Last Thursday, 14th June, 2007, a friend of mine who is new to the search marketing arena asked my to help him set up a Yahoo Search marketing account, this I did. The usual $50.00 voucher was to awarded to the account. In respect of funding the account I suggested to him to opt for the $5.00 deposit as since it's his first time and as he was really interested to see how the Yahoo PPC system works. The credit card was charged on Friday, June 15, 2007 and the account was specificly set up as a prepaid account that is, no further charge unless authorised by the card owner to do so. That being that we set up the account and forgot all about it. Come Monday, June 18, 2007, when we logged in to the account, we were horrified to see that the account was charged a total of Fourteen times the amount of $5.00!! Sometime later that day, the bank called, explaining that that have cancelled the credit as there were attempts on Sunday, June 17 to have the cards charged over eighteen during Sunday alone, which they thought were suspicious and had no choice but to cancel the credit card account due to the frequency and short intervals in between which attempts were made at having the card charged. Of the total amount deducted, Yahoo had only sent seven clicks at a cost of $1.60 per click, at one stage I had set the CPC at $0.50 but for some reason this was reverted to $1.60. My friend outlined to me that he had clearly indicated that the card be charged only once but Yahoo went ahead and attempted to charge the card a total of 18 times or more which we clearly believe is a breach of trust and a deviation from ethical and honest business transaction between two agreeing parties. I am seeking some advice as how to proceed with this matter and wheter or not any similar experience occured with members here on this forum.
I don't know how you go from automatic billing to manually, normally. I know I did it over the phone. But default is they bill you to keep 3x your budget or daily spending available, which ever is greater. It is not clear to me their system did anything other than it was supposed to do, but I would have to go check again on the mechanism for switching payment methods.
If you login to your account, there's a link there that says Customer Support. Contact them through that form. Just tell them to remove the credit card that is on file because you don't want to be charged anymore. This happened to me before and they changed the Payment Option from Prepaid to None and you will never be charged any more.