Restaurant taken payment more than once.

drinkeroftea

good evening all!!

i am after a bit of advice please... i went abroad and paid for a meal on my credit card. chip and pin was used. I came back to the UK the following day and checked my online banking to find that 3 debits of the same amount had been taken. (along with 3 non-sterling transaction fees).

I have contacted the restaurant, to be told I need to speak to the bank as they only took 1 payment. I have contacted the bank and they have advised me to speak to the restaurant....

I have emailed the restaurant back along with a copy of my statement showing the 3 debits. still waiting for a response.

I have also emailed Halifax to raise a dispute.

I am stressing a wee bit as the money debited is a fair whack, and christmas is round the corner, and no one is taking responsibility.

can anyone offer any words of advice?

thanks.

naedanger

drinkeroftea wrote: »

good evening all!!

i am after a bit of advice please... i went abroad and paid for a meal on my credit card. chip and pin was used. I came back to the UK the following day and checked my online banking to find that 3 debits of the same amount had been taken. (along with 3 non-sterling transaction fees).

I have contacted the restaurant, to be told I need to speak to the bank as they only took 1 payment. I have contacted the bank and they have advised me to speak to the restaurant....

I have emailed the restaurant back along with a copy of my statement showing the 3 debits. still waiting for a response.

I have also emailed Halifax to raise a dispute.

I am stressing a wee bit as the money debited is a fair whack, and christmas is round the corner, and no one is taking responsibility.

can anyone offer any words of advice?

thanks.

I assume you only entered your pin once. (If not then the rest of this post may not be relevant.) So it seems to me your bank are responsible for paying money from your account without your authority.

I suggest you speak to the Halifax again. Tell them that as far as you are concerned your dispute is with them and not the restaurant. You only authorised one payment yet they have taken (or allowed someone else to take) three payments, two of which were not authorised. Ask them to refund the two unauthorised payments, and associated currency charges, immediately (while, if necessary, they investigate). If they refuse then tell them you wish to formally complain about their poor handling of this matter and ask them to tell you what happens next in their complaint process. Make sure you either have the payments refunded (or the promise of a refund in a stated short time period) or the matter registered as a formal complaint before ending the call.

Then send them an email repeating what was said on the phone (by both you and them) so you have a record of what was said and when.

Then if you are not satisfied with their response follow their complaint process. (They should send you a copy of it, otherwise search their website.)

ThumbRemote

To add to naedangers good advice above, I once had a similar issue happen with an overseas hotel. Whilst speaking to my bank on the phone they could immediately see that I'd only entered the PIN for one of the transations, which made it pretty straighforward to sort out.

drinkeroftea

Many thanks for your replies, I really appreciate it.


update: the money seems to be credited back to me, but I have had no contact for either the bank or the restaurant so who knows what is going on!

Fosterdog

If the internet connection is poor the card readers sometimes have issues connecting to the server to authorise payments and it can cause glitches when it does then reconnect, that may be all that happened with you and when a connection was then made the bank has ringfenced the money requested during the failed authorisation attempt and it has now just dropped back into your account

molerat

It often happens somewhere in the middle, not your bank or the restaurant, and the system sorts itself out after a few days. I have been on the store end with a customer shouting that we had taken the money more than once but going through the transactions I could see that we had not, each transaction is serial numbered and there were no duplicates and none missing.