Charges for expired debit card

jonesMUFCforever

campbeji wrote: »

Hi Jonesmufcforever,

Perhaps it is up to me to notify them, but i'm pretty sure they are not supposed to take charges against expired cards. Even if they are, it is at least stupid on their part, it delays their payments and annoys their clients. I'm certainly not going to use them again.

This problem did not occur with the other companies that I have the card registered with, they sent emails and I updated the card details. No problems resulted.

Thanks
Jim

Sorry you are wrong.

campbeji

Hi Jonesmufcforever,

So I'm wrong?

Please be more specific, which of the statements that I made were wrong?

1. Perhaps it is up to me to notify them
2. I'm pretty sure they are not supposed to take charges against expired cards.
3. It is at least stupid on their part, it delays their payments and annoys their clients.
4. I'm certainly not going to use them again.
5. This problem did not occur with the other companies that I have the card registered with, they sent emails and I updated the card details. No problems resulted.

So I made 5 statements in that post, please tell me which is wrong, if you can't specify which statement is wrong I will assume that you don't know what your talking.

Thanks
Jim

premierfella

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/banking/recurring-payments

I'd guess point 2. If they can take money from a cancelled card under a continuous payment authority after 4 years (when it is reasonable to assume that the original card that was cancelled would have been long since expired) I don't see why an expired card on a live account would pose a company an issue in terms of getting payment.

As Nationwide claim not to have received any attempt from RAC to claim money on the expired card, sadly that wasn't put to the test in this case. I'm with you campbeji in terms of it being poor form for RAC to be charging you in the circumstances though - as you say, virtually all companies would give some sort of heads-up about expired card details either close to expiry or before they plan to take a payment.

jonesMUFCforever

campbeji wrote: »

Hi Jonesmufcforever,

So I'm wrong?

Please be more specific, which of the statements that I made were wrong?

1. Perhaps it is up to me to notify them
2. I'm pretty sure they are not supposed to take charges against expired cards.
3. It is at least stupid on their part, it delays their payments and annoys their clients.
4. I'm certainly not going to use them again.
5. This problem did not occur with the other companies that I have the card registered with, they sent emails and I updated the card details. No problems resulted.

So I made 5 statements in that post, please tell me which is wrong, if you can't specify which statement is wrong I will assume that you don't know what your talking.

Thanks
Jim

Point 2 is the only relevent part to this whole thread.
What you are failing to accept is that you gave them authority to take money from your account until you revoked that authority.
They attempted to debit your account but the payment was rejected . PLEASE NOTE YOU ARE GIVING THEM AUTHORITY TO TAKE FROM YOUR ACCOUNT NOT A SPECIFIED CARD.
Sorry to shout - if you do not believe me just read the terms that you signed up for last year.
If you did not want to renew you should have cancelled.
Personally I would now phone the RAC and explain about the error with the card and ask politely if they could refund the fee.
You never know?

Next time set up a direct debit for payment not a card and this might not happen again.

campbeji

There is obviously something about this Continuous Payment Authority that I don't understand. Now I'm not talking about what it is or what its for etc, I'm talking about the technical process they go through to take the money from the account.

If the process bypasses the long number, expiry date and security number then why would the money not have left my account? Normally when you process a debit or credit card you need these three things to be entered into the system, either manually or automatically to take a payment, if any is incorrect it will fire up an error and will not attempt to collect from the client.

I have clients that have given me their card details and when I invoice them I raise a charge to their card and it goes through (I guess that is similar or the same as a continuous Payment Authority). However as soon as the expiry date passes I can't do it anymore, the details become useless and I need to get the new card details from the client.

I just don't get how a company can take a payment using expired details, after all with a card the payment is routed through the Visa or Mastercard system, not direct from a bank account.

The whole thing about charges being put onto canceled accounts (from the link that premierfella supplied) is a different thing as far as I can tell, when you cancel a card you are still responsible for charges made to it. The card the guy used originally could still have been within the expiry date and so still been process-able.

Thanks
Jim

premierfella

The example in the link isn't different. I was referring to the "I'm being charged by a card I cancelled four years ago", which evidences that payments under a CPA can be claimed indefinitely until explicitly cancelled. It is unlikely that the cancelled expired card would have still been "in date" four years after the first payment under the CPA, so its the same position, except with a card that had been cancelled (which surely would make it less likely for the payment to go through, not more likely!)

Anyway, that was just to illustrate the point about card expiry dates not necessarily being a problem for second and subsequent payments under a CPA. Your position differs because:
Nationwide claim not to have received any request to pay out
RAC say "they got charged for it".

There is going to be no way for you to get to the actual truth of those two statements. All you will get is a Nationwide employee or RAC employee statement based on what they are seeing on their screens (assuming both are being honest) and what they are seeing on the screen may not be the whole story (e.g. RAC software could throw up a "failed payment charge" even if their software just gave up at step 1 when looking at the expiry date of the card details originally given, or Nationwide's screen might show no record of any attempt to claim funds if the attempted transaction failed at the RAC merchant stage).

So going back to the two original questions:
1. There could be an argument for saying you are liable for the fees if RAC incurred costs (but who knows if they REALLY did)
2. £25 isn't really a "cost" charge, its a "penalty" charge.

Obviously a complaint is in order, as you planned, but if RAC were going to cancel the fee I would have thought they'd have done it when you first phoned - the fact they didn't suggests they might be one of those companies that are sadly happy to lose existing customers for the sake of a few pounds rather than take a common sense approach.

Hellzapoppin

A retailer does not get charged for attempting to take payment on an expired card, or for any declined transactions for that matter.

The bank is under no obligation to honour a recurring transaction made against an expired card, although they often do.

The agreement to take a payment from a card under a CPA is for that card, technically. There is a system called Visa Account Updater that UK Merchants subscribe to (I'm fairly sure that RAC are one of them) and this will provide a retailer with a new card number when the previous one is replaced. They are then quite within their rights to use the new card number for the CPA and this is covered within the bank's Ts & Cs and the service provider's.

I'm not sure where Nationwide participate in VAU, I think it is compulsory for UK based card issuers.

Majestic12

There is more information on CPA's actually written by this website:

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/banking/recurring-payments