Fraud

The Matrix's "digital rain" - ANIMAL LOGIC/WARNER BROS.

A $70 charge showed up on my credit card bill this month from Roku / Fubo. Let me back up. Last month we got a letter from Ziply, the fiber optic, broadband internet company, telling us that rates for the TV packages were going up. No surprise there, but then the letter goes on to point out that almost everything you could want from the TV services is available on the internet, and it's probably a lot cheaper.  Kind of weird that the cable company would be suggesting that we cancel anything, but maybe they got tired of people complaining about the ever increasing rates and the new taxes that keep getting tacked on. Complaints have to be dealt with, and that consumes customer service hours, so maybe they are just taking a proactive approach to deflecting complaints.

Okay, so we signed up for Fubo which seems to provide most of what we want in the sports arena. It's like $90 a month, but that's half of what TV package cost, so bueno. But now we get the credit card bill and there's this extra charge. There's a phone number attached to the charge, so I call but all I get is a recording telling me to logon to Roku.com. I do that and find there are no charges and since there are no charges there is nothing to dispute. So I call Chase, wade through the robo-cop nonsense, hang on hold for some indefinite amount of time and eventually get to a person. I tell him about the charge and all he can say is fraud. I don't think it's fraud, it's probably just a glitch in the matrix, but there doesn't seem to be any way forward unless I say it's fraud. Seems kind of extreme, but we are in the matrix now so we have to play by matrix rules.

Okay fine, but since it's fraud, my card must be compromised and since it's compromised they are going to turn it off and send me a new one. Welcome to the matrix, where I have been reduced to paying for my gasoline with cash.

I've been carrying an AMEX card in my wallet as a back up, just in case something happened to my Amazon / Chase card, but when I pulled it out I found it expired two years ago.