Amazon - Holding funds and repeatedly attempting to take payment again

Kim_13

Ordered an item on Wednesday, part paid with gift card and part on my Chase debit card via Curve. The funds have been pending since then and I have a screenshot proving this. They must have known they had ringfenced payment as they would hardly have dispatched the item without it, but while the item was out for delivery, they attempted to take a duplicate payment. As I only add enough to the account to cover my spending, this was declined but it is starting to annoy me as they’ve now done it a further 4 times. Thankfully Chase/Curve don’t charge for a declined transaction and anti-embarrassment mode is off, so they can’t incur me any card charges - but until they either take the funds they originally held or drop that hold and then re-debit the amount, I can’t use my Chase account for anything greater than or equal to the amount unless I want to effectively give an interest free loan (as I don’t have access to the funds they are still holding.) Or use Curve with any other card.

I haven’t found Amazon CS the best in the past so didn’t really want to poke the bear as it were (and I’m not sure their system makes it possible to send the screenshot) - but equally I don’t want to lose my account when the mess up is of their making and not mine.

sheramber

Is the item from a third party seller?

Amazon as a seller only uses pending payments if they need to verify the card but a third party seller may use  pending payments.

Kim_13

sheramber said:

Is the item from a third party seller?

Amazon as a seller only uses pending payments if they need to verify the card but a third party seller may use  pending payments.

No, sold by Amazon (EU S.a.r.L if that might make a difference.)

sheramber

The only reason Amazon put it pending is because the payment has to be authorised. This is usually due to your card proivider requiring it.

Usually a message comes up on the screen that you need to authorise the payment .

Did you get such a message or receive an email advising you?  Have you checked your spam folder?

forgotmyname

Started getting this occasionally, stupid thing is I had a sub £50 order that I needed to confirm on my banking app but where a
£280 and £500 purchase went through without a check.

Kim_13

Spam folders checked, nothing. From previous experience Amazon and eBay are the sites where the payment goes through without receiving a prompt to click approve in the app, entering an OTP etc. There was no prompt on this occasion (sub £35.) The money is ordinarily pending for a day or two before it is then claimed - not failing to claim the money and then trying to ringfence the same again.

Kim_13

Well, I thought they couldn’t just randomly charge another card linked to Curve (anti-embarrassment off) but they’ve just held funds from my Halifax account that were supposed to pay Standing Orders due tomorrow. There would not have been insufficient funds at Chase if they took the funds they held at the time the order was placed, and I’ll now get almost no cashback (less than £5 of the £500 needed for the Halifax Reward was remaining.) I’d have been better off if they charged my credit card (0.5% rather than the 1% of Chase.) 

The description on the pending transaction has a third party seller name on it when I ordered from Amazon and the receipt confirms this.

I wouldn’t mind if I had been trying to evade paying, but they were the ones that messed up taking the money from the account it was supposed to come from. 

PHK

Until your last post, about the third party seller which has muddied things a little, I was going to say that this could actually be a long standing bug with Curve. For some reason, on some transactions Curve presents the "Claim" as a separate transaction to the initial hold. 

I've even seen it occasionally at the supermarket. Normally the hold and claim happen pretty quickly one after the other in the curve app. But occasionally within seconds of paying you'll see two pending, one of which will change as the money is claimed. 

Curve blame the merchant and the merchant blames Curve! 

Kim_13

I’ve sent Curve a message asking why they have allowed Amazon to do this given that the card selection was completely inappropriate (holds against twice the amount would be less of a problem if the second was on my credit card, which has had sufficient funds ever since the order was placed. My Halifax account didn’t have sufficient funds until yesterday when funds arrived to cover the Standing Orders that were supposed to go today.)

It’ll be Curve that need to release the hold on the remaining money. I doubt I’d get anywhere with Amazon as looking at it from their end they believe they’ve debited the same card because the first payment didn’t reach them for whatever reason.

The third party seller thing is just bizarre - it’s not a seller I have ever ordered from and I hadn’t made any further purchases while waiting for the Chase hold to drop and Amazon to re-take the money. The amount is identical and there’s nothing I didn’t order on my Amazon order history. There’s now no evidence in Curve that the transaction was ever supposed to come from Chase at all, except that it is still selected as the funding card - it shows as completed on Halifax and tells me I can’t Go Back In Time.

liggerz87

Also another thing if you use credit card on curve you lose the section 75 protection 

Kim_13

liggerz87 said:

Also another thing if you use credit card on curve you lose the section 75 protection 

As a result my highest single purchase via Curve has been £99 - as it wouldn’t have been eligible for S75 anyway. A useful thing for any readers to be aware of.

Having read the various stories here of higher value items being missing on arrival, I won’t spend £100 on Amazon in one transaction.

Curve did reply saying it had been passed on for further investigation - 3 days and counting…

There’s something odd about this transaction as it tells me I can’t GBIT, yet the option is there for an in-person transaction made on the same day.