You hand that info to the merchant because your credit card company can issue chargebacks against them and that costs them a pretty penny with their payment processor, especially if it happens often. Credit card disputes almost always slant in favor of the customer.

Folks just don't seem to realize: you make a reasonable effort with the vendor, and then go straight to your credit card company.

I caught a restaurant "helping" themselves to a very healthy tip for delivery; I'd tipped in cash. The owner repeatedly professed that he didn't know how to issue a refund and offered cash.

He was playing stupid because he didn't want to deal with the transaction fee, nor did he want a paper trail of his fraud; I strongly suspect he was doing this to other people, too. Warned him three times and three times he said, gosh, he had no idea how to issue a refund to my card.

I asked for just the fraudulent tip back and my credit card company reversed the entire charge. So not only did he lose the tip, he lost the cost of the food and he got dinged with a chargeback fee. He also lost my weekly pizza order.

I believe this doesn't work with debit cards, which are the norm in Europe.

Still though, it's a weird system. Instead of giving someone just enough permissions to spend my money, I give them permissions to spend all of it, with some other party reimbursing me if that goes awry (and I notice).

  > Instead of giving someone just enough permissions to spend my money, I give them permissions to spend all of it

A peeve of mine is that the trust-until-a-screwup system is used in far more critical places than with a credit card. For instance, "DOT certification" of tires has no paper trail until people die.

If a tire fails while operating within its speed regime and before five years from manufacture, then it is to be reported to the DOT (US Department of Transportation). This usually only happens if the police are reporting on a fatal accident - most common citizens neither know that this option exists nor how to report it. If enough reports of a specific brand or type of tire come in, then the manufacturer (or importer) must provide proof of the testing done and pay some fines.

Many of the cheap Chinese tires are out of business (read: have changed business names) far before this critical last step could ever be reached, assuming that any reports were filed at all.

Living in the US, with some of the worst banking infrastructure in the world, my debit card has an app that allows me to instantly lock/unlock the card, set spending limits, category limits, and even to deny a transaction if my phone isn't geolocated close to the transaction point.

I get a nearly instant alert, sometimes before the payment terminal has displayed "accepted", that there's been a charge on my card.

Also, at least in the US, debit cards have similar fraud rules to credit cards (ie you can chargeback) but the time period is much, much smaller. A week, I think.

I strongly urge you to not use your debit card and use a credit card wherever possible. Aside from better protection, any fraud or mistakes are not involving real money, but credit.

Disputes are enforced by Visa and Mastercard rules and apply to debit & credit cards equally. Some countries may have some extra legal protections for credit cards, but for clear examples of merchant bad faith the card network's dispute resolution process should be enough.

I also wouldn't call debit cards "the norm". They are in majority (1 to 5?), true, maybe also because many are issued for free by the bank where you have the account (which doesn't mean they are also used). But still not really "the norm".

Can't speak for all of Europe, but my bank in the Netherlands (Rabobank) certainly does offer chargeback options on debit card purchases.

I had to resort to cancelling a card once too, but it didn’t fix the problem. My Credit Card Provider (Barclaycard) implemented the Visa Account Updater service with no way to turn it off so my new card details went straight to the merchant.

Ended up cancelling the account I was so frustrated, lost a customer of 10 years.

https://developer.visa.com/capabilities/vau

Typically you can call your bank and ask them to block transactions from a particular merchant that you have an issue with, I have done that before, once on credit card and once on a current account.

I once had a paper/digital subscription, and at some point I had cancelled the card linked to it. Unbeknownst to me (my parents were receiving the subscription), they had kept sending the paper despite the card being cancelled. When NYT eventually realized the card had been cancelled, they claimed that I owed them for the ~year or so that I had been receiving the paper after the card was cancelled, and attempted to send this to collections.

Completely outrageous business practices if you ask me.

That's not outrageous at all. Your failure to pay doesn't invalidate your contract that you will pay for their services.

It's definitely frustrating to cancel, and this is a good ruling that will help make it easier, but it's still your responsibility to do so.

How could it not invalidate the contract? Services are provided after payment is made. If no payment is made, no service is provided.

Those are not universal terms, and are actually defined in the contract which you seem to have not read. Grace periods, minimum commitments, subscription lengths, and/or post-paid terms are all common.

Ironically there are far more complaints about cloud providers shutting down entire business operations because of a late payment here on HN. Perhaps you should consider this more thoroughly instead of escalating a single unfortunate anecdote into a strawman argument against how business billing works.

Have you ever read your contracts? Maybe it would be time to do so now, before you run into troubles with collectors.

Of course. I just opened up a contract I signed with a legal firm. It says lack of payment ends the contract.

Why can't everything be simple and easy? Maybe somebody needs to pass a law to make it so.

I'm not sure why is this outrageous. You had a contract with NYT so they deliver you the newspaper for a payment, contract which you didn't even try to cancel. This is how contracts work.

It's not a token, but similar: Europe has Direct Debit mandates, which you give to the biller and they can be revoked.

https://gocardless.com/guides/sepa/mandates/

That's better, agreed. But can I e.g. limit payment amounts on these?

On Direct Debits in the UK, the merchant just charges me whatever. This is for things like utilities and phone bills, so I don't have major trust issues, but still it irks me.

In a way, it's even better than credit card: You can not set a limit - except contractually, but you can enforce it. You can do the charge-back yourself (via the Bank's website) within like 6 or 9 months of the transaction. This will cost the vendor a lot (relatively speaking) money and is pretty easy to do. However, if there is any doubt about who is right, an action like that will lead them to invoice you all associated costs, send it to collections and then a legal fight begins.

Which I guess why many businesses prefer Klarna or other payment processors. You login with your bank account and then wire the money to them, instead of them pulling the money. Then, no chargebacks are possible.

I haven't seen an option to set a payment limit, but all banks give you the ability to cancel a direct debit authorisation at any time. For that reason alone I'd say it's always better to use direct debit than give a merchant your credit/debit card for subscription services.

In any case, the banks seem to be very good at refunding direct debits in cases where the merchants appear to be abusing them. My ex once noticed after several months that her gym was still charging her even after she'd cancelled - the bank made it very quick and easy to claim back all the extra payments!

>I still find it insane that the "normal" way to pay for goods and services is to pass full details of your payment card, sufficient to make any future payment, and just trust the merchant. Surely the sane way is you generate some token they can redeem against, but you can e.g. expire it or modify it.

That's kinda how Blik payments work in Poland. They generate one time code that is used to purchase goods, you also have to confirm it on your device(usually a banking app).

That code is one time use and expires after 2 minutes - and it can be safely told out loud. You also get transaction details before you confirm it on your device.

Expanding this system to a token that allows recurring subscription would be pretty convenient.

That's what 3dsecure is for.

in EU (well, at least in my country, France) a payment without 3dsecure is extremely easy to chargeback.

I don't think 3d protects you in this case of recurring charges.