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A comment on Senators push to ditch social security numbers in light of Equifax hack. Parent comment

Re:Senators push to ditch social security numbers in light o... by tialaramex on Thursday November 09, 2017 @05:03AM (#15661182)
The Direct Debit is 100% reversible. Clarkson didn't reverse it because the people who did it chose a charity and he can afford the money. If you found the money was somehow going to an actual crook you'd reverse it.

A utility company Direct Debited money from me when they screwed up and billed me for someone else's supply. I called my bank, said I wanted the Direct Debit cancelled and the money returned, they did it and the money was back in my account the same day.

The utility company sent me all manner of outraged paperwork, including threatening to set lawyers on me, but they couldn't magically take my money, and sure enough once they understood their mistake I got an apology and they wrote off all my actual bills for the past 12 months.

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Re:Senators push to ditch social security numbers in light o... by concerned_user on Friday November 10, 2017 @04:00AM (#15668757)
It changed last year in my country, we no longer have direct debit, it is now called e-invoice. You sign up for it and start getting invoices in your bank account then it is just one click to pay or you can enable auto-pay, so its essentially direct debit which you can enable/disable at any time.

But when I did have direct debit it always included the maximum pay amount which I usually set 2x the amount of average bill so if utility company makes a mistake payment will not go through.

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