I just received a message that my claim of unauthorized account activity was denied... and I'm left with the impression that it evidently is okay, once you authorize a small transaction (regardless of whether you received anything or not), for that seller to then go ahead and siphon your account for additional money. Here's the situation. My husband authorized a $4.95 payment to an online seller with hopes of catching a streaming broadcast of a football game: Product: Catch The Action LIVE! Vendor's Site: http://stream-online-movie.com Charge from: ClickBank Unfortunately I wasn't there, otherwise my "scam!" alarm bells might have gone off. Evidently this "service" entitles you to access information about possible programming that could be streamed online, but without promise of any actual access to programming. Nice. Okay, so we're out $4.95 -- embarrassing lesson learned. After that, however, a subsequent charge of $45 appeared on our PayPal account. Apparently this company, after already charging us money for nothing, was now helping themselves to additional chunks of cash from our bank account. PayPal's solution was to suggest that we deactivate the Preapproved Payment Agreement from our profile, disallowing the merchant for making future charges to our account. Well, yeah. But I'm left wondering if, under PayPal's fraud guidelines, it's okay for a company, after you authorize a small payment, to arbitrarily charge a second transaction (for no exchange of product or service, no less). If that isn't unauthorized, I don't know what is. Next steps, anyone?
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