Match.com fleeced my sister!!

Miskate

So angry right now.

My sister had a year's subscription with match.com, but once she met her boyfriend (not through match I might add!) she decided to cancel her subscription.

So she logged on, cancelled it, and was informed her end date would be 26/11/2013. All fine.

Today she logs on and finds that £80 (!!) has been taken from her account via PayPal. She rang Match.com, and they were deeply unhelpful and wouldn't refund the money.

Anybody have any ideas how she can escalate this? She asked to speak to a manager but they wouldn't get her one. She has raised a pay dispute on PayPal.

Netwizard

I was going to say, raise a dispute with paypal. In my experience, they are pretty good

fluffymuffy

I had a similar thing with a professional subscription. I had cancelled it but Paypal was set to a recurring payment.

Everyone should now take a moment to log into Paypal and look for the list of recurring payments to see whether they have some they don't know about.

Robinette

Did your sister cancel her payment authority as well as her membership? Most sites treat these as two separate cancellation requirements and will continue to collect on a live payment authority even if the membership has been cancelled.

fluffnutter

That all sounds feasible but if she's cancelled her membership but forgotten to cancel the payment authority then I fail to see why Match.com feels justified in hanging on to any payments taken after the cancellation date.

Raise a dispute with paypal. If that's not successful then write to Match.com (rather than talk to someone unhelpful in their call centre).

Miskate

Thank you for all your helpful comments. My sister just found out this morning that PayPal have refunded the money to her, so WELL DONE PAYPAL (and screw you Match.com!)

Mr_Toad

All my on-line purchases are made with a debit card that will not go overdrawn and is refused if there are insufficient funds.

This is the card that is also linked to my PayPal account and I never leave any money in my PayPal account either.

It means that when I buy on-line I have to transfer the money beforehand but this is a small price to pay to prevent not only fraud if an account gets hacked but it also kills any sneaky continuous payments, CPA, dead.

There are often some excellent offers on-line, one example was a magazine subscription. I got 6 months really cheaply but to get the 'offer' you had to agree to a CPA. They did, of course, say that it would be a simple matter to cancel.

It was. I cancelled in plenty of time and was assured that was the end of it. However, They later contacted me because they couldn't collect the payment. :rotfl:

When they have your money they have the advantage and you have all the grief, when they don't you can tell them to do one.

CPAs are a common tactic these days, many companies use them as it is then the customer that has to do all the work to get their money back.

For this reason they have been known to apply them when told not to, very difficult to dispute unless the call was recorded and very easy to miss when it's buried in a mass of small print.