Spent money in store, not been debited.

afk17

Hope I put this in the right place!
The OH and I were at a supermarket yesterday evening and usually when we pay by debit card the money is taken straight away. However, the money wasn’t even debited. The money in her account is the same as her available balance and she’s at a loss. Was she not charged?
Might be an anomaly, but the till attendent had to reboot the card machine after the people before us. I don’t know what the issue was, but it apparently was ‘solved’ after the reboot. Anyone have any answers? This was in a Tesco store.

TrustyOven

Might be related to this:

https://www.metro.news/card-chaos-at-tills-as-entire-network-crashes-across-uk/1289494/

afk17

Thanks for the reply. However, this article says people couldn’t pay due to a fault. Our card transaction went through and was approved by the machine in store, and the woman at the till had no reservations about letting us go. Hence why i’m a little confused. It wasn’t a small shop either, so pretty confused as to why my OH’s account shows no mention of the transaction.

eskbanker

No point in getting worked up about it - retailers are under no obligation to present transactions for settlement in real time and could in fact delay doing so for many months.

Granted this is less frequent than it used to be but can still happen and is nothing to worry about, just allow for the fact that the transaction hasn't reached her account yet but in all likelihood will do, rather than relying on the bank's version of the available balance....

molerat

If the system went into off line mode then the transaction would not show until the system went back on line or was manually polled.

afk17

I don’t exactly know what the issue was with the card machine but she needed to reboot it. It seemed to come back online and was connected when we paid, but this has never happened before and something is making me think that the machine was at fault.

JosephK

Was it contactless, these often do not show up as pending. Usually find payments, even with large stores, take a day or so to be debited. Suggest you give it two or three days and recheck.

afk17

Not contactless. We used chip and pin and my OH’s bank always shows debited amounts instantly. That’s why we’re confused. It hasn’t even reserved the funds for the payment and both account balance and actual balance remain the same.

colsten

afk17 wrote: »

I don’t exactly know what the issue was with the card machine but she needed to reboot it. It seemed to come back online and was connected when we paid, but this has never happened before and something is making me think that the machine was at fault.

You can't tell what the till was "connected to" and whether the transaction was reported to the bank. In fact, it looks that it has not been reported straight away, and it may not get reported for some time if there was a major fault in the card processing cloud somewhere. Don't spend the money again as it is more than likely that they will catch up before long.

NotRichAtAll

I guess you have not been back to the shop to ask when they will take the payment, your probably thinking "have we got away with a free shop"

afk17

Literally what i’m thinking. I have no idea what has exactly happened and can’t find definite evidence anywhere! Haha!