Ah, you're the first person I actually know who had the autopayment thing happen, so now I can completely credit it. Not that I thought that people were lying before, but I thought perhaps there was misunderstanding, and then ballooned because people are generally pretty angry at LJ right now. But if you've had it happen, and when you never used autopay, then obviously it's not a mistake.

As for the "change in three months" have you seen the planned site redesign? I don't have a link handy, it's buried somewhere in the depths of the News!Rage, but it makes LJ look very much like another platform, name starts with Face... :D They're really trying to be "hip" by aping Facebook, and possibly driving away their core userbase (who use Livejournal to interact and communicate much more than FB's "Wall" commenting system allows). I think I'll deliberately try to cut back on my community reading over on LJ, so I won't miss them if they go away.