rcx132
Philip
- Messages
- 3,014
- Location
- London, UK
Thought I'd share this so people are warned...
I have an alarm with a SIM card to send texts if there's a break in. The SIM is set on auto-top-up, when the balance drops below £2 it auto tops up £12. Yesterday morning I woke up to see almost 1'100 notification emails from Paypal saying that £12 has been debitted from my account. That's 1100 x £12 is a lot of money.
It turns out it was a fault with the telecoms company system, it just went mad and started taking payments over and over. But what was shocking was that neither the merchant, nor Paypal, nor my bank, nor my credit card company had any mechanism to stop this. They just allowed repeat debits to be taken every few seconds all through the night. They all later justified it saying "if you approved the supplier then we let them take it". Every two seconds, all night I asked? YEP they do.
Paypal is scary, when they had depleted the funds from my bank they just moved over to the credit cards that they had on file, what they call "secondary sources". Imagine if you have two bank accounts set up on Paypal, personal one and your joint account, and maybe more than one credit card, I have my personal card and business card. That means if things go wrong Paypal will go through all those cards and bank accounts and deplete them.
It gets scarier. One of the credit card companies warned me about "Continuous payment authorities". Basically it means that if you pay someone a subscription by card, then they can take the money, or even reactivate the subscription years later, even if your card has been cancelled, the payments just get taken from new cards. There's an article about it, link below. The article says that many banks aren't even aware of this, and they were right. Barclays knew, they checked all my accounts and cancelled the authorities. Nationwide did not, and the girl on the other end of the phone started getting upset at me for suggesting it. The article below says that under EU protection, just informing the bank to cancel the authorities makes the bank responsible, so even if the bank operator denies their existence, you are protected.
http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/banking/recurring-payments
I think I'm in the all clear though. I quickly cancelled the direct debit and cards and most of the payments didn't get to hit my accounts.
I have to say that Paypal have been good at fixing the problem so far. They immediately put me through to a senior operative who immediately said the payments will be refunded no matter what. The telecoms company was also good, the MD himself phoned me up from his holiday.
I have an alarm with a SIM card to send texts if there's a break in. The SIM is set on auto-top-up, when the balance drops below £2 it auto tops up £12. Yesterday morning I woke up to see almost 1'100 notification emails from Paypal saying that £12 has been debitted from my account. That's 1100 x £12 is a lot of money.
It turns out it was a fault with the telecoms company system, it just went mad and started taking payments over and over. But what was shocking was that neither the merchant, nor Paypal, nor my bank, nor my credit card company had any mechanism to stop this. They just allowed repeat debits to be taken every few seconds all through the night. They all later justified it saying "if you approved the supplier then we let them take it". Every two seconds, all night I asked? YEP they do.
Paypal is scary, when they had depleted the funds from my bank they just moved over to the credit cards that they had on file, what they call "secondary sources". Imagine if you have two bank accounts set up on Paypal, personal one and your joint account, and maybe more than one credit card, I have my personal card and business card. That means if things go wrong Paypal will go through all those cards and bank accounts and deplete them.
It gets scarier. One of the credit card companies warned me about "Continuous payment authorities". Basically it means that if you pay someone a subscription by card, then they can take the money, or even reactivate the subscription years later, even if your card has been cancelled, the payments just get taken from new cards. There's an article about it, link below. The article says that many banks aren't even aware of this, and they were right. Barclays knew, they checked all my accounts and cancelled the authorities. Nationwide did not, and the girl on the other end of the phone started getting upset at me for suggesting it. The article below says that under EU protection, just informing the bank to cancel the authorities makes the bank responsible, so even if the bank operator denies their existence, you are protected.
http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/banking/recurring-payments
I think I'm in the all clear though. I quickly cancelled the direct debit and cards and most of the payments didn't get to hit my accounts.
I have to say that Paypal have been good at fixing the problem so far. They immediately put me through to a senior operative who immediately said the payments will be refunded no matter what. The telecoms company was also good, the MD himself phoned me up from his holiday.
(I did get it all refunded)
.
phoned to say THANKS as he had paid for it ,from your account 