Wireless Carriers Are Messing With Your Autopay Discount (theverge.com) 60
According to a new report by The Wall Street Journal, mobile carriers including Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile are all requiring customers to switch to a debit card or bank account withdrawal in order to receive an autopay discount on their plan. Verizon has included this requirement for years, but in the past few months the other two carriers have quietly added it too. The Verge reports: The new rule goes into effect for AT&T customers on October 2nd, and as a gesture of goodwill, the company will only reduce your discount if you continue to pay with a credit card. Those who register for autopay with a bank or debit card will receive $10 off; a credit card will only get you $5. T-Mobile's change went into effect in July, also eliminating Apple Pay and Google Pay as methods eligible for the $5 discount. Oh, and technically, you can qualify for Verizon's autopay discount with a credit card -- it just has to be a Verizon Visa card.
AT&T and T-Mobile aren't just making this a requirement for new customers -- the change is being applied to all postpaid accounts. Even if you've been receiving the discount for years with a credit card, you'll have to make the switch in order to keep your discount. And it adds up -- the discounts are applied for each line on your plan, so if your whole family is on the same plan, it's a significant amount of money.
AT&T and T-Mobile aren't just making this a requirement for new customers -- the change is being applied to all postpaid accounts. Even if you've been receiving the discount for years with a credit card, you'll have to make the switch in order to keep your discount. And it adds up -- the discounts are applied for each line on your plan, so if your whole family is on the same plan, it's a significant amount of money.
Even big companies have Visa/Mastercard fees (Score:2)
Old news.
I had to change months ago.
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I have been an AT&T prepaid customer with autopay from a PayPal account for several years. I pay $30/mo and it's more than enough for my needs. I have received no notifications that moving to a debit card would save me any money. Even when I sign in to the portal, there is no notice nor alert letting me know that this is a future requirement.
Comcast is doing the same.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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No reason, but Comcast recently increased my bill from $120/mon for 85Mb/sec to $170/mon, which triggered the notice and manual request override. I'm about to go downgrade them. (I'd pick someone
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No reason, but Comcast recently increased my bill from $120/mon for 85Mb/sec to $170/mon, which triggered the notice and manual request override. I'm about to go downgrade them.
Might have been the end of a 1-year or 2-year promotional period, which is what happened to me. I immediately switched to a cheaper plan, so I'm now paying $50/month for 800 Mbps.
Insurance does this too (Score:3)
Cell companies, and insurance companies, don't want to pay the 3.5% or higher merchant fees for credit card transactions. If they think people will switch to bank withdrawal in exchange for an autopay discount, I don't blame them. And as for me, I won't do bank autopay without an autopay discount.
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People might be happier if they raised prices by 3.5%.
Not us, probably, but most.
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Cell companies, and insurance companies, don't want to pay the 3.5% or higher merchant fees for credit card transactions. If they think people will switch to bank withdrawal in exchange for an autopay discount, I don't blame them. And as for me, I won't do bank autopay without an autopay discount.
If you think this solely about the fees I have a bridge to sell you. A bunch of different credit cards now offer benefits for lost/stolen/damaged cell phones, if you pay your cell bill with their card, which undercuts the extremely lucrative side hustle the cellular carriers have with Asurion and other aftermarket insurance providers.
No company other than Verizon that I do business with does this. My garbage bill, electric, natural gas, water, internet, car and homeowners insurance, literally every single
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Given that probably 0.5% of credit card users actually know about these protections, I'm inclined to think it's not about that either.
What autopay is about, is making it hard to quit. If you have to consciously pay every month, you're more likely to decide to look for something cheaper. But if you never see the actual payment unless you actually look through your bank statement (and who does that!) you're probably going to just go with the flow and stay put.
When it comes to bank accounts vs. credit cards, y
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Given that probably 0.5% of credit card users actually know about these protections, I'm inclined to think it's not about that either.
Also, those who do know about them tend to have never used them.
They have 1000 exceptions to ensure they don't actually have to pay out. Chargebacks are a prime example, they're not automatic and all the merchant has to do is demonstrate that they've met the terms of the purchase or offered you reasonable compensation, which can include store credit.
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This used to be true, but now they deprioritize the fuck out of customers who are too cheap to spring for a postpaid plan. So if you don't care about your data speeds, sure, you can save a bunch. You can also ride to work on a 50cc Chinese scooter while people fly pass you and flip you the bird. Like so many things in life, you get what you pay for.
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Not everything you read on the internet is correct, my friend. I've run speed tests between AT&T's own prepaid offering and postpaid, and with a heavily loaded tower the phone on prepaid service was throttled significantly. Some people are lucky enough to live where the towers never bog down and they can get by on an el cheapo plan. If you can, great, enjoy the savings.
However, for folks who do live in highly populated areas where it means the difference between things actually loading or staring at t
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Another issue is prepaid and MVNO plans don't usually have access to domestic roaming partners. Doesn't matter for a lot of folks but if you need to travel to an area only served by these partners or just want to know you have the widest coverage possible, post-paid is the way to go.
If you travel abroad, that's an issue too. I have never seen a prepaid or MVNO plan with any sort of foreign roaming benefit at any price. On many (most?) current post-paid plans, it's an included benefit, likely with some
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When you travel internationally, just buy a local sim card. I travel the world and the only country that has more expensive mobile plans than America is Dubai. I get 100 GB and unlimited minutes for 5 Euros a month in Romania!!
I’m currently on 36 GB/mo for $12/mo in Egypt.
Superfast 200 mbps speeds, too.
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You'd have to be nuts (Score:5, Informative)
To give a cable company ACH access to your bank account.
I always use a limited credit card, and they always try to bill beyond the end of service.
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Every time, except one, that I have ever allowed anyone to pull autopay directly out of my bank account, they've tried to rip me off.
The only exception was a loan from the same bank as the checking account, and that only because the staff in the local branch I used were outstanding (despite working for an evil empire bank).
Re:You'd have to be nuts (Score:4, Funny)
To give a cable company ACH access to your bank account.
T-Mobile has been hacked a few times, too. So, take your pick, auto pay discount or keeping hackers away from your bank info. Decisions, decisions...
Re:You'd have to be nuts (Score:4, Informative)
T-Mobile has been hacked a few times, too. So, take your pick, auto pay discount or keeping hackers away from your bank info. Decisions, decisions...
Verizon at least has a branded credit card you can use for autopay and keep the discount. The card is underwritten by Synchrony, who sucks, don't make it your primary/only card, but for paying Verizon and select other things it's alright.
T-Mobile exposed my SSN, DOB, and other PII in the most recent data breach. Funny thing is, I haven't had an account with them since the mid-oughts. Cool that they just kept all of my PII for 15+ years without any business need for it. I didn't leave owing them money or any other circumstance that justified keeping my PII for this length of time. In a more just world, there would be laws surrounding how long they can keep this, and more punishment after a breach than having to hand out free credit monitoring that doesn't do a damn thing you can't do for yourself. In fact, it makes the problem worse, because now your PII is in Yet Another Database that might be hacked. :(
Please modernize the US banking system (Score:5, Interesting)
The US really, desperately needs to modernize its banking system. People still use paper checks! Give a company the numbers off of a check, and that company can extract money from your bank account. It's seriously insane. I ran into a lot of this when traveling to the US to clean up my mother's affairs after her death. Lots of companies wanted her account information, so that they could extract that last pound of flesh - to which they were not entitled, seeing as she was dead. GMAC (now Ally, iirc) was the worst of the lot.
Here (Switzerland, and indeed most of Europe) you can safely hand someone all of your account information. The only thing they can do with it is send you money. For recurring bills, we have "e-bills", where a company can send charges to your account - but they don't get paid automatically. Instead, you log in to your e-banking, see the list of e-bills, and approve or reject them. You can set up autopay if you really want to, and some people do, but it's not the norm.
Banks also have apps that let people send each other money, direct to their accounts. I had a haircut yesterday, paid that way, and the shop saw the payment arrive a few seconds later. The transfers are completely free - no fees or charges per transaction.
Mastercard and Visa exist, of course and unfortunately. They are just as stupidly rapacious here as anywhere, and they collude with each other just as much, to avoid any actual competition. Trust-busting is just as broken in Europe as it is in the US.
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Paper checks are something I actually like conceptually. Usecase: Kid paying for something.
When I was in school, the canteen used a prepay system for lunches. From time to time it had to be topped up. They accepted cash, but everyone was using checks.
This had multiple good consequences: I still had to take care of topping it up myself (personal responsibility), the check couldn't be used for anything else: I couldn't use the money for something else, getting bullied out of lunch money was impossible (the ca
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Banks also have apps that let people send each other money, direct to their accounts. I had a haircut yesterday, paid that way, and the shop saw the payment arrive a few seconds later. The transfers are completely free - no fees or charges per transaction.
Zelle seems to be a step in the right direction. And it works across banks, seemingly without fees, unlike banks in some European countries.
Not fully correct (Score:2)
The auto payment is quite the norm for many form of regular payment in Germany. e.g. see the difference between Lastschrift / Dauerauftrag for example in Germany : you don't have to approve every month the payment.
Re: Not fully correct (Score:2)
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To give a cable company ACH access to your bank account.
I always use a limited credit card, and they always try to bill beyond the end of service.
Yeah, I just pay the extra $10 every month and send them a blank check by snail mail instead.
I also might be a masochist...
Re: You'd have to be nuts (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: You'd have to be nuts (Score:5, Informative)
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The U.S. system that trusts companies to pull money from your account is broken. In Europe you can only deposit money to someone else's bank account number. The banks have a system of manual pay or autopay that the company that wants to get paid subscribes to. You can pay to a special account number that is credited to your balance with the service company. You can cancel an autopay anytime.
This.
Most UK telco's are happy to take card because fees are capped and most times they can usually process it as a debit transaction which has a much lower capped fee (0.2%).
Things that tend to go direct from bank to bank have a standing order, I set this up to transfer £X from my account to another at set time intervals. This will be for paying rent/mortgages, car lease/repayments, et al. and can be cancelled by either side (I.E. by the lease company upon completion), what they cant be used fo
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T-Mobile (Score:3)
Sometimes correlation is causation.... (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. And why the "messing with" slam? (Score:2)
The carriers are making an offer, which I can choose to accept or not. And certainly one reason they're doing this is that the price of credit card servicing keeps going up when it should be moving in the direction of a commodity. Say, the much lower cost of an ACH transaction. But then, we don't demand cash back, points, or insurance for ACH transactions either. We (those of us who prefer credit cards with such "free" perks that aren't actually free) are driving this as much as credit card companies' p
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Exactly.
I don't have any problem with the telcos doing this.
In fact, for most, you will come out ahead. If your phone bill is $50, paying with credit card will get you back between 1% and 2% in points, which is 50 cents to $1. If they give you are $5 discount, that is a much higher discount.
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...charge extra for using a credit card (or equivalently, charge less for cash *)...
* It took way too long for courts to confirm this equivalence, BTW.
There's one important distinction between those seeming equivalents. In the former case, the customer ends up paying more than the advertised price; in the latter case, the customer ends up paying less than the advertised price.
They aren't messing with "my" discount (Score:2)
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I use Mint, lol
And Mint doesn't give you their best prices unless you prepay for months of service ahead of time. There's no free lunch.
Is this really a surprise (Score:1)
Debit cards are unsafe (Score:5, Informative)
If details of a debit card are leaked (e.g. in hacked website) then those who get access to the debit card info can empty your bank account. Once you realize and inform your bank, they will begin an investigation ... which will take 2-4 weeks. Eventually, you should get your money back.
But in the mean time, all your other auto-payments (for rent/mortgage etc.) will fail because there is no money in your account. There are fees from the bank for these, and likely late payment penalties from those you were supposed to pay.
Contrast that with a credit card that is hacked. Once you notify the bank, you don't have to pay the bill for any disputed charges, When the bank finally resolves things the charges are erased from the account.
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If details of a debit card are leaked (e.g. in hacked website) then those who get access to the debit card info can empty your bank account. Once you realize and inform your bank, they will begin an investigation ... which will take 2-4 weeks. Eventually, you should get your money back.
You aren't wrong but I'll point out that a decent institution should give you a provisional credit before the investigation is complete. I've been the victim of ACH fraud and my credit union immediately gave me a credit for the entire amount. It came with disclaimer that they'd claw back the money, if the transactions were confirmed legitimate, which is certainly reasonable.
It's the same with deposit holds. Nothing requires a bank to put a hold on your deposits. It's certainly reasonable if you sho
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If details of a debit card are leaked (e.g. in hacked website) then those who get access to the debit card info can empty your bank account. Once you realize and inform your bank, they will begin an investigation ... which will take 2-4 weeks. Eventually, you should get your money back.
To be fair, banks have defences against that, well at least here in Europe (and also in Australia). Debit and Credit cards have limits, they can't just empty your account or go on a spending spree and suspicious transactions are flagged.
Unfortunately it is an arms race between the banks and organised criminals. Trying to empty a bank account will get that card number shut down in short order, so they try things like running hundreds or thousands of card numbers doing low cost transactions (less than $5)
Darth Verizon (Score:2)
They are altering the deal. Pray they don't alter it any further.
Postpaid? What's postpaid? (Score:2)
Canceling credit card cancels subscription renewal (Score:2)
I wonder if this has anything to do with research showing that the only way to cancel subscription services is to cut off the credit card. If a subscription service has direct access to your bank account, that's a lot harder to cut off than telling the credit card company you'd like a new number, please.
wat (Score:2)
According to a new report by The Wall Street Journal, mobile carriers including Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile are all requiring customers to switch to a debit card or bank account withdrawal in order to receive an autopay discount on their plan. Verizon has included this requirement for years
I am a Verizon prepay customer, and I get $5 off for prepaying through my CC, and have "for years". It's also a lot cheaper than most of their postpaid plans, because I'm not expecting them to buy me a phone every two years. I buy Moto phones which are cheap and good and have no baked in crapware, just Facebook installed to the user partition from which it can actually be uninstalled.
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A word of warning: I also have an old Verizon account that had credit card auto-payment and was still receiving the discount up until about a month ago. I had no idea that they'd stopped doing that for credit cards years (?) before.
I called in to make a change to my plan (finally got a 5G phone and was sick of their bullshit "nationwide 5G"). When the plan change went through, their billing system noticed that I was still using a credit card and removed the discount and my only options were to switch to A
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Fair enough. I'll probably switch carriers here coming up in a bit, I'll come up with a Eureka address instead of the tiny little town where I live and then I can get service with a smaller one.
Autopay (Score:1)
A way for vendors to legally steal your money. Just take the time to pay your bills manually. It isn't that hard or time consuming.
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You don't have to pay them manually. You can set up a recurring payment pushed from your bank. That way, you can turn it on or off without depending on the good will of the merchant you are paying.
"Verizon has included this requirement for years" (Score:2)
Really? I've been automatically paying my Verizon bill with a credit card for years. It's always good to know that I am so important that Verizon has made an exception for me.
Un-Carrier My A** (Score:2)
And this has nothing to do with yesterday's report (Score:2)
That the major card companies are demanding more ROI, and so raising fees.