Invoice from SMF?

[Sir Osis of Liver]

One of my guys received this email -

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He knows nothing about it, and is quite pissed.  Is this legit?  He's a longtime SMF user, hasn't been on this forum for many years.

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Looks like a PayPal payment confirmation for Charter Membership. Set up as a recurring payment, so that they need to manually cancel if they do not want to renew.

[Sir Osis of Liver]

Yeah, I have him doing that.  Is it a monthly or annual charge?  He thinks it's monthly.

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Should be $50.00 / 1 Year.

[Sir Osis of Liver]

Ok, thanks.  He hasn't been here since way back when, and apparently forgot about the charter membership and just realized he's still being charged for it.

[Sir Osis of Liver]

This from Gary at busconversionmagazine.com -

"As you can see, I am paying $50/month for using the forum, not per year. This started in January and I don't know how it started. I have been using the forum for 20 years not so I am not sure what we did to start this payment but I just noticed it this month. Something is really messed up. I will try to cancel it and will no longer support them as I don't want this monthly recurring payment to ever happen again as something got really messed up with them which is not something I did. This looks like some kind of a scam to me."

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[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

The forum is free, we do not charge for it. The optional Charter Membership is configured for $50 a year, as you can see and confirm through the available subscription options in your profile. Liroy handles the CM payments. @LiroyvH Could you please look in to this? Are we actually receiving such payments?

[Sir Osis of Liver]

PayPal payments come from Bus Conversion Magazine - busconversionmagazine.com

Trying to get more info, but Gary insists on doing support via email, which makes things difficult.

[Sir Osis of Liver]

Ok, Gary registered as busconversions in 2016, and he is currently a charter member, so he should be being charged $50 per year.  But as of Jan of this year he's been charged $50 per month, so he's out $450 to date.  Did SM receive these payments?

[Sir Osis of Liver]

Anyone been able to confirm these payments?

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Liroy probably hasn't seen this yet, so I sent him a message through other channels about this.

[LiroyvH]

Hi,

I've looked in to it on PayPal's side.
Due to privacy considerations, I can't really go deeply in to it here (like posting screenshots/transaction details) - but can say that the picture that there are or have been recurring monthly donations from the same person is incorrect.

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Took a peek at the info available through SMF as well, and their current CM membership is alive until August 2024, which would suggest to me that the actual subscription is behaving normally at this end, and has last been renewed in August 2023.

[Sir Osis of Liver]

Thanks for the info, Liroy, that's what I suspected.  I asked them for transaction data from one of the 2023 payments and they sent me a screenshot from PayPal of the Aug 2023 payment, which would be the normal renewal for the active charter membership.  There's only an 11.1% probability that they would choose that one out of the nine suspect monthly payments.  Someone else handles this for Gary and they're currently out-of-pocket, so it will take a while yet to sort out, but don't think it's a real issue.