Overcharged at POS

dmcg90

I nipped into a local petrol station on Thursday evening to pick up a few basics, it came to 16 euro, paying via laser.

I checked my internet banking and I found that 56 euro was taken out of my bank account. How do I go about getting my money back from the petrol station? Do I require my receipt?

sdanseo

dmcg90 wrote: »

I nipped into a local petrol station on Thursday evening to pick up a few basics, it came to 16 euro, paying via laser.

I checked my internet banking and I found that 56 euro was taken out of my bank account. How do I go about getting my money back from the petrol station? Do I require my receipt?

Return to the merchant with your receipt, if you have it, and a statement printout.

If you don't have the receipt, you'll probably be relying on their good nature, depending how far back their records go. That is unless you report the charge to your bank who may be able to reverse it - but as part of it is a legitimate charge, I dunno how that would work.

Procrastastudy

Being overcharged at POS is actually a criminal offence. You can go swing until you actualy pay the money over but if you genuinely get overcharged like this its very serious. Same if you overpay when paying for a large number of items.

Happened to me once - got back to the retailer and he'd already called AIB trying to get the to call me to explain he'd made a mistake. Very appoligetic - if you go back in I'm sure they'll sort it.

Solair

This was more of an issue with swipe and sign systems. Retailers sometimes pressed accept before the customer had even signed the slip!

If you're keying your pin, the amount you're authorising is displayed on pin pad!

If you're not seeing an amount displayed, never enter your pin !

Solair

Solair wrote: »

This was more of an issue with swipe and sign systems. Retailers sometimes pressed accept before the customer had even signed the slip!

If you're keying your pin, the amount you're authorising is displayed on pin pad!

If you're not seeing an amount displayed, never enter your pin !

This is a very good point. While I've never made such a mistake myself, I know from working behind a till how easy it is when you're in a rush to key in a wrong amount for a laser transaction. It really would be so easy.

You didn't say whether or not the amount at the time looked correct, but as a miskey is far more likely than a system error, I'm going to assume you didn't check the amount or your receipt (apologies if you did). As much as it is the responsibility of the cashier to key in the right amount, you really should always check it, and check the receipt afterwards. Many customers in my experience don't want the receipt at all, which is madness considering you've just been given access to their bank account. An extra zero could turn a ten euro bill into one hundred euro by mistake. It's your hard earned cash in the hands of a cashier that may be stressed, busy, tired or simply having an unlucky day, so always give it a check!

In response to your original question though, you should be able to sort it out by contacting the manager. They should have the merchant copy of the laser receipt so they will know how much they charged you. The only problem is proving that that charge is too much. If you have your original receipt then that's great, but otherwise you'll have to go in and speak to the manager and hope that a well-mannered explanation of what happened will be met with good faith. If the till receipt was made out for the correct amount then the float will have been over that night and they'll know they owe you, however if both the laser transaction and the amount on the till were wrong you'll find it a lot more difficult. Certainly try to sort it out with the manager nicely before getting into legalities.

Solair

The procedure on normal chip and pin cards should prevent this from happening:

1) Cashier keys in amount or till sends it to the card terminal.
2: Card terminal displays amount on screen on the PIN pad:

€10.99 --- Enter PIN:

3) Customer reads amount on screen.
4) Enters PIN, thus signing/authorising the transaction.

It shouldn't be possible to put through a different amount afterwards.

If your PIN was entered, the bank will get rather tricky about doing anything about it unless there was some kind of provable fraud.

You should definitely check the receipt.

Is it possible you didn't read the display and the cashier's finger slipped when entering the amount?

If this is the case, you'd need to bring the receipt back to the shop and get a refund on your card, as technically speaking, you did actually authorise the transaction by entering your PIN.

With the older systems the problem was that it worked like this (it caused the odd problem now and again!)

1) Swipe card.
2) Enter amount.
3) Print slip for customer to sign.
4) If slip's signed - Press OK.

The problem was that the retailers used to do 1,2,3,4 and hand the customer the slip to sign if they were a bit rushed.

So, if there was an error, it would have already been sent to the bank as authorised.

In this case, it's the cashier's fault.

Nedser101

It happened to me in dominos pizza charged€180 instea of€18 6weeks till it go sorted

Solair

Nedser101 wrote: »

It happened to me in dominos pizza charged€180 instea of€18 6weeks till it go sorted

Was that done by PIN or over the phone?