Is it legal for a vendor to reuse credit details from a previous transaction
It is very much legal and in fact depending on the fine print of the purchase you make, you have now established a business relationship among which gives the business the right to hold on to your information (unless privacy policy states otherwise) and reuse it under certain circumstances (such as auto shipments) and when they called and asked you if you wanted it and you said OK, you acknowledged authorization. All legal even if pushy and less than pretty.
"The whole concept of ""spending a fraudulent check"" is misleading. Both in practice and legally there are two separate transactions - you (not) receiving funds by depositing a fraudulent check, and you sending a cash transfer further on. Regarding the fraudulent check, generally your bank is 'responsible' in the sense that it's their responsibility to recover the money from you - it will not receive any money from the bank that supposedly issued the fake check, and if they give it to you, you spend all that money and are unable to pay it back, that's their problem and not of the other institutions. Regarding the cash transfer, from the bank point of view it's solely your responsibility - it was really you who made that payment, you explicitly authorised/instructed the banks to deliver money to the recipient, and none of those banks have the duty to return it. You have been defrauded by the recipient of this payment, and may attempt to recover the money from the fraudster - but that's not particularly likely to happen even in the case of a successful arrest and conviction.  Very fast reaction with involvement of police may block the ""vendor's"" account before they are able to withdraw the money. If that is the case, you might be able to recover your money or part of it." "Using the Transfer category is the best place to put these categories, as that accurately reflects what the transaction is. If you have your credit card and bank account linked in Mint, the debit and credit to both accounts will net to $0 in the category.  I would not recommend using ""Hide from budget and trends"" as sometimes multiple (erroneous) transactions pop up and having a category that should but, in error, does not net to $0 will raise your attention to possibly duplicate transactions. You can ask Mint to always categorize certain transactions in certain ways. On any of your payments, if you click ""Edit Details"" and then select the Transfer category, you can ask Mint to always make that classification:" Recommend using quickbooks for account management. If you use the manufacturing and wholesale you can track POs from vendors, estimates, bill payment quotes and invoicing (there's an editor to customize your set up)Also, most accountants are very familiar with this platform so come tax time they'll be able to give you a hand no problem. For accepting payments I highly suggest asking for checks. If you do accept credit cards keep in mind most  payment processors charge a percent (1.5-3%) depending on transaction amounts and quantities of transactions. So you'll want to mark up your products by at least that amount.   Another area is sales tax. Since you are not the end user you should be able to avoid sales tax on the items you will be selling to customers. You then charge the customer this sales tax. Not sure about NJ but in Texas we are 8.25%. I then pay the state of Texas the taxes collected quarterly.   Edit: also make sure you have separate finances for the LLC. Separate checking, separate credit card, separate everything! If you end up using an account that is tied to you personally then you run into the risk of losing the protective nature of an LLC from a legal standpoint.   Edit2: by separate I mean using your IRS issued EIN number to open accounts with the LLC name. When you sign anything on behalf of the company make sure to add the name of the company next to it to show the company is making the signature not you. For instance   u/sexlessnights Company name, LLC "You have no recourse on the spot to do anything to the vendor other than pay the fee, pay cash, or walk away.  If you're on a mission with longer-term horizon than immediate satisfaction, your options will vary by state.  If you're in a state where the fees are legal and the owner is (potentially) violating an agreement with the card company, you can report the vendor to the card company.  They may or may not really care.  If you're in a state where the fee is actually illegal, you'd need to see what options you have with the local authorities. You should keep in mind that if the vendor is violating an agreement that's between the vendor and the card company only, you have absolutely no rights to enforce that agreement.  You only have legal rights if you're a party to the agreement in question or if the law gives you some special rights specific to given circumstances. (The lawyers call this having ""standing."")  Likewise if the vendor is doing something that's not consistent with the agreement between you and the card company, you also have no claim against the vendor (because the vendor is not party to your agreement with the card company), although you might have a claim against the card company." "In 2010, the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act was passed, which prohibited certain activities, most of which had to do with online sites sharing your CC info with third parties.  However, the final part of the act deals with ""negative option"" marketing, which is basically what you're describing - ""We will charge you unless you say no"". It requires three components to allow a negative option: If you did not explicitly enroll in automatic payment, and made the initial purchase online (or made your most recent purchase online, I suspect) then it sounds like this was a violation of this act.  On the other hand, the act isn't terribly careful about defining terms, and is really quite vague in a lot of places, so it's possible they would argue they are not using a 'negative option' scheme but instead simply charging your bill similar to how your phone company might use autopay. If it was not online, then this probably doesn't apply.  Instead, the FTC's rule on Negative Option with regard to sale of goods applies.  Title 16 Part 425 covers this; this law is much less limiting as to what the marketer can do." "You should dispute the transaction with the credit card. Describe the story and attach the cash payment receipt, and dispute it as a duplicate charge. There will be no impact on your score, but if you don't have the cash receipt or any other proof of the alternative payment - it's your word against the merchant, and he has proof that you actually used your card there. So worst case - you just paid twice. If you dispute the charge and it is accepted - the merchant will pay a penalty. If it is not accepted - you may pay the penalty (on top of the original charge, depending on your credit card issuer - some charge for ""frivolous"" charge backs). It will take several more years for either the European merchants to learn how to deal with the US half-baked chip cards, or the American banks to start issue proper chip-and-PIN card as everywhere else. Either way, until then - if the merchant doesn't know how to handle signatures with the American credit cards - just don't use them. Pay cash. Given the controversy in the comments - my intention was not to say ""no, don't talk to the merchant"". From the description of the situation it didn't strike me as the merchant would even bother to consider the situation. A less than honest merchant knows that you have no leverage, and since you're a tourist and will probably not be returning there anyway - what's the worst you can do to them? A bad yelp review? You can definitely get in touch with the merchant and ask for a refund, but I would not expect much to come out from that." "Fees & liabilities Yes, the first problem is that liabilities are being improperly booked. If the fee you charge is fixed upon deposit then the fee should credit ""Revenue"", the fee charged to you should be booked by crediting cash and then debiting ""Expenses"", and the remaining should be booked as a liability. If the fee is fixed upon withdrawal then this will become more complex because of the fact that a change in the fee can occur before it can be applied.  In this case, the current fee should be credited as ""Revenue"" and some ""Allowance for fee increase"" should also be credited.  The amount owed to the withdrawer should be booked as a liability as before. Multiple currency bookings I will assume that this is for a cryptocurrency service of some sort considering the comments in your question and your presence on bitcoin.se. Accounting can become very dangerous when mixing denominations.  This is why all major accounting standards mandate books be maintained single currency. In your case, if the deposit is in USD, for example, and the liability is in BTC then two books must be maintained, one for each. To account for your operation properly using single currency accounts, the denominations must be exchanged internally and balanced across the two sets of books. For a deposit of BTC/depository of USD, the operation would be the same as described above, but then the cash should be credited away and the liabilities debited away from the USD books with simultaneous cash debits and liability credits on the BTC books. Considering the extreme volatility of cryptocurrency exchange rates, denominating accounts on the wrong set of books will quickly lead to insolvency or loss from improper accounting or both. From revenue to income Revenue can be construed as a liability since it could theoretically exist on the balance sheet. I mention this because all books, despite their name and quarter, are really simply long T accounts, like a blockchain.  A blockchain could be subdivided into users' individual income statements & balance sheets, as the reverse of this concept. Revenues are credited, expenses are debited.  The difference, ""net income"", is debited away with a credit to ""owners' equity""." "in theory, yes. in practice, no. largely because merchants pay a fee to process credit card transactions which normally exceeds the cash back you can get. i tried this with square, since their vendor fee was 2.75%, and i got 5% back on restaurants.  however, even though i registered with square as a restaurant, transactions were categorized as ""other services"" or something, so i only got 1% back and lost 1.75% net. moreover, if you did find a card/processor combination that left you with a net gain, they would eventually catch on and charge you with some sort of fraud.  i wasn't worried about it with the square experiment because it was only 1$, but if you tried to do this with large sums, a human would catch you. and if it was enough money to matter, there would be a lawsuit. if you were really unlucky, you might get charged with some terrorism crap like ""structuring"" deposits."