cashback from morrisons

spaceman5

pqrdef wrote: »

On reflection I think you're right. What it comes down to is this. Before chip & pin, there would be a piece of paper carrying your signature attached to a specific amount of money, as evidence of what you thought you were paying. With chip & pin, there is no such evidence. The system relies entirely on the retailer claiming the right amount. The display of an amount on the chip & pin reader is just smoke and mirrors - anybody assuming that he's authorising that specific amount is only deluding himself. The retailer may take more and the customer will be wasting his breath complaining.


The new system at Morrisons dispenses with the initials by collecting the acknowledgement electronically on the chip & pin reader - which in this case is exactly what it failed to do.

And according to the cashier that was serving me at the time, she had other customers questioning it as well, so obviously not the first time it has happened, makes me wonder if the new pegasus sysytem they have rolled out to all stores has a few bugs in it

spaceman5

Dave101t wrote: »

i always thought the amount on the pin machines screen was full and final, but as cashback is a seperate transaction, it seems that alls well that ends well.
i like morrisons, slightly old fashioned, but gets there in the end!

on the old morrisons system it did always include the cashback in the total when you put your pin in the pin machine, on the new system before it even lets you put the pin in, you have to press the green button to confirm the cashback you have asked for, and even after that the total on the screen will still show the cashback amount in the total you are authorising by putting in your pin, in this case, the pin reader never asked me to confirm the cashback, and the total on the pin reader was £5.56 not the £45.56 it should have read

spaceman5

opinions4u wrote: »

While Morrisons haven't been too bright, I hardly think complaining is a good idea.

"Hi, I got £40 for nothing and thought I was going to get away with it - please can I complain that they've now debited my account" is hardly a good spiel.

When making such a complaint you basically have to admit to that little dishonest streak that is in most of us. Personally I wouldn't want to do that formally.

And what do you want the bank to do? The debit to the account may not have been authorised by chip and pin, but the cashback was certainly requested. So while it may be poor process, it certainly isn't fraud. On the few occasions I've ever asked for cashback, the supermarket has also asked me to initial the receipt to confirm I've had the money. This could also be deemed to be the authority.

If any action is needed here it's a letter to the Morrisons store highlighting the two debits made and any bank charges generated as a result of the second one. A request to refund those charges may be met more sympathetically.

I was not asked to sign the receipt, although as you say in the past i have been asked to sign it, so technically speaking the only thing i authoroised them to take out of my account was the £5.56 that was showing on the pin reader when i entered my pin

spaceman5

Wow, I seemed to have opened up a bit of a hornets nest, I was fully expecting to have to pay the £40 cash back, I was only merely questioning the time frame it would take for them to retrieve their mistake, I mean I do work for them so am hardly likely going to try and defraud them just the paltry sum of £40 especially as it would be pretty obvious to find me, as I used my staff discount card in the transaction, it was my own stupid fault for not shifting my funds across quick enough so I will take the £6 fine on the chin, my only 2 bones of contention are (forgetting that i actually had the £40) how are they able to take more from my account than i authorised them to do on the pin reader, whats even stranger is the time they took it back, as i checked my account at 22:00 on friday and my account was fine, and by 09:00 saturday it was overdrawn, but when i went into my bank on saturday morning the bank tells me i went overdrawn on friday , so that means they took the money between 22:00 and midnight on friday, bit of a strange time, also the way it was done, as instead of the £40 showing up as going out on friday, all they did was change the £5.56 transaction to £45.56 as it should have been in the first place, made me look a bit of an idiot in the bank as they could not understand what i was going on about. But you could see where i was coming from, as they can tell roughly what times you make transactions i would have thought, and it was pretty obvious i had not made any transctions from 6pm on friday night, until saturday morning, so something weird must have happened to make me go overdrawn.

And secondly is a bit of beef with the bank, as I have an account where i cant go overdrawn at all, and also all transactions show on my account as soon as i make them, so say i went into a shop with £10 in my account and i wanted to make a purchase of £11 it would decline it, so why did they let this transaction go through, knowing it would take me overdrawn?.

A bit long winded I know, and as I say I was not expecting the £40 for free, just the way things happened annoyed me slighly

pqrdef

spaceman5 wrote: »

I was not asked to sign the receipt, although as you say in the past i have been asked to sign it, so technically speaking the only thing i authoroised them to take out of my account was the £5.56 that was showing on the pin reader when i entered my pin

This is the delusion they want us to have. The reality is that when we offer the card we authorise them to take what they want.

pqrdef

spaceman5 wrote: »

And secondly is a bit of beef with the bank, as I have an account where i cant go overdrawn at all, and also all transactions show on my account as soon as i make them, so say i went into a shop with £10 in my account and i wanted to make a purchase of £11 it would decline it, so why did they let this transaction go through, knowing it would take me overdrawn?.

Light dawns. With an online card, the sensible way for the system to operate is
(1) get an authorisation code from the bank for the shopping
(2) if that succeeds, get another one for the cashback.

If that fails, which it should if you haven't got the funds, then the system forgets about the cashback and just charges you for the shopping.

So then you wouldn't expect the chip & pin reader to display the cashback at all. You'd expect the cashier to say you couldn't have it.


But now I do think the bank was involved in the fiddle to make the correction. With an offline card, Morrisons could take any amount up to the card limit/floor limit, off their own bat. With an online card, they were only authorised by the bank for £5.56 and must have got a retrospective authorisation for the other £40, pleading that owing to bugs in their new system they'd paid it out by mistake.

In a decent world, the bank would have arranged for Morrisons to defray any overdraft charges they felt duty-bound to make. But company directors play golf together and customers are just cows to be milked.

callum9999

pqrdef wrote: »

Light dawns. With an online card, the sensible way for the system to operate is
(1) get an authorisation code from the bank for the shopping
(2) if that succeeds, get another one for the cashback.

If that fails, which it should if you haven't got the funds, then the system forgets about the cashback and just charges you for the shopping.

So then you wouldn't expect the chip & pin reader to display the cashback at all. You'd expect the cashier to say you couldn't have it.


But now I do think the bank was involved in the fiddle to make the correction. With an offline card, Morrisons could take any amount up to the card limit/floor limit, off their own bat. With an online card, they were only authorised by the bank for £5.56 and must have got a retrospective authorisation for the other £40, pleading that owing to bugs in their new system they'd paid it out by mistake.

In a decent world, the bank would have arranged for Morrisons to defray any overdraft charges they felt duty-bound to make. But company directors play golf together and customers are just cows to be milked.

Yes thats the logical explanation. The company directors of Morrisons and Natwest had a game of golf together at midnight on the Friday and together, came up with a scheme to take £40 out of someones account... I'm sure they have nothing better to do that worry over, what is to them, pocket change...

pqrdef

callum9999 wrote: »

Yes thats the logical explanation. The company directors of Morrisons and Natwest had a game of golf together at midnight on the Friday and together, came up with a scheme to take £40 out of someones account... I'm sure they have nothing better to do that worry over, what is to them, pocket change...

But it's not an isolated case. The cashier said the same thing had happened with other customers.

Morrisons roll out a new software system and then find there's a bug in it. Nobody knows how long it will take to fix. They can't just shut the shops. They can't even suspend the cashback service, because they really don't want to get into the media in connection with yet another buggy-financial-software story. So they keep their staff in the dark as much as possible.

They could take the hit on the unauthorised transactions, but that could be expensive and might even show up in the trading figures. Anyway, a lot of honest customers might phone their banks asking why their cashback hasn't been debited to their accounts.

So they talk to the banks and tell them what the situation is. The banks are sympathetic - they have a huge stake in maintaining public confidence in the technology. An ad-hoc arrangement is made allowing Morrisons to help themselves to the unauthorised money until things get sorted out. Then Morrisons just have to run a nightly process to reconcile the till receipts with the banking logs, find out who's been paid unauthorised cashback, and resubmit the debits with an amended amount.

Helix

Doesn't surprise me really, anything Morrisons try technology wise goes wrong. Their self scan is the worst out of all the supermarkets, the machines are always crashing. Plus I have never seen Chip and PIN go down in any other store but it has happened 3 times whilst I have been shopping in Morrisons.