Tell your grandparents to stop signing up for “free trials”.

I work for a major credit card company, in the fraud department. Basically, we send out fraud alerts for suspicious transactions and people call in to let us know if they’re valid or not, or they call us when they notice unauthorized transactions on their card.

Several times a day, I have the following call:

Me: Hi, this is lucythelumberjack from Credit Card’s charge verification group,

Elderly caller: I have a charge for XX.XX from Insert Incredibly Sketchy Name Here, and I never made that charge

Me: oh, I’m so sorry to hear that! I see that they billed you fourteen days ago for X.XX. Is it possible that you signed up for a free trial, or something where you only had to pay shipping?

Elderly caller, EVERY SINGLE TIME: well yes but I never authorized them to bill me further!

Me: (sigh) in the fine print of a lot of those websites you’ll find that they’re actually enrolling you in a subscription program. Have you tried contacting them to cancel your subscription?

Elderly caller: No, I want to dispute it as fraud

Me: So since you gave them your information, it’s not fraud, but I’d be more than happy to transfer you to billing disputes—

Elderly caller: IT’S FRAUD!!!!!

And then due to legal whatever, I have to take a fraud claim. Which is a big hassle for the cardmembsr, when chargebacks is just going to put the charge right back on their card. It’s not our fault you can’t read fine print.

It’s always skin care or diet/“energy” pills, too. The merchant location always just shows up as an 800 number, and the names are distinctly sketchy… think Health Life Plus Energy Now or similar strings of barely related words. I’ve heard from the few callers that have actually tried to call the merchants that it’s impossible to get a hold of anyone who works there, and I’ve never talked to anyone who actually received the product they ordered. They’re all straight up scams. I have no idea how billing disputes handles them or if they can even do anything, but man, they’re a pain in my ass.