Actually I do visit the BBB if I am dealing with a new and unknown merchant before making a purchase. I also do searches with the business and add the words dispute, ripoff and problems. It's amazing what you learn.
Now if you don't find anything that doesn't mean there won't be problems. But if you do it's like a flashing red light on the dashboard to back away.
If it’s a merchant, just use a credit card. Payment processors don’t like fraud, and it’s one phone call to report a disputed charge. Disputes come out of the merchants pocket and then their rates go up or they are dropped by the processor. You also benefit everyone else by finding and hurting the bad merchant.
I had quite a poor experience with this recently.
Found out that there was a recurring charge from a website I had no relation with whatsoever, upon reporting this to my bank the answers were:
- Contact the site (I had, got stonewalled)
- No we can’t block that
- Just block your card and ask for a new one
Ultimately I got things resolved and money was paid back by the site because of relentless emailing and keeping factual (like the article talks about) that resolved it.
Needless to say the bank wasn’t real helpful so “just use a credit card” doesn’t quite seem to work, at least in my experience.
(This was in NL btw, not US)
You shouldn't try to block transactions when something you never did shows up, you should report it as fraud. If they got your number, somebody else probably has it too. Trying to "block" probably got you put in the wrong pipeline.
I had a similar experience with a (quite popular but not google) website provider that I had a relationship with and had given them my CC. At some point my account credentials went invalid - I could not do a password recovery no matter what I tried. Since I could not log in, I could not cancel the subscription. I emailed them and got no response. I could not contact "customer service" because I had to log into the site in order to do that.
After two years(!) of charges (charged once a year) and no responses, I got fed up and contested the most recent charge on my CC. I was contacted via email the next day by a customer service representative who was pretty unhappy with the chargeback and threatened me with cancelling my account. Exactly what I wanted - problem solved!
Now if you don't find anything that doesn't mean there won't be problems. But if you do it's like a flashing red light on the dashboard to back away.