My Premium membership disappeared

I signed up for a 7 day trial which auto-renewed at the end of the 7 days. The following day the premium membership was completely removed from my account but the  charge remained via PayPal although PayPal did cancel the recurring payment plan.

So I'm out $53, no membership to show for it and I don't want to sign up again until I get the other $53 refunded. I tried to contact support and got nothing but an automated reply that they will contact me eventually. Is this something common? Has it happened to anyone else?

They will help you. Sometimes there are problems but they always fix them. 

One of the challenges that Chess.com mentioned at the start of the pandemic was that the growth in the site increased the delays with their responses to support requests: I'm not familiar with how they addressed those, but given that there's been another very significant spike in memberships, I expect that would lead to similar delays. Give them 7 days to get back to you and then follow up.

7 days seems unacceptable on my end, pandemic traffic or not. Call me impatient, the fact that I can't even use the service short of paying another $53 up front and hoping for a refund is not exactly good business model.

You should receive support soon. I contacted them twice and got help both times within 48 hours

There are particular challenges associated with Paypal - the documentation actually says that to cancel a premium membership paid with Paypal you need to make sure that it's cancelled in Paypal as well: How do I cancel my Premium Membership if I subscribed with Paypal? - Chess.com Member Support and FAQs

So I'm a little surprised that the recurring payment seems to have been cancelled automatically? Clearly there's something funky going on, but unfortunately the Billing team are the only ones who can help. I'm sorry that 7 days seems unacceptable to you, but if you haven't heard from them after that time, some of the mods here could rummage around our back end contacts to see what we can do.

This is what shows up in my account history:

This is what shows up in PayPal

And this is what I got in my email from PayPal:

Note that I did not cancel anything on my own.

OK, that screen shot shows that the $53.04 was a gift for membership for @PokeyRacer, not this @gtakacs account - is that your son or daughter or something like that?

They still have their platinum membership:

If you'd like to transfer the premium membership from their account to yours, Support can help you do that. You could also ask them to cancel the premium membership on that account and give you a refund.

LOL son stuff

@david

PokeyRacer is my son and I did indeed gift him an account. It was fully intended and is fine as it is. The problem is that  I was charged for two premium accounts: one on 11/21 for the gift account and a second one on 11/24 for the 11/17 7-day trial expiration converted into a regular subscription. All would be fine except my account does not have the subscription I only have the charge.

Another interesting thing I found in my account is this tidbit:

I never set such a block on my email address, I also find it rather troubling that you can't undo such limit without contacting support. What is the rationale behind such stupid arbitrary limit?

This is why the Billing team are the people who can help: they'll be able to check what the membership history has been for both of these accounts and can match that up to the Paypal payments and figure out what is going on here.

I'm not familiar with what that email unsubscription is about - I would guess that you've clicked "unsubscribe" on one of the email messages Chess.com has sent to that account? Again, there's no way I can tell from here, and the Billing team probably won't be able to help you with that either, but they should be able to work with the Support team to get it resolved.

yeah mine platinum membership also went away in 7 days and i paid for the full month WHATS THIS CHESS.COM DO REVIEW IT ASAP

If the premium was removed it was most likely due to the payment method failing, so you wouldn't have been charged.

You can check directly with staff by using the option in the menu and chosing the billing option