How can you prevent a zombie billing invasion after your satellite TV contract is up? Simple, explains reader catastrophegirl: give the company a credit card to put on file that expires before your contract is up. If they try to put the zombie charges on the card–well, they can’t.

She uploaded this to the Consumerist Flickr pool, noting:

Not that I ever let DirecTV auto pay from my account, but they do require a card on file. So I gave them one. One that expires right before my contract ends. I fully intend to pay all the bills through when I cancel and return their equipment, but I don’t want them coming back and trying to add any crap on later arbitrarily.

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