It depends on how the actual purchase was worded whether or not you should be able to get a chargeback. I didn't buy from them, so I don't know.
With some clever legal wording, it is possible to sell something that the end user considers "prepay/future use" (like calling card minutes), but as far as the credit card company etc. are concerned it was a final sale over and done with like a normal purchase. This is not to say that the issuing bank is going to give one and they will just as likely process a chargeback as normal (and later reverse it as long as someone is still at the other end shooting back the boilerplate rebuttal). I'd suggest people wait as long as they can before filing a chargeback -- merchants only get so many days (10 on my account) to respond before it's automatically settled in the customer's favor. If you wait as long as you can, there's a better chance someone won't be sitting there replying. I used to work for a shady company that sold calling cards online/phone by credit card. It was a big thing to make sure that the sales material/call-scripts were worded to make sure that once the customer took posession of the pin code the transaction was "completed" in terms of the credit card company. They often "lost accounts" or "discontinued programs" that customers still had minutes in, and they were able to escape from chargebacks by sending the fine print to their bank as their rebuttal to the customer's complaint. I didn't stay long after finding this out, the pay wasn't worth having a company like that on my CV. If you read up on the rumors around Dr. Phil, supposedly it's quite common (and in some isolated areas still legal) to do a similar thing with health clubs. Sell one year membership contracts, factor the contract to someone else, close. The customer is still responsible for completing their payments to the factor. The customer can't chargeback payments they already made via credit card because the way the contract is worded it doesn't matter if the health club is still open or not. With lawyers a dime a dozen these days, I can't imagine that LiveVOIP didn't make sure to put every protection they could in their terms of service or what have you. Most people don't even read them, or just don't care what it says. I know nothing about LiveVOIP, so I'm not trying to suggest that they were indeed shady -- just letting people know that chargeback rules aren't a fix-all. _______________________________________________ Asterisk-Users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
