On almost the first working day after Christmas, I was annoyed that PayPal took £39.99 out of my bank account and sent it in my name to Microsoft. But unfortunately, there was no way to track the transaction or find out why it happened.
This kind of transaction is a modern plague; you could pay a lifetime reading about how annoying and self-indulgent it is. On this topic, Adventures in Billing stories featuring just about every big company you can think of, including Microsoft, PayPal, Google, and others, can be easily found. The most frequently mentioned bad guy in this industry is Netflix, whose free trial gets your payment information and then charges you through PayPal’s repeat-payment system. The email telling you that the money has been sent will only come after the money has been sent, never before.
Clicking on all those Cancel buttons was a terrific feeling
Those who aren’t so young that they think the Internet is run by elves with tiny typewriters will know that this was done on purpose by a system creator and not just bad luck, like wearing flip-flops in the rain. It’s not a coincidence that your right to choose has been quietly taken away. This gives angry bloggers more reasons to believe in conspiracies and drowns out easy, less paranoid ways to solve the problem.
So, let me guide you how easy it is to stop making these payments. The debit was between Microsoft and PayPal, and my Microsoft name is very strange. I’ve had it for a lengthy time, and it’s connected to a wide range of services, from MSDN to Xbox 360 to Azure to bits of the internal test of things that didn’t cause it into production in Server 2012 R2. Any of these could be to blame for that mysterious £40 charge.
So I called Microsoft in the UK and found the billing questions area after only getting through five voice menus. I had a fantastic conversation with a fellow Irishman (at least, that’s what he thought based on my name). We decided that Microsoft probably thought the transaction was fake because neither he nor I could find any record of it in the summary pages of my Microsoft account history, which goes back at least two years. He advised me to get in contact with PayPal right away.
PayPal had a shorter list of phone choices to deal with and a different point of view. PayPal said that £39.99 was a common amount for an Xbox payment and that many amounts like that had been sent in the first week of the year. Then, my countryman suggested that I cancel the automatic repeat. He pointed out that non-automatic annual or periodic bills are handled by sending reminders as the bill date approaches.
So I didn’t just zap the disputed £40 to Microsoft once a year, which it seems Microsoft gets but can’t link to my account. I also zapped the other one to Netflix and found one I’d forgotten about to Linden Research, which owns Second Life.
If you want to do the identical, all you have to do is log in to PayPal, connect on Profile (currently far right on the grey menu bar on the site once you’ve signed in), choose My Money, and click on the last plain-background link: My pre-approved payments. You’ll see a list of people who will get the email there, and you can cancel them right there.
Clicking all those Cancel buttons felt great. Sure, I could find out if I want to play with Netflix, but I must pay. But shouldn’t that be the way things work?