Most domainers that register, renew, buy or sell domains or doing domaining related business like hosting on the internet use Paypal on a daily basis.
There are some registrars that use the Paypal “Preapproved Payments” to charge you for domain auto-renewals. How this works is that you agree that a registrar can charge your paypal account up to certain amount every month for the auto-renewals.
There also many services like DomainTools or FreshDrop that
use paypal for monthly recurring billing.
But if you no longer use the services or not doing auto-renewals there is no point that you have these Preapproved Payments active in your paypal account because anything can happen. A hacker could get access to an account you no longer use and start making purchases using that Preapproved Payments.
In my case I don’t do any auto-renewals with Go Daddy, Network Solutions or Enom so I deleted these Preapproved Payments so even if I forget to set a domain to “auto-renewal off” I would not get charged. (Of course you should make sure you don’t have any credit cards on file at the registrar too.)
I checked my Paypal account today and I found 8 “Preapproved Payments” of which I only use 3:
So I deleted the other 5 (some where as old as 4 years) and I am safe that I don’t get charged without knowing. I am not interested in doing any Network Solutions renewals, thanks.
Use the following steps to cancel a Preapproved Payment Billing Agreement:
- Log in to your PayPal account.
- Click Profile at the top of the page.
- Click My money.
- Click Update in the My preapproved payments section.
- Select the merchant’s name or email address.
- Click Cancel.
Of course I kept my DomainTools and FreshDrop subscriptions and Ebay that I sometimes use.
P.S. StubHub was used to get tickets to Spiderman on Broadway. 🙂 It has been 2 years since I was in New York. I need to go back soon…
thanks for that
Even if someone hacks into your paypal account, they cannot take any payments through pre-approved payments. It just doesnt work that way!
I didn’t say that. I talked about someone hacking to one of the accounts that are pre-approved.
If someone hacks into paypal they can do what ever they want with the funds.