Laser Cards-A cautionary tale

Our man in Havana · 22-01-2005 9:23pm #1

Just thought I would share this with you good people.

I was looking thru my online banking the other day and I saw much to my surprise 3 Laser card transactions debited on 14th Jan 2005. Strange thing was these were from over 6 months ago. The amount was about €100.

I rang the bank who were at first unhelpful and wouldnt identify the merchant involved. They said it would take 6 weeks to retrieve the slips. Also they is apparently no time limit for a shop to send it thru.

The bank enventaully told me that this place had not put any laser transactions thru for over 6 months and that 100's of people have complained.

Just thought I would warn everyone of the fact.

Lump · 22-01-2005 9:27pm

Very interesting.... But you fail to mention who it was.

John

samo · 22-01-2005 9:29pm

Lump wrote:

Very interesting.... But you fail to mention who it was.

John

was wondering that myself......

Guy:Incognito · 22-01-2005 9:29pm

i thought the idea of laser instead of CC was cos it comes straight out of your a/c? so technically youve been spending €100 of money u didnt have for 6 months.

samo · 22-01-2005 9:33pm

I have found laser transactions (apart from Tesco!) normally take at least 3 days to come out of my account - this is handy when chq hasnt cleared or low on funds but not so good if hit with debits 6 months later!

Our man in Havana · 22-01-2005 9:34pm

Yes, It was a garage in the midlands. I was blissfully unaware of the fact that i owed €100.

Gummy Panda · 22-01-2005 10:13pm

They didn't poll their machine for ages then. Basically a merchant has to poll their machine for the debit to transfer to their account. Until they do it, the transaction is just stored in the machine

Guy:Incognito · 22-01-2005 10:17pm

anywhere ive worked, its always done daily. tthey must be some bunch of lazy B***ards. either that or they very rarely do any card transactions.

impr0v · 22-01-2005 10:40pm

Stekelly wrote:

anywhere ive worked, its always done daily. tthey must be some bunch of lazy B***ards. either that or they very rarely do any card transactions.

If it was the latter there wouldn't be "100's of people" complaining.

Hamill's in Mullingar?

Our man in Havana · 22-01-2005 11:21pm

Nope, Petrol station in Mountrath. So I would say they would do loads of tranactions.

Nukem · 22-01-2005 11:58pm

Sounds very suspect

Our man in Havana · 23-01-2005 12:15am

Nukem wrote:

Sounds very suspect

Indeed, when i saw 3 transactions from a name I didnt know I thought fraud. The bank said they had the slips so I was thinking a fake card.

I am still wondering what their game was.

Any ideas?

Ciaran500 · 23-01-2005 1:02am

Have you been to this petrol station and used your laser card or are these payments just mysteriously appeared on your statement?

Nukem · 23-01-2005 1:28am

clownboy wrote:

They didn't poll their machine for ages then. Basically a merchant has to poll their machine for the debit to transfer to their account. Until they do it, the transaction is just stored in the machine

Just read this- sorry but thats impossible. Those machines have to be polled at least once a week to see if there is enough money in them - sure they have a 6month maintenance as well,so doubt it.

PADDYPOKER · 23-01-2005 9:35am

Happened to me about a year ago.
Bought some goods in a small shop in the Ilac centre (about 30 Euro worth)
but they put through the debit about 8 months later.
Rang the bank and queried it, they eventually got a copy of the slip and yes it was mine all right. I tried to argue that as it was over 6 months old it was out of date but the Bank said they could put it through anytime.

Gummy Panda · 23-01-2005 11:44am

Nukem wrote:

Just read this- sorry but thats impossible. Those machines have to be polled at least once a week to see if there is enough money in them - sure they have a 6month maintenance as well,so doubt it.

sorry but i've seen a machine hold over 6 months worth of transactions. The machine was set up on automatic settle at the end of the night but the hot list was corrupted by a power outage so it would print off x, z totals but it wouldn't settle successfully. The machine was only fixed by the bank when they installed a new chip and pin one into the store. Even then they didn't show the staff how to do a manual settle on the new brand system but just set it up for automatic settle.

Alun · 23-01-2005 12:03pm

Tesco and Dunnes Stores appear to batch them up and only upload them once a week on a Monday for Tesco and Tuesday for Dunnes if my bank statements are anything to go by. Not sure why they should do that though ... is there anything in it for them to hang on to these transactions for anything up to a week?

Red Alert · 23-01-2005 12:34pm

Few facts here: The systems where the laser machine is a separate box from the register operate two ways:

(i) Credit Cards get stored in the machine and batched up daily.
(ii) Laser Cards are ALWAYS verified. Often the machine will print the top of the slip and then wait until the transaction verifies.

Don't know very much about the systems where it's part of the till. Dunnes' system is usually ok, but Tesco and Superquinn's equipment seems quite haphazard and unreliable, they might wait until the store manager remembers to do the batch process i don't know.

Lump · 23-01-2005 1:26pm

Well in statoil they do a batch update at night. Hence speeding up the transaction process. It will notice flagged cards and dial up to the bank to verify them.

John

tk123 · 23-01-2005 1:34pm

This happens to me all the time!! BOI automatically give you an overdraft with a Laser in case this happens..

Our man in Havana · 23-01-2005 2:34pm

Red Alert wrote:

Few facts here: The systems where the laser machine is a separate box from the register operate two ways:

(i) Credit Cards get stored in the machine and batched up daily.
(ii) Laser Cards are ALWAYS verified. Often the machine will print the top of the slip and then wait until the transaction verifies.

Don't know very much about the systems where it's part of the till. Dunnes' system is usually ok, but Tesco and Superquinn's equipment seems quite haphazard and unreliable, they might wait until the store manager remembers to do the batch process i don't know.

This place has the machine as part of the till. When I was there the transaction was always immediately approved, I mean less than 1 sec.

Is it possible that the shop did everything ok and that the transactions have been floating around the banking ether for 6 months?

Laser Cards-A cautionary tale

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