Am I the only one who paid for 298 months of service ?

    This is a bit of a rant,


    been a Netcup customer since 2017.


    This month, i was charged 298 months worth of service, they did reimburse me but the reimbursement was €134 short of what i was mistakenly charged (roughly 2 year's worth of service).


    The support essentially told me it was not their problem that they did everything correctly and I was on my own to deal with it, no attempt to solve the problem, not even try to offer me credit for this loss.


    Anyone else in this situation where did only received a partial refund for this NetCup error ?

    Hi BenSG,


    your screenshots are a little confusing. What is the excerpt from? The amount on the invoice somehow doesn't match the amount on your credit card statement (?). Is it in a different currency? Was there an automatic currency exchange? Possibly from your bank. That would explain the difference, as the bank always does the exchange (including a possible fee) to your disadvantage. And since the currency exchange was made twice, the difference is now quite likely.

    Quote from Paul

    Hi BenSG,


    your screenshots are a little confusing. What is the excerpt from? The amount on the invoice somehow doesn't match the amount on your credit card statement (?). Is it in a different currency? Was there an automatic currency exchange? Possibly from your bank. That would explain the difference, as the bank always does the exchange (including a possible fee) to your disadvantage. And since the currency exchange was made twice, the difference is now quite likely.

    Hi,


    Sorry, my credit card is in Singapore Dollars .

    I agree with you, normally there is a 1 % difference or so, but this is almost a 10% difference! The world would come to a stop if the euro dropped 10% in the same day.

    All right, thanks. I had already suspected something like that.

    The price on the 24th for 1 Euro was 1,43 Singapore Dollars but your bank has charged you 2597,90. That's quite a difference (109,24 Singapore Dollars) and is equivalent to around 4.3% (far away from 1%). If a similar amount is also withdrawn when the money is transferred back, we are almost at 10%, which is roughly the amount you are missing. I'm not talking about currency fluctuations on the market, which is mostly stable, but what the bank charges you. Even with the first payment (2597), this is already a significant margin over what the official exchange rate says. The automatic payment by credit card has really put you in a bad situation here.

    Quote from Paul

    All right, thanks. I had already suspected something like that.

    The price on the 24th for 1 Euro was 1,43 Singapore Dollars but your bank has charged you 2597,90. That's quite a difference (109,24 Singapore Dollars) and is equivalent to around 4.3% (far away from 1%). If a similar amount is also withdrawn when the money is transferred back, we are almost at 10%, which is roughly the amount you are missing. I'm not talking about currency fluctuations on the market, which is mostly stable, but what the bank charges you. Even with the first payment (2597), this is already a significant margin over what the official exchange rate says. The automatic payment by credit card has really put you in a bad situation here.

    Perhaps your right, and you might be.


    So you're saying that Netcup by charging me an absurd amount of money, and effectively making me lose €134 in the process is not at fault/responsible ? this seems like a very bad customer management policy. or maybe we just do business differently here, as i really don't treat my customer that way.

    Unfortunately, yes. I can really empathize with the fact that this is a nasty thing. This is exactly why I avoid automatic payments and have never set this up with Netcup, because I always expect such technical errors and as a customer you are always the stupid one.


    Netcup has tried to reverse this. But of course they didn't consider that there could be currency exchanges. It was done by your bank, which is not Netcup's fault. They charged amount x and transferred amount x back. Your bank was happy and made quite a profit - at your expense. However, Netcup is responsible for this happening in the first place. Therefore, it would definitely be understandable if you asked them again in a friendly manner whether they could be fair and at least credit the amount as a voucher. Unfortunately, you probably don't have a real legal claim because it was your bank that made the conversion. If you are really stuck with the costs, that is a really painful learning lesson. But really ask again. Unfortunately, that's the only suggestion I can give.

    This difference looks like currency conversion fees. You paid Netcup in Euro and Netcup refunded in Euro, but both transactions incurred a fee. The overcharge was Netcup's mistake and they need to refund you the additional transaction costs that resulted from their mistake too. The alternative is what Netcup already told you: Dispute the charge with your credit card company because it was clearly an error. Your credit card company should then cancel both transactions at no cost to you and take any fees from Netcup, not you.


    Quote from Paul

    you probably don't have a real legal claim

    Not legal advice, but that is definitely Netcup's problem, not that of the customer or the credit card company. Netcup can count their lucky stars if currency conversion fees are the only damage from these overbillings. Other conceivable problems could be overdraft fees, cancelled payments due to overdrawn accounts, cancelled orders due to cancelled payments, locked/terminated accounts at other companies due to lack of payments, etc. This was no small mistake on Netcup's side.

    yes, this is entirely correct interpretation of the situation.


    Sadly, as the burden of legal responsibility is no longer there, it is now a question of ethics and customer satisfaction management, which is of course purely discretionary and they have the power.


    To be fair, Netcup would probably go bankrupt or need to terminate an employee if they would make restitution to every customer suffered a loss when they overcharged them by 25 years. Even if only a fraction of a % of the customers are in my situation, that surely amounts to a fair bit of money that the shareholders would not want to part with.

    Quote from BenSG

    Perhaps your right, and you might be.


    So you're saying that Netcup by charging me an absurd amount of money, and effectively making me lose €134 in the process is not at fault/responsible ? this seems like a very bad customer management policy. or maybe we just do business differently here, as i really don't treat my customer that way.

    A real lose-lose situation for you and netcup. There ist just one winner, the bank (as always). Anyway, IMO the party being at fault should also take the loss. I don't like the thought, that a company can accidentally charge me a ridiculous account of money, say e.g. 1.000.000.000,-€ and then I have to pay for their mistake. Doesn't sound right, this would stop world wide business immediately. Let's go back to good old cash then.

    Quote from BenSG

    So you're saying that Netcup by charging me an absurd amount of money, and effectively making me lose €134 in the process is not at fault/responsible ? this seems like a very bad customer management policy. or maybe we just do business differently here, as i really don't treat my customer that way.

    Yes and no. The contractual obligations are in Euro, so the currency exchange issue is actually not their problem. Same thing would have happened with any other merchant.


    This can and should be solved by Goodwill. Such a big invoice SHOULD have raised flags and should not have processed by netcup and Stripe.

    I mean this could have had consequences for other people as well. (technically we are in the area of damages, but nobody is going to court about 100€)


    However historically netcup has shown no Goodwill at all, so I believe they won't do it in this case also. You can try to escalate the case.

    Generally the servers are great, but the rest around is kinda bad.


    You can also ask Stripe, since this is a refund, if there are other options of entering the refund-calculations.

    Quote from tab

    A real lose-lose situation for you and netcup.

    Actually it is a lose situation for netcup - they have released this kind of code that didn't set of any flags - not in the amout of months charged, not in the date (year 0001 should be invalid), not in the amount.


    In other cases we should prepay for a server order and get the real invoice later - but in this instance?