I’ve seen a thread on xbox about a guy who got charged tax by an online store a couple of weeks after the sale. How does that work? In Europe your account doesn’t simply get charged unless you give explicit permission for a company to do so, for example utilities or phone bill. Can anyone charge anyone’s account? How do you deal with that?
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This will be a debit card payment where the payment details were either retained by the merchant and a second charge made or the original price adjusted somehow.
You cannot just find out someone’s account numbers and take money from their account.
Would need to actually see the exact situation. In general someone has probably technically agreed to it.
I suspect it’s a state sales tax, and the actual credit charge was made as a pending charge and updated based on the buyers location. Sales tax is charged on digital purchases only when the seller and buyer are in the same state.
Similar to this some places will only calculate shipping charges at the time of shipment. You get charged for the item and charged for shipping separately without knowing ahead of time what the shipping price is.
In any case the buyer probably agreed to it by clicking a checkbox somewhere. You don’t have to be explicitly presented with a wall of text and the terms, a checkbox and link to the terms counts as binding for the purposes of a sales contract.
One of the common sketchier situations which is still legal is when you subscribe to some service they add on a new account charge that’s listed in a separate terms and conditions pages. Used to get this one paying for WiFi on airplanes a while ago, no idea if it’s still the case. There’s also a common change of address scam where some website offers to change your address (which can be done for about $1 through the official USPS website), makes it look like you are only paying a dollar then tacks on a $40 service fee not mentioned up front, but buried in the terms and conditions.
In general the recourse for this if something is legitimately sketchy is to treat it as fraud. Someone can’t just charge arbitrary numbers there should be a reason behind it.
In general the only recourse is to go to your credit card company and claim fraud. Most suppliers don’t go too blatant with hidden charges on account of the card companies tend to side with the buyer, and if a supplier gets hit with too many chargebacks in addition to losing revenue from that sale and a small fee, they can get fined or blacklisted completely. As a buyer if you file too many fraud claims you tend to lose the ability to file a fraud claim without getting the police involved.
At one point in time (~2009, I hope this has been corrected for) monthly recurring charges could be added to your monthly telephone bill if you were a US customer and someone submitted you phone number in an online form.
Same way it works here in the EU. If you purchase something with your debit card then that was the permission. Curious whyxbox didn’t put a large enough hold on the account to account for the tax though.
Up until the PSD2 directive came into effect in 2019, this was possible in Europe, too. As soon as a business had your card number, they could just charge you whatever they wanted to whenever they wanted.
Technically, I think they probably still can, but it is no longer allowed, so they might get into legal trouble.
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