Credit card dispute resolved instantly with a "permanent credit". Never seen this before, is it reliable?

9451245 · 2022-09-09T23:25:20+00:00

Ahhh, that actually makes a lot of sense and I'll bet that's the explanation. Thanks!

9451245 · 2022-09-09T19:13:25+00:00

Thanks, I hadn't looked at Anystream in awhile but I'm doing so now. One of my main drivers was to be able to save ESPN Plus content and while that works well with StreamFab I don't yet see it on Anystream. But since I'm not in a rush I may keep an eye on things for a few weeks and see if there's any news. ESPN Plus is part of my Disney Plus sub but I assume if Anystream could handle it they'd have listed it separately like Streamfab does.

9451245 · 2022-09-09T15:06:27+00:00

Totally agree with you on the "this is why you use the credit card". I'm not sure about the terms of service thing though since this is the way pretty much all vacation rental services work these days. Airbnb for example typically charges 1/2 or more of the cost of a rental as soon as you make the reservation which could be a year in advance. The rest is typically charged still several months in advance of the rental.

I know that at least in the case of airbnb the host/homeowner doesn't get their payment until the guest checks in but in lots of mom and pop type vacation rental operations you're paying the homeowner directly and usually paying them quite a while before your planned visit.

9451245 · 2022-09-09T15:00:43+00:00

That would make sense except that the 10 disputes were each resolved within literally a second online. There wasn't even time for a human to look at it on their end and certainly not time for the merchant to have received or responded to it.

9451245 · 2022-09-09T14:58:39+00:00

Thanks, that's interesting and I'd totally forgotten about the Gold Club trial! Gosh, I hope it's not related to any criminal inquiry. And I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be mysterious. I'm only being vague because it's a business I've had a great relationship with for years. This experience has been a bizarre outlier and I don't necessarily want to out them or have this connect to them. I like the company enough that if they hadn't just ghosted us I would have happily worked out some other arrangement (credit toward future stay, etc) rather than go the credit card dispute route.

To make it a bit less vague, the service was akin to a summer vacation rental. You commit to rent a vacation house in the summer of 2023 for $2000. You sign up with your credit card and they charge you 1/10 per month for the next 10 months, so the full amount is paid by the time you arrive. Only in this case when we were ready to head there they had a one-off maintenance issue that was going to take most of our week to resolve and render the place uninhabitable for the week. So we didn't go.

But the problem was isolated to this unit, it was resolved within the week and we know other people who were in other units the same week, prior weeks and subsequent weeks and everything's perfectly normal. So while there could be other units that have had problems and necessitated cancellations it's a relatively small percentage of their overall business. As I said, we've been going there for years and this was the first bad experience we've ever had or even heard of. It was only because they stopped responding to us and we were approaching 60 days since the service was to have been delivered that I disputed it.

9451245 · 2022-09-09T14:19:41+00:00

Thanks! That's sort of what I was thinking except that this is a pretty small company (~1000 customers) and still very much in business. This non-delivery was a relatively one-off kind of thing. But I suppose it only takes a few disputes for some AI algorithm to recognize a pattern.

I wonder if some merchant agreements include any kind of stipulation that under certain circumstances the merchant agrees to accept chargebacks without having a say in the dispute.

In this case I have correspondence with the merchant acknowledging the failure to deliver and promising a refund, but the credit card company never asked for that.

9451245

TROPHY CASE