Beware the $9.99 Recurring Charge

FLORIDA  
Opinion by:  
E. Eugene Webb PhD

Last week I was going through my credit cards during an audit on what has been paid and what has not, and I discovered a $9.99 charge on one of my credit cards.

You may not know it, but almost all major credit cards offer an easy-to-use search application if you have an account login. You can search on any number of parameters and one of them is price.

I put $9.99 into the search box and up came five of these charges, the first one in January of 2025 for $0.00 and the remaining for $9.99 each. I went back and checked on the actual charge and it was for an Amazon application called Luna, a gaming application.

Nobody in my household is a gamer I could not find where I had  placed the order or approved the order. Later I discovered it had been hung on the bottom of one of my Christmas orders as a trial with one of those you have to cancel it or it automatically renews features. No notice to continue or cancel was ever received.

The first thing I tried to do was cancel Luna. Turns out Luna is a company owned by Amazon and while the splash page says cancel anytime there is no place to click cancel. I went back to my credit card and challenged all five charges which are currently under review.

The subscription was charged on a credit card in my Amazon wallet, which turns out to be Amazon’s wallet not mine, and since it was in the wallet my additional approval was not necessary. I took all my credit cards out of the wallet.

After a lot of clicking around inside Amazon and a couple of calls to their customer service, not very friendly by the way, I finally managed to get it cancelled but all they would refund is the latest charge, even though their promotion says,” If you have found this on your account and have not opened it or used it you may be able to get a refund for all charges” not so.

So, as I write, the issue is not yet fully resolved.

I just decided to write this since all the frauds you may run into on the Internet are not necessarily perpetrated by scammers. Some of the very people you do business with on a regular basis may have some rather clever marketing methods that you might never expect.

So, here is the takeaway. You should check your credit cards frequently, especially the ones that you use on the Internet no matter who you are buying from and look for those recurring charges. $9.99, $6.99. And so on. If one of these pops up just go to your credit card account, look for the search section of the account put the number in search box, set the range for a year or more so you get several months and take a look at what you get. If something pops up check it out and immediately challenge it on your credit card if you did not buy it.

Be prepared for a struggle but press on to get the refund you deserve.

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