[BUG] [Billing/Account Deletion Bug] Unauthorized Pro→Max upgrade led to permanent account+data deletion; refund stuck in Fin loop (no human escalation possible)

Found 3 possible duplicate issues:

1. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/64814
2. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/31012
3. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/61339

This issue will be automatically closed as a duplicate in 3 days.

• If your issue is a duplicate, please close it and 👍 the existing issue instead
• To prevent auto-closure, add a comment or 👎 this comment

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

Thanks for flagging these — they're related (unauthorized Pro→Max upgrades), but my case has an additional, more severe consequence: permanent deletion of the entire account and all data after cancelling the unwanted Max subscription. None of the linked issues mention account/data deletion as an outcome.
This issue also documents a specific, ongoing refund request (Invoice 9BF0758D-511905) that the support bot ("Fin") confirms requires manual human processing but cannot route anywhere. Keeping this open to track that case.

I'm sorry — losing a prepaid year plus all your work on top of a billing error is a genuinely bad outcome, and the refund part (your documented €187.50 claim) is something only Anthropic can resolve. I can't help with the account or the refund. But there may be one piece you can get back that's easy to miss.
If you used Claude Code (the CLI), your conversation history and projects are stored locally on your own machine — not in the claude.ai account that was deleted. Claude Code writes every session to:

~/.claude/projects/<project-folder>/<session-id>.jsonl

Deleting your claude.ai (Pro/Max) account is a server-side action; it does not touch these local files. So your Claude Code sessions are very likely still on disk. Quick check:

ls -lah ~/.claude/projects/
find ~/.claude/projects -name '*.jsonl' | wc -l

Each .jsonl is one session — every turn, including the full conversation, is on each line. You can read them directly, or resume one with:

claude --resume          # pick from the list
claude --continue        # most recent session in the current folder

(If you can't launch Claude Code at all now because the account is gone, the .jsonl files are still plain text you can open and keep — your work isn't lost even if you can't resume it.)
Two honest caveats: this only applies to Claude Code CLI sessions, not claude.ai web conversations (those live in the cloud account and are gone with it); and it does nothing for the refund/account itself, which still needs a human at Anthropic. But if months of project work felt deleted, a good chunk of it is probably sitting in ~/.claude/projects/ right now.
On the refund: your claim is concrete and documented, and the auto-close bot shouldn't bury it — adding a comment (as you did) keeps it from closing in 3 days.

Same thing happened to my account too.
First time it's upgraded from Pro -> Max on June 15. I place refund request and it's give me refund to my account.
Second time today June 17 it's upgraded from Pro -> Max again without my consent automatically.

So frustrating. How did you succeed to get refund to your account?

My annual Pro auto-upgraded to Max 20x without consent on 21 Jul 2026 while I was asleep; residual charge went through, two further attempts failed; session usage drained to 100% while I wasn't using Claude, and stopped after I terminated all sessions. Reported via support (conversation 215475169581135); Fin escalated but no human response yet. Invoices and screenshots available on request.

Mine did the same. It auto upgraded me from Pro to Max without my consent or authorization whatsoever. Fortunately was able to get a refund. But this is not normal! I tried checking if my account was hijacked or hacked by someone but couldn't find any clues or evidence. Usually if it's used somewhere else on a different session you can actively see that but i didn't see it on my side

@Picoolo29 Glad yours got resolved — can you share how? Which channel finally worked (chat, email, other), how long it took, and whether a human agent handled it? Mine's been escalated since 21 Jul with no human response. Specifics would help everyone in this thread.

@jerrysajan99 In my case it happened on 20th of July, about 10 - 20 minutes after i received the payment confirmation on my email i went into the Claude desktop app, opened the chat box with Fin and explained that my account was upgraded to MAX subscription without a request from my side. The chatbot initially started off with pointing that my email account might have been accessed by someone else and to change my credentials and so on and after pointing that no one has accessed the account and mentioned that there have only been 5 days between monthly charges, on the 15th i was charged for the normal PRO subscription and then 5 days later i was charged 100$ for the MAX plan without my authorization. After this Fin checked my account, found that i had 2 active plans the MAX plan and an API plan it asked if i would like a refund for the Max plan. Confirmed i do and then go this message from it

" To help us categorize your request correctly, could you select which option best describes your situation?

1. Usage limits
2. Performance issues
3. Quality of responses didn't meet my needs
4. Needs additional features
5. Unclear what was included in my subscription
6. Unwanted auto-renewal
7. Accidental purchase
8. Other "

Having no idea which of these categories my request would even fall in i choose option 7 since that would be the most logical one. After that it got this message

" Good news — you're eligible for a refund on the Max plan upgrade. However, your Max subscription is currently active, and it must be canceled in order to process the refund.
Please note: if you approve the cancellation, you will lose access to your Max plan immediately (not at the end of your current billing cycle).
Do you approve canceling the subscription so we can proceed with the refund? "

I confirmed and then my account was downgraded to the free plan. I should mention that it didn't escalate to any human and it refunded me both the MAX plan and the PRO plan i had previously paid.

Not sure if it helps much but maybe i was just lucky since i reported it as soon as i noticed something was not right, or possibly that category i choose was the deciding factor.

@Picoolo29 Happy for your refund. I have 70 emails from FIN saying I qualified for a refund. But I also had two adresses that did not work. Finally FIN gave me the adress to Anthropic in Ireland, which was wrong the first time but right the third time. So I sent a letter including all my receits from them. The letter reached the office 24th och june. No answer. No refund. I have sent all the attachments including a letter to my bank and hope they can cancel the payment to Anthropic for the Max plan I never ordered. In my case I think there were more problems as Anthropic closed my account as I tried to cancel the Max plan. Very frustrating. Hope all of you get a refund.

Update for anyone with an annual plan hit by this bug. I tried the Fin refund flow @Picoolo29 described (thanks — it worked exactly as you laid out, up to a point): "Accidental purchase" category → eligibility confirmed → cancellation gate. Before approving, I asked Fin to state the exact refund amount. It offered only the small residual cash charge from the upgrade invoice — not the annual-plan credit that funded the Max month — and stated it "doesn't have visibility into prepaid annual credit consumption or the ability to add it." So for credit-funded upgrades, the automated flow cancels your subscription in exchange for a fraction of what you're owed. If your Max month was paid by prorated annual credit: demand the exact amount before approving, and decline if it's only the residual. I declined on record and the conversation was escalated to the human team with that admission attached. Will report the outcome here.

@jerrysajan99 I was reading your post and this exact same thing happened to me (July 21st) I was upgraded from Pro to Max and all my usage is being used without me ever using the app. This is the third time this has happened. It happened twice on another account and so I switched to a different email, and now it happened again. I have tried using the FIN bot and from my experience when it states that "we have escalated your response to our human support team and will respond via email" - I have never gotten a response.

@neevchandra1-sudo same date — mine hit 21 July too (upgrade + usage draining while I wasn't using the app), which points to a batch/systemic event rather than individual accounts. Three things that helped me while waiting: (1) claude.ai → Settings → Account → terminate all active sessions — my phantom usage stopped immediately after; (2) export your data (Settings → Privacy, web only) before touching anything billing-related; (3) if you're on an annual plan, see my comment above before accepting Fin's refund flow — it offers only the residual cash, not the annual credit. Posting your dates here helps establish the cluster. No human response on my side yet either — will report when one comes.

Adding related public, privacy-sanitized billing/support context from a separate unresolved Claude billing case, because this thread now looks like another Billing Platform / payment-operations queue issue rather than something an automated refund/card article loop can safely handle.

Public case hub:
https://coolak.github.io/anthropic-claude-billing-incident/

Reconciliation matrix:
https://coolak.github.io/anthropic-claude-billing-incident/reconciliation-matrix.html

The separate case has a different surface area: manual prepaid Claude usage-credit purchases fail or lose the advertised discounted checkout state, while automatic usage-credit top-ups from the same saved billing setup keep charging successfully. Support has acknowledged it needs specialized billing review, but no human Billing Platform / payment-operations owner or restored manual purchase path has been confirmed.

I am not asserting the same root cause. The overlap is the operational pattern: paid account/billing state is inconsistent, Fin/support automation cannot reconcile the ledger, and affected users need a human owner with access to billing events, entitlement state, refund/cancellation state, and payment logs.

The July 21 cluster reported above, phantom usage, and the warning about annual-plan credit not being visible to the automated refund flow are exactly the kind of facts Anthropic should correlate internally before telling users to cancel, rebuy, or accept a partial automated refund.