This doesn't always work. I had a similar problem with Chase, and the charges kept appearing on the new card. Chase explained to me that the charges can follow the person, not the specific card number.
It's a feature they provide to be helpful to their customers. Absent any info from you about needing to stop it why would they not do it, it's there to make losing a card much less painful than it used to be.
It works like this. Chase is trying to be helpful so let's say you set up your utility bill to go through their credit card. Now, you get a new card with Chase because you lost it. Chase can see that the old number and new number are both attached to your account history and the charge from the utility company has the same utility account number so they happily approve it for you so you don't have to change your utility billing. It isn't such an awful feature except in this case where you want it stopped. This is one argument for not using credit cards for recurring online bills and ACH instead. Most people love the rewards though.
We need better online payments options that prevent these scams. It would be nice to have the ability to whitelist and blacklist online vendors.
Other people have told you how this "account update" process works so I'll skip that.
I just went through this with Citi/Mastercard.
I'm not sure if other companies do this, but I was able to opt out of this "account update" feature to hopefully stop a Comcast charge from going through to my new card number. I'll find out on Dec 10 if it works, but the customer rep I spoke to says it should. It basically cancels that feature so that I now have to manually go through every merchant and update them to my new credit card.
This can happen sometimes if you get a new credit card number (but the same account). If you have a reoccurring purchase, like a subscription, the billing was already authorized, so the new charge is automatically applied to the new card number.
If you get a completely new account, that can't happen. I'm not sure what happens if you get a new card from the same company (like getting a brand new Chase account). I'd guess it would depend on their backend as to if new charges followed you.
I can understand this is your deep, gut reaction - "sue them!", but have you ever been to small claims court? Are you aware that most ToS define the resolution mechanism which includes the jurisdiction?
Isn't up to the company to send a representative and point out the ToS to the judge? Just because the ToS says that doesn't mean the end user can't file.
