[bitfolk] DD vs continuous credit card authority (Was: Re: What do you expect to happen when you authorise a Direct Debit mandate?)

Hello, On Tue, Sep 08, 2020 at 10:57:55AM +0100, John Winters wrote: Going off on a bit of tangent but yes, the Direct Debit guarantee is very consumer-oriented as you can dispute any DD transaction (even years old ones) without having to give a reason and you get your money back; the merchant has to pursue you for it. More than once I've had people say they want to pay by PayPal because they don't trust DD, which really baffles me because PayPal take a continuous CC authority on at least one of their cards as a funding source, which means they gave PayPal the ability to take an unlimited amount of money from them, over and over until the card details expire or the card is cancelled. While credit card providers are usually willing to entertain a chargeback, they aren't legally obliged to. And as you say, there is no way to stop a company with a continuous authority from charging you again and again. We like DD though mainly because the fees are less than the other methods and the GoCardless API is fairly nice to work with. Continuous credit card authority is still something that we have to implement because non-UK customers can't use DD¹. Cheers, Andy ¹ GoCardless do operate in more jurisdictions, including all the popular ones like EU, US and AU, but to take payments that way BitFolk would have to operate bank accounts in all those currencies, which is a bit inconvenient. -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting