ChatGPT falsely deactivating account and then charging customer

ChatGPT
1

Searching social media I’m not the first.

I was a happy ChatGPT user for about a year. Using ChatGPT Plus paid subscription for a few months in the first half of the year. In November, I renewed my ChatGPT Plus paid subscription, however communicated with account support to cancel and refund this renewal as it didn’t suit my specific need then, of which the refund for this November charge went through.

Last week (15 December 2013) I noticed I was unable to login to ChatGPT due to apparent account deactivation. Searching social media this seems to be a false flag from misbehaving plugins that are auto-enabled by the auto-enable plugins feature that I had turned on a few days prior.

Logging into the app reported:

Your OpenAl account has been deactivated, please check your email for more information. If you feel this is an error, contact us through our help center at help.openai.com.

Logging into the ChatGPT website reported:

You do not have an account because it has been deleted or deactivated. If you believe this was an error please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com.

Logging into the OpenAI website reported:

You do not have an account because it has been deleted or deactivated. If you believe this was an error, please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com.

I never received an email or any communication about this, despite the messaging indicating that I should have.

Account deactivation is unfortunate, however although an inconvenience, I submitted a support ticket (that I haven’t heard back from) and have used alternatives.

However, today (18 December 2023), like others have also reported on social media, my bank card was just charged for the ChatGPT Plus paid subscription, despite not having an active subscription (due to the cancel and refund of my subscription in November), NOR do I even have an active account with OpenAI (due to them falsely deactivating my account a week prior).

I have filled a support ticket for this false charge, however others with deactivated accounts on social media have reported that they are months in and still getting charged to their bank account with no response, as apparently support no longer interacts with those with deactivated accounts.

I have opened a dispute with my bank and seems I need to change my card number.

Posting as a warning for others who also find themselves in the same position.

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2

A discovery.

On the successful refund email for the November subscription there was a link at the bottom to Manage subscription (there is also a Manage your subscription button on the original plan signup email). These are magic login links that will take you to a Stripe payment portal with a URL like pay.openai.com/p/login/<redacted>.

To my surprise OpenAI support only refunded the November charge but failed to cancel the subscription, against my desire to refund and cancel. I was able to cancel the subscription in that portal to hopefully prevent further false charges.

Hopefully support will notice this issue report, refund their false December charge for me, and fix this issue in the future, so that:

  1. customers that request a refund/cancellation of their subscription are actually refunded AND cancelled, rather than just refunding a particular month while keeping the subscription active in a backend portal, to continue to charge them in the future
  2. customers that have had their account deactivated will also have their subscription deactivated, rather than continuing to charge them for a product they cannot use and with zero support access due to the deactivation
  3. deactivation reasons are actually stated and the appeal process actually works, so that customers who seem falsely deactivated due to a misbehaving automatically enabled plugin can appeal, rather than just completely ghosting them

Here is the pay portal details for the false December charge:

IMG_0552
IMG_05521125×2436 163 KB

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3

There’s dozens of threads on this forum about deactivations:

https://community.openai.com/search?q=deactivation

There’s a few reports of OpenAI still charging deactivated customers, notably this one, which is now locked:

https://community.openai.com/t/account-deactivated-but-subscription-still-active-and-charging-my-card/227856?u=balupton

Common theme is that deactivation stops any support resolution. Hopefully my workaround for stopping billing in my earlier post can help @EdG, @entenmydestdo, @zzkzkkzzkz, @shi.cheng and co prevent any future charges

https://community.openai.com/t/account-deactivated-but-subscription-still-active-and-charging-my-card/227856?u=balupton

Using code blocks to workaround the links and mention limits.

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It seems within two weeks into deactivation the deactivated account becomes purged, as I no longer have any access to my account nor my ChatGPT chats via the iOS app, the web app, or via shared links. No data export is available and everything is just gone. All the value of the year gone.

All with zero notice nor support nor response from OpenAI.

Unless you are enterprise with direct contacts to OpenAI, know that at anytime your account may become falsely purged, so make backups and have fallbacks.

5

I have met same issue like yours. Have you resolved the issue now? that’s was terrible. All my conversation data was not able to export. All the years’ work has been gone. I wish someone who is charge of this could provide a way to handle or figure it out.

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I was able to get ahold of OpenAI support a few weeks ago, and they were able to diagnose it as requesting a refund triggers their fraud system, however they also said that at this time they have no intention of fixing it nor restoring access to those affected. I asked about data exports, and what else could be done, however then they ghosted me.

7

Got it. I am waiting for their replies for so long. They ghosted me too. :slight_smile:
I don’t know is there any methods to export the data for deactivate account. it is so important for me.
If you figure it out. Please tell me how to export it. Thanks.

8

After 12 months of being deactivated, OpenAI reactivated my account, acknowledging it was in error:

[Album] OpenAI Account Reinstatement

No explanation of what the error was. Considering the gravity of the error, it’s surprising that they don’t offer a free plus/pro subscription for the duration of false-deactivations.

I have requested an export of my data, now that my account is reactivated that is finally possible — it is not possible to export while they have deactivated your account. I am still waiting for the export, it has been a few days. Once the export is done, I will check against memory to see if any ChatGPT chats were purged.

There are probably many others falsely deactivated, who after their forum sessions have expired, have also lost any ability to receive support or to update us.

As a reminder, there are two suspicions for why my account was falsely deactivated, both of which have also had reports on this forum:

  • requesting a refund triggers their fraud mechanism
  • enabling their auto-plugin feature activated a dodgy plugin that triggered a policy violation
9

I am in the same situation. All of a sudden, without any warning, my account has been deactivated. I checked their policy, and I did not violate it at all. I have been emailing them for days with no response! My fine-tuned models and my data are not accessible. As an institution, we are about to make investments in their platform, and if this is the level of customer service, I have some concerns.

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