I tried yesterday to renew my TV license but couldn’t because of this stupid “verification” step.
I have also failed to pay council tax, and couldn’t buy National Savings premium bonds on line for the same reason.
VbV appears to be a brain damaged attempt at extra security that requires you to re-enter all your card details (and personal data) into a really dodgy looking form.
IIRC it then goes on to “register” your card so that you need to use a password for all future online transactions.
It doesn’t work for me, because it doesn’t recognise my card details.
I think is using details for an old card that’s been replaced. I can’t get past the initial form.
Two questions.
1: Why are the BBC, national savings and the council using this thing at all? I’m trying to give them all money for things that are tied to the owner of the card anyway.
There’s no way to use a TV license or council tax for fraud. Premium bonds? They are credited to the card owner.
There is no need for “fraud” prevention when paying for these things.
2: How can I get round this crap? Will I be able to pay for anything online ever again?
Because… list.
Probably rather UK-centric, apologies if this means nothing to you. TV license? Premium Bonds? What the frack is he on about?
Seriously, I would really like to know how to kill off this crap.
I’ve been using it for years, never had a problem with it. I’ve not used it for a TV license (no TV) but it worked fine at NS&I and other vendors. I used to work for the company that developed the software. The wikipedia article explains what the benefits are supposed to be for both buyer and seller.
I initially resisted it but now like it, as it does seem to provide an extra layer of security. Except that I kept forgetting my password, and when you make a new one it doesn’t let you use one that’s been used previously.
The OP mentioned “National Savings premium bonds.” If you drop the words “National” and “premium” you end up with “savings bonds,” which are familiar to most Americans.
A Premium Bond is a savings account where the interest of everyone is pooled together, then distributed as prizes. So if you put in £100, you get 100 chances to win. There is no guaranteed interest, but your money is guaranteed. So you could strike it big and win £1,000,000, but more likely to get less interest than a regular savings account.
A TV license is the annual fee you have to pay the government if you have a telly.
[QUOTE=Filbert]
I got fed up with it too- I can’t remember how, but I managed to unsubscribe, and now it just goes straight to “verifying”…
[/QUOTE]
I’m not (just) fed up with it, it does not work for me. It won’t accept my card details. Any chance you can recall how to un-subscribe?
The TV license pays for the BBC, it does not go to the government. 145 quid and I get a year’s Radio 4! (also the telly stuff).
Premium bonds are savings that are a sort of lottery, except you can take your money back whenever you want. There’s no interest as such but the overall prize payout is a fixed percentage. Currently it’s 1.35% which means if you own as many as I do you win something pretty much every month*
*usually just £25 (Shh…I just won five grand, but I never expect to win that much again).
Every time I go back to Canada and endure all that horrible TV advertising every 4 1/2 minutes, I realise how happy I am to pay the licence fee just to have zero commercials, if only on BBC
Oddly, Ve rified by Visa just hit me (American) here the other day when I tried to upgrade my cell phone online (Verizon). I ended up in this endless loop. Enter your credit card (I owed no money, so why I had to enter a card was a mystery).
Fine. Card enter. Hit “Continue”
Arrive at Verify by Visa. Enter another, somewhat over-lapping set of info from the card piece. Dandy. Enter info. Hit "Continue.
Back at the card entry, with no explanation, just blank. No error messages. No way to skip anything. Went through the loop a few times. Seemed likely to be infinite.
(I tried other cards, if anyone is curious. There was similar infinite loop for MasterCard. I eventually had to talk to someone, who was actually helpful. Turns out there’s an entirely different purchase experience they can link you to, if you ask someone…)
We’ll all be seeing more of this everyplace. The issue is that most of the implementations are buggy and assume you have no popup blocking or anti-scripting measures activated. Which almost all of us do have.
The eventual idea is that merchants will never ever have your card details. You’ll be redirected to Visa or MC itself to arrange the payment, then sent back to the merchant’s site to get your successful order confirmation. This way there won’t be merchants with thousands of ill-stored card details sitting on crappily built websites just waiting to be hacked or stolen. But so far it’s a bloody mess with lots of screwed up sites & screwed up processes.