never use PayPal as they still keep over thousand pound due some bullshit reason and don't want to release it. And it's pain to get to speak to a human. Currently, it's at the Financial Ombudsman
When I was in Europe for a holiday I subscribed to Eurosport to watch the tennis. Unfortunately, when I returned to my country, due to geofencing, I could not access the relevant Eurosport site to cease the subscription... Fortunately it was via Paypal and I could achieve the same outcome by revoking the authority...
Yeah, agreed. I canceled my NYT subscription a while back in protest over some of their editorial misbehavior. It took me weeks to get in canceled and all my money back. Especially frustrating is that they dragged out the process and then charged me for the time that I was trying to unsubscribe. Eventually I just made American Express take the extra $2 back.
I want to resubscribe eventually, as they put out a lot of good journalism. But there is no way in hell I'm doing it until it's as easy to quit as to join.
One sort of workaround is to subscribe through Apple. Then cancelling is as simple as toggling your subscription to Off. As an added bonus, when you subscribe this way, you do not even have to give the NYT any of your contact info - Apple has it set-up so you can use randomized tokens to login. One of the many things I appreciate that Apple does.
Same story with myself and NYT almost a decade ago. Keep an eye on your statements: they kept charging me and I kept needing to cancel for 3ish more months until it all finally stopped.
California has such a law, and at least on one website I changed my address from WA to California do it would show me the option to cancel directly on the website.
I believe Visa has started working on requiring platforms "Provide customers with a digital or SMS cancellation method", though due to Covid it's been pushed back a year [1].
This sounds like a good and sensible step. It is a shame it has been pushed back due to Covid, as this is really not a particularly onerous requirement. Given how many companies are resorting to limited "service levels" as they have emptied their call centres and contact centres, it seems this should be expedited rather than delayed.
Yeah, Adobe did this to me, then I reminded them that they broke Dutch law by increasing my contract term by 1 year after a year (this can only be done automatically for a month), after talking to bosses of bosses of bosses they finally ended my subscription.
As someone fromnEurope, I was in the same boat as you with a NY Times trial subscription. I didn't even tried to call them, since they not only require you to call them to cancel your subscription, but do it during US east coast office hours too.
In the end I just canceled the recurring payment contract at PayPal. A few weeks later I received a 'Sorry to see you go' email from them and that was it.
I'm not sure if credit cards also allow you to cancel recurring payment contracts, but sepa directdebit does (which is the payment method used if you used for example the Dutch iDeal payment method as initial payment.
It would be interesting to see a credit card company differentiate on this. Have an internal team which works through the various companies (presumably in order of popularity) and does the leg work of figuring out how to subscribe. So the customer would be presented with: Go to these locations and upload this information. Or even: Enter your username and password and this information and our scripts will unsubscribe you.
That might be dangerous. At least in Germany there's a difference between the service agreement and the payment. As long as you don't cancel the service, if you are not paying you just amass more and more money that you owe them.
“Legally speaking, we can’t allow you to cancel via the app. You can only cancel via a web browser but unfortunately that system is down. Please mail a letter to PO Box 937192 or send a fax. We will process your cancellation with 4-6 weeks once we have the legally required paper request. Thank you for being a valued customer.”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
We have that law in California. A trick for non-californians is to change your address to a California one and sometimes the site will let you cancel. Depends if they use your shipping or billing address though.
Exactly same issue a few years ago with The Times in the UK, with the ringing and very odd restricted availability hours, except they also said it was “technically impossible” to cancel without charging three more “monthly” charges.
I cancelled my card and somehow they managed to rescind access.
Same with me. And somehow, their online costumer service was always unavailable... What a coincidence! Luckily, in my country there is a service that allows us to create temporary credit cards and I had subscribed with one. It was just a matter of canceling that card.
Also in Europe, I tried unsubscribing by SMS, and it seems to be pretty frustrating, I confirmed a few times I wanted to cancel and instead all I got was more questions and offers.
In the end I took the offer of 25 cents a week for a year, waiting to see how they'll charge my PayPal.
Email them and say you want to cancel and state that you're deaf so you can't do it over the phone. They have to oblige because of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Tell your credit card company that it’s an unauthorized charge and request a new credit card. Some will even ship it expedited for free if you request it.
Maybe it's different based on how you signed up, or what kind of subscription you have, but for me at least there's a "cancel subscription" link when I go to manage my subscription online on this page: https://myaccount.nytimes.com/seg/subscription
I remember it didn't exist when I signed up a few years back, and they made a big deal about announcing that I could now cancel/change my subscription online when it launched.
It's so frustrating because my credit card declines the most random things. But when a service charges me twice in one week after I've been subscribed and charged the same amount once a month for years, the charge goes through and I have to go through hoops to get that money back.
And credit cards do this other obnoxious thing where they update merchants when you get a new credit card. It would be great if they didn't do that because then you'd remember that you are paying for certain services you never use because you'd get a payment declined email. But nah credit card companies just let those scumbag merchants continue their shadow charges under the guise of it being more convenient. Certain services like energy bills, phone bills. Sure, update the merchant with the new credit card. But a gym!? Gtfo with that trash.
I'd rather they update all of my merchants instead of assume that I want to cancel this or that. Citi has a nice feature that shows you all of your recurring charges. Maybe try to use a feature like that?
I also have it set up to send a text message to my phone any time my card is used.
This was a revelation sometimes back and it was Amex (relatively new in India) but I am sure it would be same for any credit card issuer. I had a VPS in Europe that I had emailed the support to cancel about a year ago and they had replied telling me I could do it myself (listed the steps) or they'd need another confirmation from me to go ahead and cancel. I forgot about it.
Got charged some 40 Euro a year later. I was shocked. My first thought was a compromised card. But immediately afterwards I received invoice from VPS provider. I called the bank and asked them how did that happen. They said it's possible. Lucky for me the provider immediately reversed the charge.
The thing is I had cancelled that Amex card almost a year before that charge had happened. It was still charged! I was baffled. Coming from a country where literally every credit card payment has to be authorised via an OTP or password (since as long as I can remember) it was a whole new world for me.
Well, that cancelled card was charged again (almost a year after I had the last experience) when I shopped at AliExpress and forgot to switch to a new card while making the payment. This time I just paid the bill and went around Internet removing that cancelled card.
I started using privacy.com for this reason. You can spin up a separate card number for each transaction type with its own limit (e.g. $100/month or $200). You can also just turn them off at will.
There are other services, though not as advanced. In Europe you could use Revolut to create virtual disposable cards. They are more useful for one-time payments however.
privacy.com looks great. I think the only disadvantage is that you lose all the 2-5% cashback, travel benefits and so on. I wish they could produce card while keeping these benefits but still its good card to have for shady websites.
I use privacy.com and my regular card. I use my privacy.com cards for sites where I think security is bad (like our local water company) and for recurring subscriptions on sites that I don't think will be easy to cancel.
It's a good compromise between protection and credit rewards.
Credit card companies and banks receive 1-3% of commission on all of the transactions made throught he card. Banks normally pass parts of these along to the consumer in the form of cashback or other benefits. Privacy.com just uses these commisions as funding for their service. (I've read it somewhere on their site)
This is why I use Paypal for recurring services when possible. One list of all the items, and you can cancel the payment there easily.
Dodgy companies like the New York Times even do offline transactions to successfully charge canceled cards. I was able to cancel it by changing payment to Paypal.
It's funny that you mention NYT and Paypal. I signed up to support, but upon finding out that they still show ads to subscribed users, I wanted to cancel. Turns out you have to call them simply to cancel your subscription, which is the worst dark pattern of all.
I just swapped my subscription to Paypal, then blocked it in paypal. They then spent the next month sending me 8 emails asking me to fix my payment, which I all sent to the spam folder. I'm not a big fan of paypal, but definitely having control over your recurring payments is the best feature.
It is Amex so I am surprised. They do not give a crap about the merchant only members (from what I have seen) and this is a good thing. Call again, tell them you do not authorize any charges from rhapsody.com ever again and be done with it. They should just sort it. I have never had a bad experience with them. Years ago My wife and I where at LAX getting on a flight to London then connecting to Dublin. At the airport my wife released she forgot her card. Called. Agent said, I see you have a charge at this hotel in Dublin, is that where you are staying？ Arrived in Dublin at the hotel around 12 hours later and there was an envelope with my wife’s new card.
I used their online form to void charge which requires me to write justifications. I wrote a paragraph of it explaining that I didn’t authorized that charge and that I can’t even contact Rhapsody, because of bad phone number they have put in Amex system. They have checkbox that requires me to say if I ever authorized merchant in the past and if it was a subscription. I had to say yes to that checkbox because I did had their subscription like 8 years ago. They then flatly and simply refused to void those charges without giving me any reason whatsoever or letting me know how do I even avoid the future charges. I then filed appeal where I threatened to cancel the card and after yet another month of “review” they finally voided it. My card is at “Gold” level, I pay close to $200 in membership fees and I easily qualify for their Platinum level according to their frequent spam. It’s most certainly not member oriented.
Mastercard seems to be leading the way in fighting this type of behaviour. As of April 2019 they require notification at the end of free trials sending the customer a receipt and cancellation instructions. And Mastercard are looking into preventing recurring charges that you try to cancel.
I understand why card companies struggle to implement this while retaining good relations with merchants, but this does seem an opportunity for Stripe or similar.
You can "log into" a London TFL "account" that is effectively just your credit/debit card. That means that, at least in theory, Stripe could let you log in to a "shadow" account as a card holder.
I think the problem is that Stripe (and others) don't want to upset merchants by making it possible for people to cancel "fixed term" subscriptions, where the merchant claims the customer has entered a contract to pay for X months.
Agreed entirely though - I would really like to see privacy.com style "limited authentication value/merchant card numbers" take off more and become a "default". This has added privacy benefits too, as it means for anyone other than the CC issuer, it will become very difficult to link digital transactions.
“ Apple Card has awesome features but the most important of them all, at leasts from a security standpoint, is probably the ability to generate virtual card numbers on demand, which will come in handy for those times when you won’t necessarily trust the recipient.”
BoA discontinued that service (ShopSafe) last year, and it had basically been abandoned for a few years before that since it required Flash and was never a part of their mobile app.
There's a Brazilian credit card company that gives you a virtual credit card. You can generate as many new credit cards as you want, even multiple times a day, to use for online banking exclusively.
I think privacy.com does a similar service, but I loved to have this feature for no extra cost. I assume it also benefits the CC company a bunch with happy customers and less labor costs since people will be calling less for this kind of situation.
I really like it that my bank allows me to refuse payment, or just set the payment limit per company (I would set this to 0). Or I could just delete my virtual MasterCard altogether.
I'm always curious if deceptive actions like these are approved by an individual, a committee, or are perhaps a byproduct of unrelated tasks driven by lazy oversight shrouded by process.
> The credit card companies literally have no control over who can charge us.
That's not quite true. The card network can refuse a merchant for any reason, constantly making bogus charges would probably be a good reason for the network to refuse them and that's likely to be the result. Of course you don't see if your bogus charge was reflective of 0.01% of the charges from this merchant or 99.9%
However as I've explained on HN a few times there's an important distinction between two separate payment card processes: Authorization and Settlement.
Authorization is the one with PINs and online referral and even getting a call from your bank about "possible fraud". Authorization protects the bank from fraud by customers (you're a necessary evil to them) and merchants by automatically collecting evidence that both authorized this to happen. Once upon a time that meant taking an "impression" and a few merchants still do that, today it may mean redirecting customers to a half-arsed HTTPS site or an EMV PIN terminal.
Settlement moves money. The merchant tells the network that they want $85.26 from card #1234567890 and usually that will just result in them receiving $85.26
These two systems aren't tied together. If there are two authorizations against your card this week for $20.00 and $35.26 but also three settlements for $19.86, $209.42 and $20.00 respectively, it's likely no alarm bells go off, this is fine, you pay $249.28
One reason it is this way is that while Settlement is essential to the idea in the first place (if the merchants don't get money what's the point?), Authorization is dozens of extra things tacked on over time and so each has to be optional or the system would fail.
This means important safeguards in Authorization don't actually safeguard you, only your issuer (in your case Amex)
For example: Modern Authorization schemes are replay resistant. When you pay with an EMV card the merchant gets a one-time "cryptogram" that isn't reusable. Buying a $5 product, walking out of the store, then realising you needed two, so you go back and buy another $5 product results in two entirely different cryptograms for the two Authorizations. The store can't present a third Authorization because it would need a new cryptogram.
BUT Settlement isn't replay resistant. When (not if, this really happens) an IT mistake results in running all the Settlement for a merchant twice, customers just all get charged twice, again no flags are raised automatically, it will take until either somebody confesses their error or more likely angry customers start calling their issuers to complain.
For individuals the only advice is: Check your statements, demand that line items you can't explain be reversed, and try to pick an issuer who is on your side.
You obviously understand payment systems more deeply but to me this is like someone explaining why I need to deal with mainframes with tap drives in 2020. Many of us don't even need credit cards, we just need a way to transfer existing money from our bank account on agreed upon transactions safely. There are far more modern ways to electronically "agree" on a transaction then to use exact same 19 digit number for every single transaction for every single merchant everywhere. We need certainty for protection against frauds. Transactions should literally be instant but undoable change in bits in electronic databases without having these arcane settlements and authorization non-sense. Even if there are edge cases like offline merchant in Africa, credit card companies need to be able support all of below and there are exactly zero technical reasons why they cannot:
1. Consumer should always be able to blacklist a merchant or provide a whitelist
2. Consumer should always be able to set limit how much a given merchant can ever charge him/her and during what time windows
3. Consumer should always be able to set total limit of charges he/she wants to have at any time
4. Consumer should always be able to get phone number, mailing address and correct full legal name of any merchant who puts charge
5. Consumer should always be able to generate new electronic card number for online usage and dispose off any previous one at will
"Check your statements" is an useless advice. My experience is that even when you find out bad charge, you have to go through hoops and appeals which may take weeks or even months. There are zero guarantees same charge from same merchant won't happen again. The only single case when CC companies are willing to take off charge immediately is when you say you don't recognize merchant at all and its 100% fraudulent. If you say you once authorized that merchants a decade ago, its suddenly your fault and you are looking at writing up justifications which will likely get rejected any way.
I suppose what OP is saying is, if an innovative company figured out how to do those things, obviously using the technology/universe we already have, then they'd have him as a customer and/or investor. They'd have me too. These are all great consumer-focused features that would be game-changers for a credit card company.
It's simply utterly bananas that all it takes is for someone to get a few numbers from me, and then they have the ability to arbitrarily take my money, making it my problem to dispute it. This goes for credit cards and ACH transfers (which only require routing number and account number). The company who figures out how to fix this will have it made.
Isn't this what Venmo and Zelle are doing (sorry US perspective here)? The trick is to get companies to accept payments via those methods where the customer has control over the recurring payment.
If only that were the case... But actually there is a service Credit Card companies offer which will automatically update your number with merchants who charge you regularly.
> Report your old card stolen, and renew the card.
As someone who shops online at a much wider diversity of vendors than amazon.com, My card actually gets compromised about once a year and needs its number changed. I don't mind the hassle because it forces me to update the payment method for my recurring charges. On more than one occasion when I re-evaluated whether I really still needed some random subscription, I decided that it wasn't worth it any more to me.
On that note, I'm amazed how many accounts with outstanding balances have been next to impossible to close out by simply sending a physical check to an address. On the phone, they insist, "If you'll just give us your new credit card number, we'll get this all taken care of now." I respond, "I'm not giving you my credit card number because I don't trust that you'll actually stop charging me. I'm happy to send you a check in the mail to pay off my balance." Then it's often, "Uhhhhh, I don't know how to do that. My computer program requires that I enter your credit card number in this field to process. Please just give me your credit card number and stop making my life so difficult."
By the time everything is said and done (and escalated), they always end up finding a way to accept a check in the mail.
The major credit card companies have a service where they can notify the merchant of the new details when the card expires. I believe Visa calls it Account Updater.
If anyone at stripe is reading this, I think this is golden opportunity for consumer focused payment service. One should be at least able to block a merchant from charging my card. I can do that for spammer email but can't do that for spam charge on my card - in 2020!