My defense, however imperfect, against having to deal w/ having to update subscriptions is to have a card I only use for subscriptions, so there's a low chance it gets skimmed. I use Mr. Swipey swipe all day long without need to (excessively) worry that someone illicitly cloning Mr. Swipey will affect my relationship with Mr. Subscribey.
Pfft. My new Amazon CC got compromised the day I got it. I used it precisely once, for an Amazon transaction.
I've probably had 5 cards compromised in the past decade. The biggest hassle is changing recurring payments. I don't track them, I just do my best ten wait for the bills to fail. What's annoying is sometimes they keep successfully charging my account for 4-5 months before failing. How they're able to bill the old number I don't know.
But yeah, they just call you and send you a new card. No need to select which transactions are fraudulent typically -- or at best 2 mins on the phone. No big deal.
Sucks when you're overseas but google voice + headphones and then Apple Pay means your new card is active the minute it's issued, even if you won't get it in the mail for 2 weeks.
I recently had to get a card replaced and what was interesting was that some companies with recurring subscriptions automatically updated to the new card number without any input from me. Not everyone did this but it was about half of my recurring charges. They must have some way of updating the info via the card provider. The expiration date and CVV changed as well but they magically already had it.
Visa's product is called Account Updater[1] and MasterCard's is Billing Updater[2]. It allows previously approved billers to get updated card information when a card is replaced due to expiration, loss, fraud, upgrade, etc.
