McNamara’s Credit Card

After Mrs. McNamara was forced to resign from Breaking Code Silence on December 9th, 2021, her credit card was not removed from several of Breaking Code Silence’s accounts.

One such example was Breaking Code Silence’s Hootsuite account. On December 9th, 2021, her access to the Breaking Code Silence email she used was revoked within minutes of her resignation. Since the BCS Hootsuite account was registered to this email address, Mrs. McNamara’s access to the Hootsuite account was also cut off. However, no one removed her credit card as the primary payment option from that account. After Breaking Code Silence initiated litigation, Hootsuite charged Mrs. McNamara’s credit card for the annual non-profit renewal of $831.00 for Breaking Code Silence’s Hootsuite account. Mrs. McNamara, through counsel, informed Breaking Code Silence of this issue in June 2022.

Note: For the efficiency, we are posting the emails in order below to make it easier to read but the original formatting can be read here and here

Attached email provided by Ms. Close:

At that time, Breaking Code Silence, through counsel, continued to insist that they only had access to a free account.  Mrs. McNamara contacted Hootsuite’s support. During the below exchange, Hootsuite support confirmed that Mrs. McNamara’s credit card is still being charged and that the Hootsuite account’s admin email had been changed from kmcnamara@breakingcodesilence.org to admin@breakingcodesilence.org – an email that Mrs. McNamara believed to be under the control of Jennifer Magill, the current CEO of Breaking Code Silence.

At this point, Mrs. McNamara attempted to mitigate her damages by disputing the charges and changing her card number. However, that seldom works to prevent future charges with automatic payments.

Through discovery, it was later shown that Breaking Code Silence indeed did have access to the paid Hootsuite, and Mrs. McNamara’s credit card was again charged in May 2023 for that Hootsuite account. The latest charge was for the amount of $2,988.00. This charge was later reversed and, hopefully, will not reappear next year.

Note: Hootsuite was not the only charge that Mrs. McNamara’s credit card has been charged for. After her forced resignation, she continued to receive charges from Cloudways for Breaking Code Silence’s web hosting from January through March 2022 – which finally she stopped by disputing the charges through her credit card company and with Cloudway’s help. She also received annual charges for a Dropbox account in Breaking Code Silence’s control on January 2022 and January 2023.

To date, Mrs. McNamara has not been reimbursed by Breaking Code Silence for any of the charges that were detected outside the dispute period her credit card allows.