Today, instead of talking about retired hot girl ish, I want to have a conversation about chargebacks (when you contact your credit card company and tell them the newsletter you willing subscribed to somehow used your card to make a fraudulent charge because you couldn’t figure out how to cancel your subscription
I wrote about this topic yesterday but what I realized is that there is a group out there deliberately filing fraud charges to hurt writers. I’ve come across this group lately - they make up fake profiles.
There are of course the people that don’t know how to unsubscribe and do this too, but there is also a new gang in town aiming to silence some of us.
Zuri I read your article and you brought up some great points. Those charges start to add up and writing on this platform will eventually become unaffordable for most of us. Substack sent me a message saying they are going to dispute the $160 charge back with American Express, but I've had this happen before and American Express usually sides with their customers and not the vendor. In a nutshell...I'm exhausted.
Looks like these Shady credit card disputers found a loop hole in the system. There’s no penalties that I’m aware of where you get pinged from your CC company letting you know that your threshold of charge backs are above the national average. this just adds to more of the economic building wealth gap. How many white women Substackers have to deal with this level of covert charge backing to undermine a business?
I took a class on food entrepreneurs and a Hawaiian food producer shared that his POS system was able to track if a particular card was always returning the food item. With food, yeah there’s always going to be some returns, but when it’s an identifiable pattern over a period of time, plus it’s happening to a collective of black people in a their industry and their white counterparts are not having the same issue. Yet it’s incredibly exhausting to now create bandwidth to now document, file and track possible financial covert targets under the guise of “fraudulent charges”. Ugh.
After communicating with an understanding Substack representative, neither of us could understand how my credit card information, used to subscribe to one Substack's feed, was accessed by another Substack publisher. Albeit an improper charge was promptly refunded, that my credit card account was even reached without my consent continues to be disturbing. Bottom line for now: When using Substack, use a credit card issuer that provides customer with so-called "virtual" credit card numbers, use that number for only one-time charges on Substack, and, after the charge has properlly posted, deactivate the "virtual" credit card number.
Unfortunately, Substack has a bunch of spam accounts that the understanding representatives do not know how to stop and they are causing chaos. The chargebacks I've had have come from subscribers who willingly signed up for my newsletter - forgot - then didn't know how to cancel and I know this because they will admit it to me in an email AFTER they file for the chargeback.
I wrote about this topic yesterday but what I realized is that there is a group out there deliberately filing fraud charges to hurt writers. I’ve come across this group lately - they make up fake profiles.
There are of course the people that don’t know how to unsubscribe and do this too, but there is also a new gang in town aiming to silence some of us.
Zuri I read your article and you brought up some great points. Those charges start to add up and writing on this platform will eventually become unaffordable for most of us. Substack sent me a message saying they are going to dispute the $160 charge back with American Express, but I've had this happen before and American Express usually sides with their customers and not the vendor. In a nutshell...I'm exhausted.
Looks like these Shady credit card disputers found a loop hole in the system. There’s no penalties that I’m aware of where you get pinged from your CC company letting you know that your threshold of charge backs are above the national average. this just adds to more of the economic building wealth gap. How many white women Substackers have to deal with this level of covert charge backing to undermine a business?
I took a class on food entrepreneurs and a Hawaiian food producer shared that his POS system was able to track if a particular card was always returning the food item. With food, yeah there’s always going to be some returns, but when it’s an identifiable pattern over a period of time, plus it’s happening to a collective of black people in a their industry and their white counterparts are not having the same issue. Yet it’s incredibly exhausting to now create bandwidth to now document, file and track possible financial covert targets under the guise of “fraudulent charges”. Ugh.
This is so true. I didn't realize this was happening to others on the platform too.
Wait…what? (Deep sigh) 😔
After communicating with an understanding Substack representative, neither of us could understand how my credit card information, used to subscribe to one Substack's feed, was accessed by another Substack publisher. Albeit an improper charge was promptly refunded, that my credit card account was even reached without my consent continues to be disturbing. Bottom line for now: When using Substack, use a credit card issuer that provides customer with so-called "virtual" credit card numbers, use that number for only one-time charges on Substack, and, after the charge has properlly posted, deactivate the "virtual" credit card number.
Unfortunately, Substack has a bunch of spam accounts that the understanding representatives do not know how to stop and they are causing chaos. The chargebacks I've had have come from subscribers who willingly signed up for my newsletter - forgot - then didn't know how to cancel and I know this because they will admit it to me in an email AFTER they file for the chargeback.