Recurrent payments make possible softer kinds of frauds where you extract money from people for services they don't need or use only because they forgot they ordered them or can't be bothered to cancel.
If its a fraud its a fraud you can get your money
back. There's a difference between being cheated
and wanting the service & being willing to pay for it.
I might point out on Paypal you get an email every time a charge is done and you can easily cancel any subscription in under a minute quite easily so you wont forget about anything.
Direct Debit (such as that offered by HDFC, Axis, etc)
can also do the same thing, although it is more difficult
to cancel than a credit card would be & less services are available to it.
Also consider if you pay cash/neft/rtgs/paytm for 12 months
upfront instead of every 1 month recurring for a subscription service. Its
going to be harder to get that back (and perhaps
not possible) if you decide to cancel halfway
than it would be with a credit card/paypal.
>>If its a fraud its a fraud you can get your money back.
Sorry, but in a country where credit card companies send the local mafia after a person if they miss a few EMI's. No one is realistically going to trust 'dispute the transaction, get your money back' promise.
There will be so much fraud from both the ends, it will be hard to bring the chaos in control.
India needs a lot of social evolution before you could trust the public with these things. We can't even discard a biscuit packet properly, let alone these kind of things.
I still prefer to pay up front. At least I need to carefully consider if I actually want the service.
I heard a lot of stories how hard is to get out of gym membership. If someone uses tricks in my psychology to make me pay for the service I don't use I consider it to be a scam. Visa might think otherwise.
Agreed, this has lot to do with social evolution than government policy.
'X country has it, why can't we' is a useless argument here. If only Indians acted with same degree of responsibility, you could do away with a lot of things.
> I would argue any place can have cheats. That's why you can reverse and dispute card transactions if they are fraudulent.
but India has the reputation of being one of the world's mecca of online scams. I'm sure plenty of good people in India too but there is an overwhelming population that choose to scam, deceit their way out of honest folk's money.
Poverty is always used as an excuse for such behavior but we've seen plenty of emerging economies where people have gone through poverty like Korea, Japan, Taiwan that aren't known to behaved as badly, using poverty as a modus operandi to inflict damage on others.
So yeah, I'm really glad there are steps in place to stop frauds and cheats coming out of this place, it's doing the rest of the world a great favor.