THIS HAPPENED TO ME/FINANCE
Companies Can Get Your Information for Recurring Payments
They don’t even need you to prompt it and it speaks to a larger problem
My title might sound alarmist. It’s true. How do I know this? It happened to my partner today. We previously had a streaming subscription to a popular streaming service. We had to cancel it since we didn’t use it and we couldn’t afford to justify paying it anymore.
We just stopped paying and made it clear we were canceling. Months later, my partner got a new card. We went to pick it up last week from our mailbox. And he hadn’t entered it in or saved it anywhere. He’d only used the card once to pay for something online.
Then today, we got the notification.
The company had taken the $5.99 from his card. What? How did that happen? No one had that information. The card wasn’t saved online anywhere. We weren’t hacked. We know this because we have a strong security system on our network and Mike’s careful about that.
He looked in his log to see if it showed that he updated it and forgot. Nothing. All the logs showed him was that the card was added to the account at 12:59 pm this afternoon. We woke up just before that and we were in the bathroom at that time.
How would we have been adding a card to an account we were no longer paying for or interested in paying in? It turns out that other people have had these concerns. It seems that the companies can now get your banking information to charge you for your subscriptions.
There is something called an updater service that’s available through payment processors and apparently, this is legal. They can get your address, phone number, and banking information on a dime. Companies can opt into this service.
Then any recurring payment whether it is a subscription to a streaming service, a car payment, or even a mortgage payment can be taken out without you physically adding your information to the system. That’s scary. Also, you can’t opt-out. You may not even find out until it’s too late, as was the case in my partner’s situation.
This is how I know it wasn’t a hacker. The updater service added his card to our account. If someone else got a hold of that information, wouldn’t they have used that information for themselves? It doesn’t seem likely that someone will go through all the trouble to get that information and not try to do things for themselves. Why would they want to add the information so that we get charged for our benefit?
Do the streaming companies and updater service companies think that people are just not going to pay attention to these little charges and get as much as they can out of the average consumer? The point is, that you should always be vigilant and make sure that you are keeping track of what your money is being spent on.
It’s insane that these companies can get away with this tactic. They’ll claim that they didn't know that a consumer didn’t want to start their account back up again. Whatever the case may be, a consumer should always be given the option to opt in first instead of having to go through the extra steps of opting out or not being able to opt out at all.
We’re already in a financial situation that isn’t that great. We don’t need companies having access to our funds right now when they only have their own best interests at heart. I’ve already read countless accounts since I started writing this.
Real-world implications of this stuff are what happens when people can’t make the payments and forget to arrange something, especially at a much larger expense. For us, it’s not about the $5.99. It wasn’t going to break us. It’s the creepy, icky feeling after it happened and the much bigger implications for the future.
This worries me because of the lack of regulation around this. Let me know if this has ever happened to you. Do you check your banking statements regularly? Do you even notice when a few dollars are taken here or there? What about when larger amounts come out when you’re unable to pay? I’d like to hear your thoughts.
