Sorry to be away from you for a couple days. The reasons would be of no interest to anyone. They aren't even that interesting to me but I'll make it up to you.
Well, one thing might interest you: I had to deal with some credit card fraud…and not the kind you might imagine. I'm still not 100% certain what happened but it involves a Seemingly-Reputable Company that's supposed to bill me for services once a month. For some time, they had been billing me once a month, like they were supposed to, charging what we shall call Credit Card #1. Then one day, along with many legitimate charges, Credit Card #1 was suddenly racking up phony ones — which I caught because they were to companies with which I never did business.
Okay, fine. That happens. The credit card company closed down that card and issued me a new one with a new number. Let us call this Credit Card #1A. Before I received it, I went in and changed several online accounts from billing Credit Card #1 to another card we shall call Credit Card #2. Am I going too fast for you? I'll try and type slower. One of the companies where I made the switch was the Seemingly-Reputable Company.
By coincidence, the change was made just after I'd changed my level of service with the Seemingly-Reliable Company so the amount they billed me each month changed. Instead of billing me Amount #1 to Credit Card #1, they were billing me Amount #2 to Credit Card #2.
But now here's where it gets muddy: When you cancel a credit card and the same credit card company issues you a new one, they continue to honor some charges to the old card. For instance, if you've regularly had monthly charges for your gas bill to a card, they pay those charges on the new card. The credit card company's computer assumes those are legitimate charges…which they usually are.
That's all well and good but in this case, the Seemingly-Reputable Company began billing me twice a month: They charged Credit Card #1 in the amount of Amount #1 and the credit card company, recognizing it as a routine charge from the Seemingly-Reputable Company paid Amount 1 on my behalf. And the Seemingly-Reputable Company also billed Amount #2 to Credit Card #2 and that was paid.
At first, I didn't notice the double charging because both were from a company that I expected to charge my credit card. After a little while though, I thought, "Hey, didn't I pay that bill two weeks ago?" I compared all my statements and realized I was being charged Amount #1 and Amount #2 each month. A nice lady on the phone from the credit card company agreed with me and immediately put a full cancellation on Credit Card #1, meaning that absolutely no charges to that card would be paid. And she alerted the Seemingly-Reputable Company and they admitted their mistake.
So here are the two problems I'm dealing with now…
Problem #1 I'm Dealing With Now: The Seemingly-Reputable Company is refusing to refund the overpayments. They insist on merely giving me credit towards future bills. This would be fine except that I've decided for other reasons that the service from the Seemingly-Reputable Service sucks and I no longer want it. In fact, I completely canceled it and at the moment, they're insisting on giving me five more months of it as my "refund."
Problem #2 I'm Dealing With Now: Since nothing charged to Credit Card #1 now will be paid, I'm going around changing credit cards on various accounts. For instance, the monitoring system on my home security system was billed automatically to Credit Card #1 and I've switched it to Credit Card #1A. That one was easy but some of these companies make it very hard to do on their websites. It must have taken me ten minutes to find where to change the number on the New York Times website. This should not take longer than their crossword puzzle.
I wound up taking a look at every arrangement and subscription I had that bills to a credit card of mine and decided to cancel a few of them. I had forgotten that I meant to do this every six months or so because a lot of times when you cancel an online subscription, you are instantly offered — by a computer or sometimes even a human being on the phone — a lower price to stay. I canceled one $29.95 per month subscription and the computer instantly gave me a "We hate to lose a loyal customer" line and an offer for the same service for $5.95.
And when I turned that down, they knocked another buck off the price. It can be very profitable to cancel your online subscriptions. Some of them offer tremendous discounts…and if they don't, there's usually a way to uncancel that cancellation if you decide you want to keep the service.
The downside of this is that some companies make it real, real hard to cancel. Sometimes, they insist you phone a cancellation department and then they keep you on hold for a long time. In one case, I had to go into a text message "chat" with some sort of Artificial Intelligence program that kept asking me why in the world I wanted to cancel their wonderful service…and keeping me waiting three or four minutes between responses. I think it took about fifteen minutes just to be free of them.
I'm guessing the logic here is that once I've wasted ten minutes online trying to cancel, I'll just say, "Oh, hell! I'll keep it!" In my case though, I thought, "I have ten minutes of my life invested in trying to cancel this service. I don't want to ever go through this again so I'm sticking with this as long as necessary just to get this company out of my life!"
It was worth the time. I think I ended up keeping four services, cancelling three others and getting reduced prices on two others. I'm probably paying $100 a month less and that was worth a couple hours.
So I'm left dealing with Problem #3 I'm Dealing With Now, Problem #4 I'm Dealing With Now and Problem #5 I'm Dealing With Now:. These Problems I'm Dealing With Now, you don't want to hear about but I'll try not to let them keep me away from this blog for so long.