I was irritated when £39.99 was mysteriously taken out of my bank account by PayPal and sent to Microsoft on my behalf – with absolutely no explanation or backstory to the transaction at all – on almost exactly the first working day after Christmas.
This kind of transaction is a modern scourge, and there are entire lifetimes of reading material on ultimately pointless and indulgent. Almost every major brand you can think of, including Microsoft, PayPal, Google, and more, has appeared in Adventures in Billing stories on the subject. The most frequently mentioned bad actor in this space is Netflix, whose free startup offer gathers your payment information and then subtly uses PayPal’s repeat-payment system to charge you. The email informing you of the transfer never arrives prior to the money being sent; it always does.
So allow me to demonstrate how simple it is to stop these automatic payments. My identity with Microsoft is a very strange thing, and the debit was between Microsoft and PayPal. I’ve had it for a very long time, and it’s connected to a wide range of services, including Azure, Xbox 360, MSDN, and various internal beta versions of Server 2012 R2 features that were never put into production. Any one of these services could be to blame for the mysterious £40 charge.
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I called Microsoft in the UK, and after only a few voice menus, I discovered the section for billing inquiries. We came to the conclusion that the transaction was probably fraudulent in Microsoft’s eyes because neither he nor I could find any evidence of it in the summary pages of my Microsoft account history, which goes back at least two years. I had a great conversation with a fellow Irishman (or so he thought, based on my name, anyway). He advised me to get in touch with PayPal right away.
PayPal had a somewhat more manageable set of phone menus to navigate, and its viewpoint was quite distinct. According to PayPal, £39.99 is a typical Xbox payment amount, and numerous transfers for similar sums occurred in the first week of the year. Then, a kind fellow countryman advised that I simply stop the automatic repeat, noting that non-automatic annual or periodic bills are handled by sending out reminders as the bill date approaches.
Therefore, I didn’t just zap the disputed £40 once a year payment to Microsoft, which it appears Microsoft collects but can’t link to my account; I also nuked the other payment to Netflix and found one I had completely forgotten about to Linden Research, the holding company for Second Life.
You only need to sign in to PayPal, click on Profile (currently far-right on the grey menu bar on the homepage once you’ve signed in), select My Money, and then click on the final plain-background link, “My pre-approved payments,” to accomplish what you want to. You can immediately delete the recipients’ names from the list that appears there.
I must admit that it felt great to click all those Cancel buttons. It’s possible that I’ll eventually learn that in order to use Netflix, I must pay a fee. But shouldn’t that be how things operate in any case?
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