jack t.

Folks - I dabbled with Match.com for three months also and managed to get them to shut off the billing, but I understand how it can stay under your radar. There is a simple solution to this, for this site and anything else you want to control with internet purchasing. My banker clued me in. All you do is:

A) create a separate checking account, with one c. C. tied to it
B) keep just enough money in there to pay for the one-time (or whatever) thing you're charging against it. Make yourself email reminders for when something is supposed to come due and re-bill and just empty the account enough so the billing will fail.

My banker does this himself. Since many of these dating sites have overseas billing, most banks (Umpqua Bank anyway) have trigger alerts that will automatically lock the card and reject the purchase if it's a first time / unknown vendor, or, if you've cleared the vendor with your bank/card and they try to hit the card again with no money, it will fail, and as they will auto-repeat the billing attempts, continued failures will tell their system to give up.

It may seem like a hassle to set up a distinct account just for internet, but it makes a lot of sense. All these banks have online banking now where you can transfer money between account easily and it's easy to manage, I've been doing it for awhile now If a lot of people get wise and start doing this, these greasy sites will start cleaning up their billing machinery. At the least, they won't get your money. It's just plain dangerous to have hard-to-reveal vendors hitting your main bank account. Treat them like the <insert label here> that they are. Good luck.