Charging me $300 a year despite cancelling

  • Unknown's avatar
    tylerblake1993 · Member ·

    Your system has been charging me $300 USD a year for a plan I made sure I cancelled years ago.

    I cancelled this in 2018. I’ve just realised in a most recent credit card statement that you have been charging me $300 USD a year!

    I have just opened a dispute with american express. My card ends in [redacted by staff].

    The recent trasnaction for $300 USD was on 5 FEB 2022 (Reference number: [redacted by staff]).

    Please look into this and refund this transaction and the others that have been wrongfully charged.

    Regards,
    Tyler

    WP.com: Yes
    Correct account: Yes

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi Tyler,

    This is a public forum, visible to everyone on the internet. Please don’t post sensitive information like credit card details or transaction reference numbers here.

    The tylerblake1993 account you used to create this forum thread hasn’t owned any upgrades with us since October 2019, when you cancelled the Business Plan you used to own with us. We haven’t charged you since then, and don’t even have a valid credit card on file for you which we could charge.

    You can see the full billing history for this account here:

    https://wordpress.com/me/purchases/billing

    The payment you mention above appear to be for the site, bapoffroad.com, that belongs to the username account, bapoffroad

    If that’s also your account, and you no longer have your login details, please follow our account recovery process at https://wordpress.com/en/support/account-recovery/ so we can help you regain access. Once you’ve verified your ownership of that account we can then also help you to cancel the upgrades under that account, and refund the recent renewal payment.

    But please do not dispute the charge – we will be more than happy to refund you once you’ve verified ownership of the account, but if you dispute the charge instead, the funds will be frozen by our payment processor, making it impossible for us to refund you. In that case you will only be refunded once our payment processor concludes their investigation into the dispute, which could take as long as 12 weeks.

    https://wordpress.com/en/support/payment/chargebacks/

    Let me know if you have any questions.

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Just an additional note:

    At the moment the domain, bapoffroad.com, is redirecting to a website hosted at GoDaddy.com.

    But in March 2019 that domain was connected to the WordPress.com site, bapoffroad.wordpress.com using our Business Plan by the bapoffroad account. That plan is still active and we’ve never received a request from the other account to cancel that plan.

  • Unknown's avatar
    tylerblake1993 · Member ·

    You responded to my ticket/post on the forum regarding $300 transactions. You asked me to respond yet your email was sent from ‘(email visible only to moderators and staff)’

    I’ve just gained access to the ‘bapoffroad’ account now.

    There are 3 charges from 2020, 2021 and now 2022. Each for $300 USD.

    I need you to refund these charges. $900 USD that has been WRONGLY CHARGED to me.

    I used your services for about a month on a free plan in 2019 before removing the credit card from payment methods on the wordpress dashboard. I never accessed the account since, as you may be able to tell. 

    Your system has then decided to keep my payment method on file and continue this plan going, charging me $300 per year for the last 3 years. A total of $900 has been wrongly charged to me.

    If this is not refunded, I will be seeking legal advice and going on a rampage across all public forums. This is borderline criminal behaviour if this is not refunded.

    Regards,
    Tyler

    Correct account: Unknown

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi Tyler. It appears you created a new forum thread instead of replying to your existing one. I’ve merged your thread into this one.

    The noreply email you mention is just a notification that someone has replied to your forum thread. To add a new response you need to visit this thread directly at https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/charging-me-300-a-year-despite-cancelling and post your reply here.

    I’ve just gained access to the ‘bapoffroad’ account now.

    There are 3 charges from 2020, 2021 and now 2022. Each for $300 USD.

    I need you to refund these charges. $900 USD that has been WRONGLY CHARGED to me.

    You are still posting to this forum thread as tylerblake1993, and we cannot refund any payments made under another account at your request.

    Please log into the bapoffroad account and contact live chat support at https://wordpress.com/help/contact, and they can take a look at what’s possible here.

  • Unknown's avatar
    bapoffroad · Member ·

    Here I am, commenting from the account with the billing issue, just as you requested.

    Please refund the 3x payments of $300 that have been wrongfully charged over the last 3 years.

    As explained, in 2019, I used your service for a few months on a free plan. After which, I removed the payment method from the account and never logged in again.

    I have only just noticed today, 3 years later, that you have been charging me $300 on the 5th of Feb every year for the last 3 years.

    It seems like your system decided to ignore the fact that I removed the payment method and just started to bill me once the free plan ended.

    I have not even logged into the account in over 3 years.

    Please refund me the $900 or I will be getting legal advice. This is ridiculous and seems like I’m not the only one this has happened to after searching your forum.

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Thanks for posting as the correct account.

    I’ve refunded the $300 charge from 5 February 2022 and cancelled all upgrades in your account so you won’t be charged again. You should receive the full refund in about 10 business days, depending on your bank’s processing times. You can view a receipt for this refund in your billing history at https://wordpress.com/me/purchases/billing.

    However, the other charges cannot be refunded any more as they’re over a year old. I realise this is frustrating, but due to the age of these payments there’s nothing more we can do in this case.

    Your account bought a Premium Plan from us under this account on 7 March 2019, and then proceeded to upgrade it to a Business Plan on the same day. You can see the receipts for those two payments in your billing history I linked to above.

    The subsequent charges were for the annual renewal of that plan – auto-renewal is enabled by default on all upgrades purchased on WordPress.com, as explained in our renewal policy, and we never received any request from your account to disable that for this site.

    We sent you a reminder email a month prior to each renewal (the most recent one was sent on 6 January), and we emailed you a receipt once each renewal payment was completed. Those were sent to the email address we have on file for the bapoffroad account. I see you updated that email around an hour ago – if the original email is no longer active, that would explain why you never received these emails.

    Let us know if you have any further questions about this.

  • Unknown's avatar
    bapoffroad · Member ·

    kokkieh,

    I have cancelled the credit card today to avoid any further unauthorised charged being made to it by your company. I hope that does not effect this refund you have just made.

    Regarding the previous two refunds, I don’t care if they are over a year old, they were unauthorised.

    I REMOVED MY CREDIT CARD AS A PAYMENT METHOD WHILE ON A FREE PLAN.

    You had no right to retain my credit card data and proceed to bill me $300 a year for services not rendered.

    Obviously you did not recieve a request to disable auto renewal. I was not aware that was even a thing I had to do! I thought removing my credit card data meant that you were UNABLE TO CHARGE ME and would subsequently cancel the plan.

    Regarding renewal emails? The email address ((email visible only to moderators and staff)) used on the account was deactivated at the same time I cancelled this wordpress account, so of course I didn’t recieve any of your emails.

    That’s a poor excuse to tell me that I should have recieved emails pertaining to the renewal, like it gives you the right to bill me? That’s like billing someone illegally and telling them you sent an invoice in the mail and it’s not your fault if it got lost.

    This is honestly criminal and I will be seeking legal advice if my $900 is not refunded.

    You can CLEARLY see that I have not even logged into the account in 3 years. I REMOVED my credit card as the payment method in 2019 before any charges were to even be made.

    Your system obviously did not accept that and went on to bill me annually anyway.

    I EXPECT A FULL REFUND, NOTHING LESS!

  • staff-mckluskey · Staff ·

    Hi Tyler,

    In 2019, you contacted us asking that we remove the domains connected to your site. We’ve done that and asked if you wanted to keep your site with us, as you still had an active Business plan on your account. We’ve never received a reply to that.
    You haven’t disabled the auto-renewal, canceled the plan or closed your account, so the charges would renew annually, according to our renewal policy.

    Our refund policy allows us to refund charges made less than 14 days ago, so, apart from what we already refunded, I’m afraid we won’t be able to refund the subscriptions from past years.

    If you’d like to consider hosting your site with us again, as a courtesy, we can add credits to your account that you could use to upgrade your plan without additional cost.

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