Credit card protection from Chase that I didn’t know that I had

Our primary credit card was compromised.  Again.

We noticed a spurious $9.84 charge when looking over our Chase Sapphire statement.  A quick visit to the website and a bit of Googling revealed the bad news.

So we called up Chase, reported the transaction, and they credited it back to us, no questions asked (they're good like that).  They canceled our current card, and rushed us a new one for free, which came promptly (they're good like that, too).

Following that, we looked over our recurring charges on that card, and saw only one that was due to be posted soon.  A couple of days later, when my wife went to the business to change the credit card number on file, and to pay if needed.  she was informed that the charge had bee posted that morning, and that the system was reporting that our account was paid up.  So, she left without paying anything.

“But the account number is wrong!”

After my wife relayed this to me, I called up the business.  It didn't make any sense.  I knew that the credit card was canceled immediately when I called, and the charge was posted to that account after the card was canceled.  The charge should have bounced.  The person behind the desk couldn't give me a concrete answer as to how long it took their system to report back that a charge had failed.  Was it minutes, hours, or days?  They didn't know.  I wasn't convinced that the charge had gone through, even though their system said it had.

A pleasant surprise

They told me to call the credit card issuer, which I did.

At that point, the Chase representative gave me a pleasant surprise.  They did approve the charge, even though the card had been canceled.  Their system determined — correctly — that the charge was a recurring charge, and in essence gave me some time to call up the merchants to change over the credit card information.  In the meantime, though, they let the charges through.

In fact, they said that they usually approve these kinds of charges for thirty to sixty days!  That's a huge amount of time to fix things.  I had always been rushing to change over the payment arrangements because I thought that they could bounce at any moment after the card was canceled.

Not so, apparently.

Thanks, Chase!