How can a credit card processor tell I had a trial with a specific company before if every detail provided is different?
Consider the following scenario: I signed up for a free 7d trial of a $200/y "AI" subscription product (not OpenAi) -- provided username and an e-mail address and was forwarded to a Stripe checkout page for card verification.
While on the Stripe payments site, I provided the card details and it was clearly stated that it will only be charged after seven days and only if the trial is not canceled during that seven day period.
To my surprise, the "AI" company tried to charge my card the full $200 amount right away.
I had a trial with that company some months before and my only guess is that charging the full yearly amount was their way of "reflecting" that they remember me.
My problem here: how can they tell? I signed up with a new e-mail address and username (lost access to the old one, which was just a throw-away to test their product) and also used a different virtual card (my bank offers an account with many of those and I happened to just pick a different one than the last time, again months before).
So: username was different; email was different; card holder name was different (usually leave out my middle name or just use "Finn" after learning that this is not relevant for cc transactions); card details (cvv, card number, expiration) were different -- and they still recognized that I had a trial before?
My problem: I would have been completely cool with a prompt like "after your card verification, we noticed >somehow< that you had a trial before; therefore the only option we can offer to you is the $200 subscription due now".
My only guess: AVS provided by my bank to Stripe but still; even that would be concerning because there are apartment buildings where many tenants share the same address, right?
So what happened here?
Thanks Finn
