If Your Credit Card Gets Double Charged, Beware the Dangers of Support

le_spy

The chargebacks are way too easily accessible for customers since banks want to earn money from it, however what customers never do, is read banks contract, precisely when they're supposed to use it, ignorance isn't an excuse, chargebacks that are done without previous contacting of whoever charged them should have a 0 tolerance,

i'm not saying it was the case in this case (obv not), but it is generally very often used for fraudlent purposes. International companys usually put shipments on the way after they have received payment, then day or 2 later, its not too uncommon for the customer to charge back, when parcel is on the way, for the company to cancel such parcel it would take additional money, on top of having to pay a chargeback fee, Same happens often with charities, which are forced to pay fees due to someone having donated due to social or peer pressure, charging back up to 40 days later. Due existance of such peoople many companys have very strict policy in regards to chargebacks

Tigerseye

deadwinston wrote: »

I guess what I would say here is that if a chargeback is apparently such a big deal in the credit card community, why does my credit card company make it as easy as clicking a button in an email to start a chargeback for a double charge?

Money, I guess?

They really should tell you to approach the company first, but if they can make up to $100 per chargeback and the law doesn't make them advise you to do that, then why would they, quite frankly?

The law should be changed so they have to and/or they should lower their fees, so that at least it doesn't cripple companies when people do legitimate chargebacks.

the credit card company said there was no way to do this unless the merchant followed the dispute procedure to say the charge was valid.

Well, that is also highly dishonest and unacceptable, on the bank's behalf, then.

Because they are basically fishing for (irreversible) chargebacks, just so they can make easy money from a company that probably just made an honest mistake.

You, the customer, should be able to reverse that chargeback, if you want to (fee-free).

Nyladreas

Tigerseye wrote: »

Also, what they should have done, at the very start (in one email), is:

1. Apologise profusely.
2. Admit complete responsibility for the error.
3. Politely request that you reverse the chargeback, explaining why this would be the ideal scenario for them (i.e. the high bank fee).
4. Offer a full refund for the overcharge and perhaps, also, a few free Crowns, as an apology and a form of recompense for the inconvenience (to be delivered after you reversed the chargeback, obviously).

Then, almost certainly, you would have seen the predicament they were in (and the free Crowns!) and you would have complied.

However, even if you had refused their offer, they should have still reopened your account (minus the free Crowns).

As they were the ones who made the error; not you.

Never understood why anyone should apologize for something that is not their mistake regardless of the issue as a customer service representative.

Are you a person with a healthy mind and brain? Or are you just a butt that wants gratification? You can realize how things work and understand the process. Neither of those CS reps have cause the OP this issue and it's not their responsibility to apologize for a mistake they've not made. The issue is fixed so everyone can be happy now.

I am honestly sick of this practice. Try to imagine being a CS rep and regularly apologizing to people you haven't even met before or done anything to. It messes you up, your self-esteem and future social interactions. Crap like this is WHY most of customer support reps end up hating people in general, and live poor social lives.

Because you're expected to behave and act like their B all the time, because you are constantly doing someone a favor and noone ever looks back at any effort you put into it while you are at it, fixing something someone else somewhere else messed up. That's basically abuse.

When I see CS do this (anywhere in any business) when it isn't directly their fault, I always remind them to keep their self respect above their job. Cause that matters more. Being nice, helpful and welcoming [/b]IS[/b] their job and is appreciated. Acting like your B is NOT okay and shouldn't be expected.

You know what's the funniest part BTW? None of us actually like to see stuff like "we apologize for the inconvenience" or "we're sorry this happened to you" or "on behalf of the company we'd like to apologize". Because we still realize both conscious and subconscious that noone is actually genuinely sorry, and the company couldn't care less about you. It's sinister psychology practice to get you to return and get more of your money or simply to cover their reputation. You can pretty much F off as a customer otherwise. Yet when we don't hear it it's HDHDBBDJDDJHDHDJDJDHDHJDJDJDJS BLASPHEMY. Please treat each other as they genuinely deserve to be treated!

How many of us actually tell any apologizing CS of large companies, that it's okay, that we know it's not their fault? Nearly none of us. We all just wanna "win". That's sick.

There SHOULD BE AN APOLOGY, HOWEVER, ALWAYS AND ONLY FROM THE PERSON WHOSE FAULT IT WAS! If it was the same CS rep that caused this problem, or basically refused to solve it or deal with it properly, failed to properly inform the customer etc. etc. THEN it would be okay to apologize.

(This doesn't apply to small and family businesses btw, people there are mostly somehow directly involved and their apology is expected and accepted)

Tigerseye

jircris11 wrote: »

All the CS hate in this thread, makes me wonder who the hell I talk to when I contact them as my issues have been solved each time with in a timely manner.

I've also been treated fairly and politely by CS, when it comes to stuff about purchases.

Was quite hard getting technical help, that actually helped, but anything to do with purchases has been more than fine.

There again, I'm in the UK and we have slightly better consumer laws here.

Although, not sure what will happen after Brexit, under the Tories...

Hopefully, we will still (at the very least) maintain all that, otherwise I will have to go on the warpath.

Secondly the CS agent followed rules, they are not a CR (customer relations) agent, they have a set guideline and op did a charge back thus not ONLY taking back money for services granted to them, but also getting a 2nd fee sent to zos for the charge back.

Yes, but it wasn't his fault and they also did the extremely weird thing of making him buy Crowns, to then take them away again, just so he could (finally) access his account.

The bank are also remiss, but ZOS behaved very unprofessionally, here.

Yes he was double charged, but most cases where it happens to me I get that 2nd charge refunded automatically within a day.

That would have been ideal, but he didn't know and the bank; a) didn't tell him to approach ZOS first and b) didn't let him cancel the chargeback.

Not saying the situation is not crappy, but there us no case here.

There was, absolutely, a case.

The only person not to blame, in this scenario, was the customer.

He was wronged by ZOS, then the bank, then ZOS, then the bank again.

All you can do is hope Gina can help. In the end NO MATTER how much we pay, per TOS and EULA we don't TECHNICALLY own our accounts.

Whether we technically own our accounts, or not, is irrelevant.

We pay to access them - or, at the very least, we pay for the game and xpacs - and why would we do that, if we weren't allowed to play them, after an error not on our own behalf but on ZOS's?

Saying you have no recourse, because you don't own your account is like saying you have no recourse to a car hire company, that wrongs you, because you don't own the car, or no recourse to a train company, as you don't own the train.

Totally incorrect and irrelevant.

Neoealth

deadwinston wrote: »

UPDATE - I have received a response offering some explanation and a refund for the $15.98 crown purchase. A real, feeling human has finally seen my support ticket.

@Nyladreas Thank you so much for getting the right eyes on this.

The Elder Scrolls Online Team response on 01/15/2020 01:05 PM
Hi There,

Thank you for contacting The Elder Scrolls Online Team. My name is Brad and I am an Escalations Agent here with the Support Team.

I am sorry for the confusion on this matter, and that it has taken so long to resolve. I would like to try to explain.

The fees that financial institutions charge are extremely expensive. In addition to the charge itself being reversed, they charge a substantial fee. While I am not privy to the exact numbers, a cursory Google search would support the claim that they range from $20-$100 per item that is charged back. So in a case like yours, not only would we have lost the cost of the item, but we would have been charged an additional ~$50 on top of it.

For this reason, we insist that any refund requests go through us, not the bank. This could have been all handled within 24 hours if it had been done that way.

The next best solution would have been to reverse the chargeback, then have us do a conventional refund. That way, everything gets resolved, and no one gets fined.

With bank chargebacks, we get fines, the account gets banned, and the only ones that come out on top are the banks, so naturally, we'd like to avoid that at all costs, especially over something as easy to resolve as a double charge.

In regards to the idea to have you purchase some Crowns, I believe that was an attempt to work around the fact that you were unsuccessful at reversing the chargeback, essentially recharging you for something of similar value, since the original item is no longer on sale, but it seems to have gone a bit sideways. I am not satisfied with how it has turned out, especially since this all started with something outside of your control, so I have gone ahead and refunded that item.

The $15.98 from the Crowns has been refunded through a normal refund, and the $13.98 from the double charge was refunded a while back by your bank. I believe all outstanding issues have been addressed, but if I overlooked anything, please let me know.

Best Regards,

Brad - Escalations
The Elder Scrolls Online Team

1:51 PM (4 minutes ago) to Bethesda
Brad,

That is great to hear. This is the first time I've felt like a human being was on the other end of communication here. I really appreciate you reading through it and offering the refund.

I now understand the issues with chargebacks and what can happen, but nobody spells that out. If it's such an issue, the credit card companies really shouldn't make it as easy as clicking a button to get refunded for a double charge. I will never make that mistake again.

But, when I called the credit card company, they said they couldn't reverse the chargeback unless your processor followed the dispute procedure to say it was a legitimate charge. They put a note on the chargeback that I told them to reverse it, but I guess when I sent that information to support it never happened on your end. I spent 25 minutes with them trying to get it corrected. Then your support system people waited 13 days to get back to me.

So, I am happy to have the refund coming, that resolution is great and makes up for the time I've spent trying to get this issue resolved. But my feedback here would be the large gaps where there was no response on my ticket. I'm sure the only reason I've been escalated and gotten a good outcome is because of a forum post about the issue. I wish that a real person like you could have been on this from the start or it was something that I could have talked to a human being about.

If I had to grade the support I've received, your resolution handling was A+, but the support process up until today is a definite F.

---

So thank you for everyone involved in making this right. @ZOS_GinaBruno A thousand praises to you if you got it done. I'm not 100% sure who it was. Thanks to Brad in Escalations.

I'm finishing all this up on lunch and need to get back to work, so this is probably the last I'll say on the matter. I still think a system where a ticket can go 7 days and 13 days with no response from support is broken. Locking an account out for a total of 29 days over a mistake that is very easy to make is unacceptable. The inability to talk to a real, human person on the phone is frustrating.

Glad you got it sorted! If only they explained this from the start instead of causing you lots of upset.

Sounds like the bank shares a small amount of the blame for being greedy and trying to extract high fees for thier part in dealing with the error. The bank didn't care or understand they were putting your account at risk by charging zos. But zos screwed up in the first place. Unfortunately you were caught in the middle and got treated badly.

furiouslog

Nyladreas wrote: »

Or are you just a butt that wants gratification?

The mind reels with ways to address this question.

jircris11

Tigerseye wrote: »

jircris11 wrote: »

All the CS hate in this thread, makes me wonder who the hell I talk to when I contact them as my issues have been solved each time with in a timely manner.

I've also been treated fairly and politely by CS, when it comes to stuff about purchases.

Was quite hard getting technical help, that actually helped, but anything to do with purchases has been more than fine.

There again, I'm in the UK and we have slightly better consumer laws here.

Although, not sure what will happen after Brexit, under the Tories...

Hopefully, we will still (at the very least) maintain all that, otherwise I will have to go on the warpath.

Secondly the CS agent followed rules, they are not a CR (customer relations) agent, they have a set guideline and op did a charge back thus not ONLY taking back money for services granted to them, but also getting a 2nd fee sent to zos for the charge back.

Yes, but it wasn't his fault and they also did the extremely weird thing of making him buy Crowns, to then take them away again, just so he could (finally) access his account.

The bank are also remiss, but ZOS behaved very unprofessionally, here.

Yes he was double charged, but most cases where it happens to me I get that 2nd charge refunded automatically within a day.

That would have been ideal, but he didn't know and the bank; a) didn't tell him to approach ZOS first and b) didn't let him cancel the chargeback.

Not saying the situation is not crappy, but there us no case here.

There was, absolutely, a case.

The only person not to blame, in this scenario, was the customer.

He was wronged by ZOS, then the bank, then ZOS, then the bank again.

All you can do is hope Gina can help. In the end NO MATTER how much we pay, per TOS and EULA we don't TECHNICALLY own our accounts.

Whether we technically own our accounts, or not, is irrelevant.

We pay to access them - or, at the very least, we pay for the game and xpacs - and why would we do that, if we weren't allowed to play them, after an error not on our own behalf but on ZOS's?

Saying you have no recourse, because you don't own your account is like saying you have no recourse to a car hire company, that wrongs you, because you don't own the car, or no recourse to a train company, as you don't own the train.

Totally incorrect and irrelevant.

Tech help with ANYONE via email, chat or phone is hard as most don't know how to describe the issues clearly enough. Or the solution in a way the average non tech can comprehend. This was my exp as an apple tech support...so many angry ppl who wanted me to snap my fingers and fix their issue

DMBCML

All of this can be avoided if you use prepaid visa cards, and only place enough money on them for the current transaction. Then if there are issues, they can't charge more than they are allowed to because there won't be funds to charge. For the recurring charges simply set up your card so that money is automatically sent to the prepaid cards monthly.

I'm seriously considering doing this for everything. Depending on your financial institution, the cards should not cost anything or very little.

Dusk_Coven

Neoealth wrote: »

Glad you got it sorted! If only they explained this from the start instead of causing you lots of upset.

This.
29 days locked out of their account is ludicrous. Well before that it should have gone to Escalations when the agent needed help handling it. Assuming that department existed before this debacle.

HankTwo

Pretty disgusting behavior by ZOS...

Pevey

I know they have certain policies to help prevent fraud (often if there is a chargeback the card used was stolen, so an account freeze is a good deterrent) and also to try to make people follow the proper procedure of contacting the merchant first for a correction. Chargebacks are only meant to be used when there is no merchant response...

BUT...

This case is nuts. The customer received an automated email from the credit card company because their algorithms caught the error. If you don't respond to such an email quickly, you run the risk of having your credit card deactivated to prevent possible fraud. So the customer's choices were to select the correct option, that it was a duplicate charge (and then go through all the madness described above) or select the wrong option, which would be a lie and would potentially affect his ability to dispute the charge later if he took the matter directly to the merchant and could not get a refund issued.

This situation just sucks all around. ZOS owes OP a major apology. The attitude of support puts all the blame on the customer. ZOS was the party responsible for the error (double-charging). And yet they are punishing the customer for having the gall to handle it with his credit card company, even though the credit card company initiated it and the customer had no other good option in how to respond.

Jayne_Doe

Unseelie wrote: »

What I am seeing, and where the root of this is seems to be surrounding the crowns.
The part that I am not seeing mentioned here is this...apparently there was an assumption by one party that when you created the account and paid the 13.98 that you also received an amount of crowns. Now just to verify when you bought the game, did you also pay for a month of game time? Or did the original purchase come with an amount of crowns.
Every mmo out there right now (at least the big ones..WoW, FFXIV, LotRO, SWTRO) all will ban the moment that there is any chargeback. That is not anything new or surprising.

If there was an allotment of crowns at the beginning was it 1500 or did you receive 3000 or 0.
If you did receive crowns did you spend them? I believe that is the impression given, that you had spent crowns that you were not supposed to have since you were getting a refund, if so those crowns would need to be replaced and hence they had you buy crowns to repay those used.

Again, just my impression from going through the information

If this is what you understood from reading the OP's posts, then I'm guessing that CS support completely misunderstood the issue as well.

ETA: OP, I'm really glad that this was resolved for you and that they did the correct thing, which was to refund you for the crowns they asked you to purchase. I'm not really all that satisfied with their response, however, as they basically blamed you by explaining the ways in which you could have done things to make things easier and quicker. Also, he implied that the crowns purchase was to take the place of not reversing the chargeback, still not understanding that you already paid $13.98 and the chargeback was for the DOUBLE incorrect charge. Reversing that chargeback and then them doing a refund on their end would nave resulted in you not paying anything. So, asking you to purchase 1500 crowns still makes no sense, and of course, a refund was in order. But he doesn't actually admit that this was overpayment on your part and something they never should have asked of you.

But, in the end, it doesn't matter, as you've gotten things resolved. Just wish it hadn't taken so long - but much of that delay was probably due to them having to investigate things on their end. Still, some communication during that time would have been nice - such as "we're currently investigating and will get back to you as soon as we can." I do think CS does as best as they can, and I've certainly had generally positive experiences when I've needed to contact them. Though I had one CS person that just never did quite grasp what my issue was, which I was fortunately able to resolve on my own.

TjPhysicist

deadwinston wrote: »

Never report a double charge from an MMO to your credit card company. They will lock out your account and steal from you apparently.

ok but..why not put that on the transactions page somewhere? Like "please note: if you are charged multiple times for one transaction please use this link to contact us first", i've seen a few other companies do this...

Iarao

Raisin wrote: »

That's still super disgusting on several levels. Maybe you can get some of the Support related forum staff to get in on this to get this sorted out because this is NOT where the issues should end. Even if it sucks for them that the chargeback cost then a free, holding your account hostage is in no way appropriate.

maybe the op hit the pay button twice by accident? i did that for one small zos purchase. for some reason it didnt look like my cc had gone thru, so i hit the button again. in the end, 2 charges. let it ride.

linuxlady

on steam i add money to my steam wallet then remove my cards on file and make the purchase from my wallet balance never had a double charge that way...

ZOS_ConnorG

Greetings all,

After review we have closed this thread as it is old and the information within may be out of date. You can create a new thread to continue this discussion to ensure that all of the information will be as up to date as possible. Thank you for your understanding.