Virgin double charging transactions

Terry_Towelling

Migster wrote: »

I agree with what Terry has posted, though it seems very odd that both transactions were similarly affected. In the first example, Virgin is the issuer and in the second it is the merchant. I would have thought that these would be two distinct systems, which presumably would make it less likely that both were incorrectly configured.

Also, as has been mentioned, if this was a system issue, then surely all customers would be impacted and it would have been all over the media.

I also felt it seemed odd to have affected both sides of the equation. However, regardless of who supplied the currency, Virgin Money's credit card system will have had to receive, process and respond to an Auth request for the transaction, hold that Auth request and then match it to an incoming Clearing Message. Problems within the Auth & Clearing processes (such as 'dropping' key bits of data) could then still have an effect.

Of course, If Virgin Money also acted as the currency supplier, then the diagnosis looks even more likely.

UHAHA

Terry_Towelling wrote: »

Of course, If Virgin Money also acted as the currency supplier, then the diagnosis looks even more likely.

They were not the supplier, Post Office Travel Money was.

Terry_Towelling

UHAHA wrote: »

They were not the supplier, Post Office Travel Money was.

OK thanks for the info.

I still don't think it alters things. With your credit card transaction Virgin has failed to match the Auth to the Clearing message (they may have stored incomplete/incorrect data in the pending transaction) and with the Payment made through the App, Virgin has issued an Auth request to your current account and then cleared a transaction with (presumably) different data to the Auth message, meaning the two messages couldn't be matched.

Either way, it suggests a problem with the data being held/stored/issued by Virgin's Auth and Clearing systems.

Quite why no one else has mentioned this, I don't know. One final caveat - I'm only theorising about the cause but, taking everything at face value, something has gone wrong somewhere and Virgin is the common denominator.

UHAHA

To be honest I'm not too bothered with the credit card as I wasn't going to use it to full extend and I'll be fine when it finally drops off but money on my current account is the problem. Simply fact that they get away with doing things like this!

On my credit card £750 transaction is classified as cash advance(completed one) and as a purchase ( pending one).

When I think about it I remember now it happened before but I thought it was just a glitch and the amount of money wasn't much at all and I just didn't dig in to that when the transaction cleared after few days.

Terry_Towelling

UHAHA wrote: »

On my credit card £750 transaction is classified as cash advance(completed one) and as a purchase ( pending one).

So, herein lies the answer - Auth Message was incorrectly profiled as a Purchase and Clearing Message was correctly profiled as Cash. Those two message types will never match.

Virgin needs to be told to sort it out. It will only affect (seemingly) Cash transactions which is possibly why it isn't reported as a problem more widely.

AnotherJoe

UHAHA wrote: »

Gary, do you even read what I write? Or are you Virgin Money employee or simply brainwashed?

What money belongs to the credit company??? The money on my current account in completely different bank? The money I paid in from my decorating bussiness? Because that's the money they frozen!!! They took £300 that I wanted to pay and then FROZEN ANOTHER £300!

That is not what I understood you were stating had happened. So yep, somethings broken.