today, and over the last few years i’ve learned something interesting about the credit card industry. let’s pretend that during covid you sign up for a service to help keep you entertained (no, it’s not porn, ok). you sign up for a year subscription. before that year is up you go to the web site and you cancel your subscription and delete your account. then, around the time for the year to be up you see your credit card billed for the subscription rate. you call the credit card company and dispute the charge. they take away the charge and you think nothing of it. a year goes by. suddenly, you see that same charge pop up again. you try to login to the web page and you can’t, it says no account. you fill out their contact form. no response. you call the credit card company again. this time they dispute the charge but they also send you a new credit card. a year goes by. you don’t even notice it for over 2 months because you never use that card under normal circumstances but you happen to notice a charge. what could it be? you download statements. sure enough, 2 months prior there’s a charge from that same company. this is where you learn something interesting. what the company is doing isn’t even fraud. they’re gaming the credit card system. see, when you get a new card from the bank, that card is still associated to the same account as the old card. any company that you’ve done business for something like a subscription with can then just use services from mastercard/visa to grab whatever new card is associated with that account and it’s fine. the only way i will be able to deal with this is go down to the credit union and have them fully close the credit account and then create me an entirely new account.