I wonder if CC companies have a way of punishing companies for this. At least in my circles, the sense of security from having charge-backs is a huge reason a lot of people even use CCs. If Visa told Uber/Epic/etc "you can't use our network if you're going to undermine our features".
Though it would smell a bit like a giant squashing ants... anti-trust and all that. :/ So maybe government getting a handle on Dark Patterns is the best way to do things.
> I wonder if CC companies have a way of punishing companies for this.
Yes, if they get enough people doing chargebacks. The challenge is most of these big co's seem to be in the "too big to punish" camp. This is both you need a large amount of chargebacks and perhaps they may not want to fire the companies (though this is speculative).
> At least in my circles, the sense of security from having charge-backs is a huge reason a lot of people even use CCs.
I'm with you that this is still important and valuable because many companies don't blacklist you. Furthermore I'd rather have that protection and testing a service which could be no service than no service at all.
I wouldn't expect them to drop the company as a client; I don't think that really serves anyone.
My suggestion would be to levy higher transaction fees on the business, and provide refunds to customers out of that. If a company is going to ban users for filing chargebacks, raise their transaction fees by 0.5% or 1% and have the CC company issue refunds themselves out of that pool.
At the end of the day, it's really a problem for the government to solve, though. Companies being able to get away with such blatantly anti-consumer policies is indicative of a substantial distortion in the market. I don't think this is something that would happen if there were robust competition in the market.
Note that chargebacks are mostly a US thing. In Europe you basically can't charge back and last time I enquired about even blocking a company from making new charges I was told that doing this required me to block the entire card and get a new one issued.
It'd really very odd to see Americans insist that they should have the right to take a service, get the money back for it from the business i.e. get the service for free, and then go back and get service again! That's pretty unfair towards the business.
Maybe, but I've never heard anyone I know in Europe ever refer to making a chargeback or even raising the possibility of doing one. It certainly isn't common. Perhaps it depends on what country you're in.
Chargebacks are mandated by law on credit-cards in Europe, and they have saved the ass of many people, and stopped a lot of fraud.
When covid hapepned, many airplane companies were not refunding cancelled flights, everyone who bought tickets with a credit card could do a chargeback, and buy another ticket. Everyone else was stuck in disputes for months, some for years, some never got money back.
When you pay with a debit card, you are paying with your money. So you could lose all the money you have, that's bad.
But the credit-card is the Bank's money. You could loose all the money you don't have. You could lose unlimited amount of money - after all, the bank decides if to accept a transaction. That's Much Much Worse.
So let's say you bought something for $500 on the credit card, then the bank has to collect this money from you.
So the Chargeback is really you telling the bank that someone stole from them, it was the bank's money after all, and that they cannot collect from you. It is then between the bank and the merchant to fight it out.
Basically the bank is providing you credit, they decide how much credit to provide, and they are also in charge of security -> making sure it was you and not someone stealing your credit card. So they hold the buck.
Though it would smell a bit like a giant squashing ants... anti-trust and all that. :/ So maybe government getting a handle on Dark Patterns is the best way to do things.