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snarpFig. 1: What I see when I log in to Yahoo Wallet.
Fig. 2: What was in my email today.
Yep! As you can see, I have no business relationship with Yahoo. YET THEY ARE CHARGING ME MONEY ANYWAY. A mystery.
For historical background, this is the fourth time this has happened. Apparently I get one fraudulent charge in early April every year, and another fraudulent charge in mid-November. Behold: My first post on the matter, exactly 365 days ago, and my second, in November of last year. (I for some reason didn't post about the November 2008 incident.) Further notes on this apparently neverending saga can be found preserved for the ages under my Yahoo tag.
Notably, when I go to Yahoo Billing's Invoice History page, of the four fraudulent charges, only the very first one, from November 2008, shows up. PayPal knows Yahoo charged me $35, and my bank's website knows Yahoo charged me $35 - but Yahoo, apparently, does not.
After trying several non-working customer support numbers, I found one that did work ((866) 562-7219), got a live person, and got put on and off hold for about half an hour.
The rep at one point told me that the charge was for my Flickr account, but 1) Flickr is only $24.95 a year, and this charge was for $34.95, 2) my Flickr account isn't up for renewal until July, and 3) it's not set to renew automatically anyway; since this started happening, I always do it manually.
I'd checked all this before calling, so when I pointed it out to her, she paused for a second, then told me that, actually, the charge had been rejected and I hadn't really lost any money. After questioning her about this assertion, I established that, like my Yahoo Billing invoice history page, the database she was looking at actually had no record of the charge being made at all. After a minute, she acknowledged that she'd been looking at that very first fraudulent charge, from November 2008.
So unless she honestly misread the dates and charge amounts - twice - I think she may have been deliberately trying to confuse me with plausible-seeming reasons for the charge. Is Yahoo actively training their support people to do stuff like this? Are they in that much trouble financially?
I offered to read her the PayPal transaction IDs for the new charges, but she didn't want them. She told me to go file a dispute with PayPal. So I could include the conversation in the PayPal dispute note, I asked her for her name - which she wouldn't give me - and for a reference number for the call, which she gave only after putting me on hold for seven minutes.
I felt bad forcing this out of her - I'm sure Yahoo's worse to work for than to do business with, and she sounded pretty stressed out that I was asking her so many questions. But this has been going on for two years, and I wanted to at least try to get it stopped. It doesn't sound like I did.
Assuming incompetence on Yahoo's part rather than outright malice - because that's the safest bet in most situations - I'd guess that these charges are coming from some ghost database that's several years out of date, and thinks my account's still active. It seems pretttty reasonable to assume that it's a Yahoo database rather than a PayPal one, given that a lot of other people have had this problem with Yahoo, too.
What's really bugging me now is that, last time this happened, I decided that they wouldn't be able to do this if you went in and manually removed your PayPal billing agreement from Yahoo! Wallet. I thought this because the November charges have never gone through, and I always checked to make sure my billing information was safely out of there after getting the emails scolding me for not letting them charge me.
Unfortunately, that's clearly not the case - I haven't had anything to do with Yahoo since last November, so the ghost database has clearly gone ahead and re-instated my billing agreement with PayPal without my permission. Let me put that in boldface, there: Yahoo has re-instated my billing agreement with them without my permission. Probably pretty illegal, Yahoo! You should look into that? BEFORE SOMEBODY FILES A CLASS ACTION SUIT, MAYBE.
So, I don't really know what advice to give people at this point! Never, ever get involved with Yahoo in any way, ever? There doesn't seem to be any way to stop this from happening - you just have to keep doing the PayPal disputes or credit card chargebacks every time you see they've made a fraudulent charge, I guess.
(Just to re-iterate my usual Yahoo schpiel: There are other good reasons to avoid Yahoo, like their semi-official blackmail policy for owners of privately registered domains. Basically, if you ever cancel your subscription, they release your real name and address to the world. Useful for people involved in international civil liberties work or for whistle-blowers, Yahoo! You're awesome. It's notable that in 2008, they also jacked up their yearly domain registration costs to $35, wayyyy above the industry standard. It looks like a pretty straight-up blackmail scheme to me.)
Fig. 2: What was in my email today.
Yep! As you can see, I have no business relationship with Yahoo. YET THEY ARE CHARGING ME MONEY ANYWAY. A mystery.
For historical background, this is the fourth time this has happened. Apparently I get one fraudulent charge in early April every year, and another fraudulent charge in mid-November. Behold: My first post on the matter, exactly 365 days ago, and my second, in November of last year. (I for some reason didn't post about the November 2008 incident.) Further notes on this apparently neverending saga can be found preserved for the ages under my Yahoo tag.
Notably, when I go to Yahoo Billing's Invoice History page, of the four fraudulent charges, only the very first one, from November 2008, shows up. PayPal knows Yahoo charged me $35, and my bank's website knows Yahoo charged me $35 - but Yahoo, apparently, does not.
After trying several non-working customer support numbers, I found one that did work ((866) 562-7219), got a live person, and got put on and off hold for about half an hour.
The rep at one point told me that the charge was for my Flickr account, but 1) Flickr is only $24.95 a year, and this charge was for $34.95, 2) my Flickr account isn't up for renewal until July, and 3) it's not set to renew automatically anyway; since this started happening, I always do it manually.
I'd checked all this before calling, so when I pointed it out to her, she paused for a second, then told me that, actually, the charge had been rejected and I hadn't really lost any money. After questioning her about this assertion, I established that, like my Yahoo Billing invoice history page, the database she was looking at actually had no record of the charge being made at all. After a minute, she acknowledged that she'd been looking at that very first fraudulent charge, from November 2008.
So unless she honestly misread the dates and charge amounts - twice - I think she may have been deliberately trying to confuse me with plausible-seeming reasons for the charge. Is Yahoo actively training their support people to do stuff like this? Are they in that much trouble financially?
I offered to read her the PayPal transaction IDs for the new charges, but she didn't want them. She told me to go file a dispute with PayPal. So I could include the conversation in the PayPal dispute note, I asked her for her name - which she wouldn't give me - and for a reference number for the call, which she gave only after putting me on hold for seven minutes.
I felt bad forcing this out of her - I'm sure Yahoo's worse to work for than to do business with, and she sounded pretty stressed out that I was asking her so many questions. But this has been going on for two years, and I wanted to at least try to get it stopped. It doesn't sound like I did.
Assuming incompetence on Yahoo's part rather than outright malice - because that's the safest bet in most situations - I'd guess that these charges are coming from some ghost database that's several years out of date, and thinks my account's still active. It seems pretttty reasonable to assume that it's a Yahoo database rather than a PayPal one, given that a lot of other people have had this problem with Yahoo, too.
What's really bugging me now is that, last time this happened, I decided that they wouldn't be able to do this if you went in and manually removed your PayPal billing agreement from Yahoo! Wallet. I thought this because the November charges have never gone through, and I always checked to make sure my billing information was safely out of there after getting the emails scolding me for not letting them charge me.
Unfortunately, that's clearly not the case - I haven't had anything to do with Yahoo since last November, so the ghost database has clearly gone ahead and re-instated my billing agreement with PayPal without my permission. Let me put that in boldface, there: Yahoo has re-instated my billing agreement with them without my permission. Probably pretty illegal, Yahoo! You should look into that? BEFORE SOMEBODY FILES A CLASS ACTION SUIT, MAYBE.
So, I don't really know what advice to give people at this point! Never, ever get involved with Yahoo in any way, ever? There doesn't seem to be any way to stop this from happening - you just have to keep doing the PayPal disputes or credit card chargebacks every time you see they've made a fraudulent charge, I guess.
(Just to re-iterate my usual Yahoo schpiel: There are other good reasons to avoid Yahoo, like their semi-official blackmail policy for owners of privately registered domains. Basically, if you ever cancel your subscription, they release your real name and address to the world. Useful for people involved in international civil liberties work or for whistle-blowers, Yahoo! You're awesome. It's notable that in 2008, they also jacked up their yearly domain registration costs to $35, wayyyy above the industry standard. It looks like a pretty straight-up blackmail scheme to me.)
