Help with recurring payments for a service (Zoom) I cannot access

alphawhisky

Hi all,
I'm new to the Forum, so please go easy on me(!) Hopefully I've posted this in the right place... 

Around a month ago, in the midst of the Coronavirus situation, I thought it would be helpful if I had access to a paid Zoom account. I'd begun using video conferencing a lot more both for work and personal reasons, so upgrading seemed sensible. I completed the sign-up process and received confirmation of the payment via my email address. All well and good, I then tried to log-in to my new Zoom account. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to. Given we all have thousands of passwords to remember, I thought this was very much a user-error so I tried the 'forgot my password' function. However, I received an email from Zoom that no account was associated with my email address... Which is strange given this was the same email address that they sent all my invoice/billing receipt to.

No problem, as I thought I would reach out to their support. But I can't because, to do that, you need to log-in. I checked the billing receipt and spotted that you can email their billing@ email address for support on billing matters. I did just that but received no response. I followed up to the original ticket and no response. I tweeted them and received no response.

After a while, without much more of a clue of what to do, I raised a payment query with my card issuer (Barclaycard). This is still pending which I understand - they probably have staffing issues and, in reality, I don't know how long something like this will take anyway.

However, in the meantime, I've now received this month's charge! And, with that, the dawning realisation that, unless I cancel my Barclaycard, I'm never going to be able to stop these recurring charges... I can query this month's transaction but this isn't really a realistic long-term approach.

Not really sure what else I can do? I've emailed billing@ again and received confirmation that they've received my email but I'm not hopeful that I'll get a response. I don't really want to phone Barclaycard as I'm sure they are struggling to deal with the volume of calls, most of them from people who will be really struggling with these difficult times in which we find ourselves. But I'm at a loss as to my next move. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated. 


Thanks
Andy  

gettingtheresometime

I know this sounds patronising but are you sure when you typed your email address both on the  forgot password & signin bits were correct? Sometimes I've thought I've typed in hotmail as an example but actually typed hitmail.

JJ_Egan

Especially a missing or wrong placed  dot .

eddddy

alphawhisky said:

However, in the meantime, I've now received this month's charge! And, with that, the dawning realisation that, unless I cancel my Barclaycard, I'm never going to be able to stop these recurring charges... I can query this month's transaction but this isn't really a realistic long-term approach.
 

Cancelling your Barclaycard account isn't a good way forward - you're still liable for any charges made to the account after you've instructed Barclaycard to close it.

The payments are probably being collected by 'Continuous Payment Authority' (CPA) - so a better route is to tell Barclaycard that you want to cancel that CPA and make no further payments.


Are you saying that...

•  You received a confirmation from Zoom confirming that you had upgraded your account.
• After attempting to change your password, you got another email from Zoom to the same email address saying that no account existed

If so, it might be worth studying the recipient email address on both emails carefully. For example, with a gmail account, gmail considers alphawhisky@gmail.com, alpha.whisky@gmail.com and Alpha.Whisky@gmail.com to all be the same account and will accept any of those formats, but Zoom might not. 

alphawhisky

gettingtheresometime said:

I know this sounds patronising but are you sure when you typed your email address both on the  forgot password & signin bits were correct? Sometimes I've thought I've typed in hotmail as an example but actually typed hitmail.

No, not patronising at all - and I did wonder this too. However, in this instance, I used an Office 365 email address at my own domain, so there is no chance it could be wrong. And I've tried a few times too! 

JJ_Egan said:

Especially a missing or wrong placed  dot .

As above, I have tried a few times to no avail. 

eddddy said:

Cancelling your Barclaycard account isn't a good way forward - you're still liable for any charges made to the account after you've instructed Barclaycard to close it.

The payments are probably being collected by 'Continuous Payment Authority' (CPA) - so a better route is to tell Barclaycard that you want to cancel that CPA and make no further payments.

Thanks, I'll ask Barclaycard to cancel the CPA then and see what happens, that's really helpful  

Are you saying that...

•  You received a confirmation from Zoom confirming that you had upgraded your account.
• After attempting to change your password, you got another email from Zoom to the same email address saying that no account existed

If so, it might be worth studying the recipient email address on both emails carefully. For example, with a gmail account, gmail considers alphawhisky@gmail.com, alpha.whisky@gmail.com and Alpha.Whisky@gmail.com to all be the same account and will accept any of those formats, but Zoom might not. 

Yes, I received confirmation of the purchase of the Standard Pro Monthly package to my email address (including the associated PDF paperwork, etc.) And, yes, on attempting to recover access to the account (absolutely, definitely using the same email address!), I received confirmation that no said account exists. I suspect it's been a technical glitch with their system, perhaps down to the high volume of new accounts, etc. But it's massively frustrating. 

alphawhisky

For the sake of clarity - I'm relatively IT literate (that is, I was around in the days of 28.8K modems!) The email address used is in the format of me@mydomain.co.uk which restricts issues around gmail.com vs googlemail.com (as an example), or a dot in the wrong place, etc. And, for the avoidance of doubt, there is no email going to spam/junk that would otherwise hold the key to gaining access. 

The biggest frustration in all of this has been the complete lack of response from Zoom - again, they are no doubt busy, but it strikes me that they could have easily resolved this... 

shaun_from_Africa

alphawhisky said:

so I tried the 'forgot my password' function. However, I received an email from Zoom that no account was associated with my email address... Which is strange given this was the same email address that they sent all my invoice/billing receipt to.

What happens if you try to open a new Zoom account (obviously stopping before entering any payment details) using your email address?
Normally if you try that, it shouldn't allow you to proceed by giving a warning of "there is already a zoom account registered with this email address" , or something similar.
If you get this warning, it may well give a "forgot my password" link that actually works.

alphawhisky

shaun_from_Africa said:

What happens if you try to open a new Zoom account (obviously stopping before entering any payment details) using your email address?
Normally if you try that, it shouldn't allow you to proceed by giving a warning of "there is already a zoom account registered with this email address" , or something similar.
If you get this warning, it may well give a "forgot my password" link that actually works.

Interestingly, it allows me to sign-up using the 'existing' email address - that is, exactly the same email address that's currently receiving the payment receipts... And it generates an email asking me to activate my account. Out of curiosity, I completed the sign-up process and it worked just fine, though it shows that the me@mydomain.co.uk account is just a 'basic' account.

That said, it does now open up the opportunity for me to contact support through a logged in account. 

In the meantime, following the advice from eddddy above, I have sent a request to Barclaycard to cancel the CPA on the account. 

sharpe106

When did you sign up? As it is only a few days ago and it takes them a week or two to get back to you they can always refund you so no real big difference.

Although are you sure you actually went to the real site the first time? As if you can still sign up again suggests to me they have not set you an account up so they won’t be billing you. Did you get any confirmation emails?

shaun_from_Africa

sharpe106 said:

As if you can still sign up again suggests to me they have not set you an account up so they won’t be billing you. Did you get any confirmation emails?

The OP has received confirmation, they've received acknowledgment of their 1st payment and they have also been billed for the next month's payment.

alphawhisky said:
I completed the sign-up process and received confirmation of the payment via my email address.
.....
.....

However, in the meantime, I've now received this month's charge!