I've done that 4 times, AMEX has a block (multiple blocks as per the reps). But the charges still go through (that's another story).

The AMEX people just keep saying Stripe has a "iron clad contract" so even with that, they cannot do much.

I am not saying it is a 100% Stripe. But why would a company like Stripe allow me to do (successfully) 7 chargebacks in a row. At what point would an account be shut down or a subscription terminated? If this was PayPal, the account would have been frozen ages ago.

Can you not report your card as stolen, get your bank to issue you a new one, and be done with it?

I've got a brand new card number, CVC, etc. They can still charge it because the subscription contract exists, there is nothing AMEX can do.

Even with a brand new credit card, reported as stolen, what ever. If a monthly subscription contract exists (which you sign once you click that button to pay $5 monthly I guess), they can continue charging the account.

This was what AMEX rep told me.

It’s pretty surprising that credit card companies will route charges to the particular “account” linked with a “number” even if the “number” is “closed” or “cancelled” or “expired”. Certainly not the experience one intuitively expects up front. I realized this when the bank issues me a new card proactively due to a data breach, but old recurring charges still work.

I guess this is both for customer convenience and to give the bank more flexibility, but I think this would be a lot simpler if closed credit card numbers just stopped working.

If anyone is interested in how this works:

https://stripe.com/docs/saving-cards#automatic-card-updates

> Stripe works with card networks and automatically attempts to update saved card details whenever a customer receives a new card (for example, replacing an expired card or one that was reported lost or stolen).

> It is widely supported in the United States, allowing Stripe to automatically update most American Express, Visa, Mastercard, and Discover cards issued there.

Google did this to me with GCS: they automatically updated my expiring credit card. It's not a terrible feature, but I think users should consent to it before companies do it.

They probably do. Remember the terms and conditions that we didn’t read?

You can try contacting your ombudsman, official notice is less likely to get the circular finger-pointing game

Okay. So I can steal an AMEX card (in fact, copy the numbers so that the cardholder is not aware), subscribe it to a bunch of leeching services, and expect that those subscriptions will go on and on even if the holder finds out and changes the card details?

My god.

It doesn’t quite work like that in Europe, as far as I know. The fact that you file chargebacks over and over and they don’t do shit is even more insane.

> It doesn’t quite work like that in Europe

Which is annoying in its own way because when your card expire, you need to manually re-enter its new details into all the services you're using. And you (or at least I) will inevitably forget one of these until you need it urgently.

Not annoying at all. It's a good opportunity to revisit each subscription and check if it's actually useful.

Not annoying to me either, I do it every two or so years to clean house of unnecessary subscriptions.

I would get super annoyed at the US behaviour.

Looks less annoying to me than not being able to cancel.

Although in the US people still subscribe to "newspapers" where you can subscribe online but have to wait for hours on hold on a hotline to end the subscription...

Some stripe folks are very active on HN. May be they can help ?