I recently began receiving large amounts of spam from socialsex.com, including one email that offered a cheap membership. I went to the site and checked out the offer, which turned out just to be a sales pitch, so didn't accept the offer, join the site or enter any of my details. A couple of days later I happened to check my bank account and saw that some money had been withdrawn. I contacted the company, Epoch.com, shown on the bank statement, and they, after several lengthy online chat arguments, refunded part of the funds - less what they'd lost in currency exchange. I am currently pursuing them for the outstanding amount. Epoch have confirmed that they were acting on behalf of socialsex.com, who had informed epoch that I had taken out membership of their site. I repeat, I had not. It turns out that socialsex is owned by the same company as xxmatch, with whom I had a membership, but had cancelled over a year ago. It seems clear that socialsex took my visiting their site as authorisation to draw funds from my account, and therefore instructed epoch to do so. They used the data held by xxmatch to do this. As I didn't sign up for socialsex, this is unacceptable, and amounts to fraud. I am now concerned that they will repeat this process next month. I have not been able to cancel my card, as epoch appear to have done nothing wrong and therefore I cannot block them, and as they have refunded the cash (mostly) I do not hold them culpable - the guilty party is xxmatch / socialsex. They have taken money without authorisation, and used data that should not have been used, as socialsex never had access to my card details.
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