Payment processors shouldn't be able to charge through an expired card
My web hosting service renewed my subscription by charging my bank account through an expired debit card. Why do banks give payment processors such power? It’s ridiculous!
My leverage has always been to leave expired cards on file when I find it difficult to cancel a subscription. It's crazy that they can get around it.
The business is using a card account updater. All of the card networks offer this service and most issuing banks participate.
This is an extremely popular feature with both consumers and merchants as most of the time card payment changes (card reissues, expiration etc) causes unwanted disruption. You happen to be in the minority who dislike it.
Your issuing banks is who you need to take this up with, the payment processor is acting on their behalf in this case.
Some merchants are more adept at this than others. I had a Wordpress plugin (Elementor Pro) manage to charge me despite an expired card to my fury. While another SaaS (Webflow) couldn't manage the same while trying to charge the expired card 5 times (and mailing 20 times).
This is commonplace. Banks allow it to avoid subscriptions failing where the customer hasn't updated their card. Merchants may also be able to get the updated card details from the bank.
What you can do instead is get an account that lets you create virtual credit cards that you can later cancel and destroy. This should prevent any future charges going through.
> create virtual credit cards
I was forced into this behavior by Google Pay/Wallet, and I found it extremely precarious.
With one of those virtual cards I purchased an item at a high cost, and unfortunately I had to go through a cycle of factory reset and reload everything to my phone. This necessarily wiped the "virtual cards" stored there.
Thereafter, I went back to the merchant for a refund, and we found that a credit to the "original card" was impossible because I "no longer possessed" the original card! I was rather infuriated that it would be this easy, but Google assured me there's no error and this is how it works. Google claims that they're protecting our privacy, but I basically did not ask to be enrolled in these virtual cards and, when we trust the card processors, this is a disadvantage and honestly, kind of insulting to our relationship.
This glitch cost me a long, long time as I needed to wait for a paper check to issue in the mail. Therefore, I would urge caution and being fully-informed of the corner cases, before anyone tries to use a virtual card for any serious transactions.
Weird. What is the expiration date for, then?
I set my card balance to zero.
Interesting. How does one do that?
You can have a dedicated account for your card, in theory you can create an account per valid card and cancel it afterwards or at least nullify it