Strange email received this morning!

My bank recently changed my debit card to a new company and so I went to my account on Rocks to delete the cancelled card and add the new one. ( The original card wasn't due to expire until later on this year but has now been cancelled by my bank in favour of the completely new one.) A simple enough task you would think. Not so! I have been told that Rocks cannot delete expired or cancelled cards and that they have to remain on their system for "audit purposes". I wasn't very happy about this, but was assured that it would not cause any problems.

However today I received an email from Rocks which informed me, "We are preparing to despatch your order number *****. Unfortunately, we have experienced a problem obtaining funds from the payment card ending in ****. We will try twice more, on the next two working days.
In the meantime, if you would like more information or would like to provide us with alternative card details, please do not hesitate to contact us."

I have not placed an order with Rocks for over a month now so have not checked anything out or given permission to debit my card. Furthermore, the card they have tried to debit is, yep you've guessed it, the cancelled card which "wouldn't be the cause of any problems"!!!

Needless to say, I have been in touch with CS at Rocks this morning to see what is going on and I have been told it is a computer error and they are working on it! It seems that the computer has randomly picked old orders and I have been told Rocks are aware of the problem.

I can't help wondering what would have happened if the card they had been trying to debit had been a live card? When would the error have come to light?

I would be much happier if debit and credit cards could be deleted as required and have not encountered this problem with any of the other internet companies I deal with. It was a simple task to update my card details in the "my account" section of M&S, Amazon, Play.com, Paypal, QVC, etc.

Anyhow, apologies for the long winded post but I felt I should flag this up to you all so that you can keep an eye on your bank and credit card statements just in case.

Thanks for the "heads up" perdita!! I find this rather alarming, especially considering the e-mail correspondence I have had with Rocks recently.

I contacted Rocks to ask them to remove a card (had to get my card changed, long story) from my account as despite our "my account" on the website making it look like we can edit/delete cards ourselves, we can't so I asked CS to.

Anyway I got a reply explaining that they cannot remove cards from our accounts as they have to keep them for 6 years for auditing purposes, they assured me that they are kept securely by the card processing company. Now even if companies do have to keep these details, surely these can be kept for that purpose without having to appear in peoples "my account"? Amazon and M&S to name just a couple allow you to edit/delete cards yourself, we have full control as to what card details sit in our accounts so surely Rocks can do the same?

To be fair when I said this to Rocks CS that I was far from comfortable with the situation and asked them to pass my concerns onto the appropriate department they confirmed they had passed it onto technical team but I have not heard anything further. I just hope they are working on it.

Hello everyone,

Unfortunately, a change we made to our system over the weekend re-opened around forty old orders, most of which had old or expired cards. The system then tried to process the orders when we started shipping this morning, so it would have tried a pre-authorisation check against the card. We've now fixed this problem.

With regards to the old cards - perhaps as a result of your feedback Perdita and Sazza - the Help Team asked a while ago for the ability for cards to be removed. This facility is now in test and we hope to release it shortly. Effectively, it hides the card so that it cannot be seen or used on future orders, whilst keeping a reference to it on the system for audit purposes.

One thing I would like to point out is that we do not store credit card numbers on our system at all, as we use a 'token authorisation' system, which means that we register the card with our payment gateway provider and then just store a 'token' that refers to that card on our system, along with the last 4 digits of the card number. Therefore, full card details are not retrievable from our system at all.

Please accept apologies for the system problem this morning, and hopefully this further information is helpful.

Kind regards

John Bennett

Just thought I would let everyone know that you can now delete old cards from your account on Rocks. :happy: