So, I do my boss’s expense report. Twice now in the last few months, there have been charges neither he nor I recognize on his card. Both times, the vendors in question haven’t been able to figure out what they are for (or don’t wanna look it up), so use the line, “This wasn’t charged to his card.” Uh, yes they were. They are right here on his statement. Do you think we can call his bank and say, “Yeah, hey, the vendor says they didn’t charge this, so we’re just going to assume we don’t have to pay this.” So then the vendor both times has come back with, “Well, then those are just authorizations.”
Um, NO. I have never ever heard of an authorization that’s made on a card actually becoming a charge because the credit card bank fucked up somehow.
(An authorization is a hold or a reservation on your line of credit in the amount of hte charge. It reserves the amount of the charge and reduces your available credit for that amount until such time as the actual receipt is transmitted. It should drop off once the receipt comes through. If no receipt for a charge comes through, then it drops off in 10-30 days and that amount once again becomes part of your available credit.)
Is this the new customer not-actually-service meme? Blame it on the credit card company? To tell me there isn’t actually a charge on his account when I’m looking at it right here on his bill??? The fuck?
I used to work in the credit card industry. I’ve never heard of this happening. I just confirmed with my boss’s bank that my understanding of authorizations and charges is correct, and there is NO WAY that a charge has shown up on the bill that is an improperly processed authorization.
Well, duh. But that’s not what I’m bitching about. I bitching about vendors pulling impossible scenarios out of their ass because they can’t be arsed to do some research, or they can’t find the charge in their system. It’s passing the buck, it’s horrible customer service, and it has now come up twice in two different scenarios with two different vendors, one huge and one not. With the first episode, I just assumed the manager was on crack, and now I’ve heard this unmitigated bullshit again. When I was working in customer service I would have never, ever shrugged my shoulders and given my customer some bs hoping they’d swallow it and get off my phone just because I couldn’t immediately solve their problem. I most certainly would NOT tell them a charge didn’t happen when they have it on their statement!
Speaking as a billing rep, I often can’t find that charge. I can’t look up every charge that happened on a particular credit card number: the PTB do not want to give that power to every billing rep on the floor. To make it even better, our fraud department is contacted solely through email and mostly works with banks. We generally don’t refund fraudulent charges through our billing hotline because that is much better handled by the credit card company in question.
Naturally, your bank/credit card company does not want to spend time doing this work. They will tell you to call the retailer. This is because your bank’s fraud department is overworked or lazy. Frankly, they need to do their job and research these unauthorized charges if they want to keep your business.
I am gobsmacked by this. Are you saying, Little Plastic Ninja, that if Company X charges my credit card for something that I never ordered or requested, then the bank issuing my credit card is the one that is in charge of fixing it, and I shouldn’t be calling Company X? Because, in your example, Company X can’t find the records of charges, and if the bank doesn’t want to fix Company X’s mistake, the Bank is the one being overworked and/or lazy?
I called Dell to get a copy of the receipt for the charges. I have no doubt they are legit, I just don’t know what they are, and I need the receipt for the expense report.
Silly me I process a charge to Dell for probably a service contract renewal and they didn’t automatically send me a receipt.
I’ll take that responsiblity.
But when you can’t find the charge because all your charges are linked to phone numbers and not credit card numbers (or at least cross-referenced with a cc #), don’t pull some bullshit excuse and assume your customer is an idiot an thinks an auth is a charge. And don’t keep coming back to that same crap of an excuse when the customer tells you its on the credit card bill. The first problem is, of course, a shit way of keeping track of customer accounts. We tried three different office numbers, two cell phone numbers, and my boss’s phone number at home. Without the elusive magical phone number that these charges are linked to, there’s no way for a rep to find it.
Now, wouldn’t it make more sense for the charge to be linked to, I dunno, the customer number? Or the service tag #? Or the Company Name? Or any of three possible email addresses? I have NO IDEA what phone number was used when the charge was made, and I’ve exhausted all the possible numbers I have. Then I get the bs about the charge didn’t actually happen!
Wait a sec. From numerous other threads on this board, ISTR that if you contest a charge through your credit card company, the vendor who issued the charge gets whacked with some non-trivial fee ($25?), even if the charge turns out to be valid. But you’re saying your company would rather pay that fee every time instead of spending a bit of time investigating on its own? Because I’ve called vendors plenty of times on a charge I/my wife didn’t remember, which turned out to be perfectly valid.
And plus, if they can cough up documentation for the credit card bank, why can’t they for the customer? I doubt that Dell is going to refund $363 without a fight. Somewhere there’s means to look up that charge and what it was. What I want is for someone to take an interest and see what they can do. You know, help the customer.
(A related rant, for crissakes right down the details I’m telling you. I shouldn’t have to tell you three goddamn times that there is one charge for $129 and a second for $234. Finding a two-year-old charge for $490 is not helpful.)
I deal with this on a monthly basis. I have to reconcile a company p-card and get invoices/receipts for every purchase made on the card (about 60 transaction a month). These are purchases for manufacturing parts from various distributors around the county.
The statement will say Unitek-Miyachi… $647.32…4/20.
I call them up and get-
Me: I need a copy of an invoice for a purchase made last month.
Them: What’s the invoice #?
Me: I don’t have that, otherwise I wouldn’t be calling to get a copy.
Them: What’s the order #?
Me: I don’t have that either. I’ve got our company name, shipping address, billing address, transaction amount, transaction date, and credit card number. Surely you can look it up with one of those?
Them: Mmmm, nooo… do you know what parts it was for?
Actually, this is exactly what you should do. Call the credit card company, and tell tham you want to make a chargeback. Tell them the vendor denies making the charge. so it must be fraudulent. They will check with the vendor, who will either continue to deny the charge (which will result in the CC company reversing the payment to the vendor) or they will do what they should have done in the first place, which is look up the records and confirm the charge. Can’t hurt, and it may result in removal of the charges.
Really, I’m not actually trying to be bitchy (it just comes to me naturally) but did you read the thread?
I don’t want the charges removed. I want to verify what they are for (which should be a service contract renewal, IIRC). If I renewed the service contract, then I need the service contract. (Additional rant upon additional rant - how am I now supposed to use a service contract you charged me for when there’s no record of it on my account???)
What I WANT is for people to stop telling me it’s only an auth when it clearly is not. What I WANT is for customer service to give a rats ass and try to help you instead of finding escape hatches for their damn selves. What I WANT is for customer service to stop assuming the customer is a moron, that this is the only reasonable explanation, and not that there might be more digging that needs to be done on their end.
For the record, the first time this happened? Turned out it was a charge for a hotel room made to my boss’s card, but for a gentleman we’d brought in for an interview. Had the hotel manager been willing to look up the charges to my boss’s card instead of insisting it was an authorization that his Visa converted to a charge in error, she could have saved herself $25 in dispute investigation charges. All she had to do was not insist she was right and I could not possibly be, and the whole stupid dispute process could’ve been avoided.
Also, where does this suddenly come from, this “it’s an authorization, m’am, not a charge”? I’ve never heard this before and its sounds like people have just enough information to be dangerous.
I hate to tell you, but as the AR guy for a hotel I get all the ‘what the hell is this charge on my card’ calls; and lots of our authorizations do show up as charges on people’s statements and then disappear when the authorization expires. This mostly seems to happen with american issued cards (we’re in Canada).
Since I don’t have their money I can’t give it back. And there’s nothing as a merchant I can do to make them come off a statement any faster so my only response in those cases is ‘call your credit card company’.
And when the guest does it never shows up as a chargeback from our perspective so I have no idea what the banks are doing.
With all due respect, that’s not possible. By statement I mean bill. I’m not talking about looking up your card online and seeing auths. I’m not talking about calling into the automated line and seeing what your available credit is, and having it be lower because of an authorization (for example, many hotels, as you know, put an authorization of about 150% of the expected final amount on a card at check-in). If you, the merchant, have not been paid, then it hasn’t appeared on their bill, trust me. I’m certain that what you’re talking about is NOT a charge and you’re right, you don’t get paid for authorizations. But the problem here is that too many people do not understand the difference between an authorization and an actual charge, between what they actually have to pay/what the merchant gets paid and, oddly, what a statement is.
/shrug. You say impossible, I say I’ve seen it (yes, as in faxes of bills sent by the CC company to the cardholer). I know who’s experiences I believe.
And then do you follow up and track this auth to see if it ever comes thru to you? Do you see these “disappearances” on later statements? You realize that banks hold charges until they get the highest possible exchange? Are your guests understanding what their statements are telling them as to showing the exchange rate?
I am not saying Company X cannot find the record of the charges. I am saying the billing department at Company X cannot find the record of the charges. Heck, I can’t even see the full credit card number on your account.
I’ve worked for two billing departments, one at Company X, one at Company Y.
Company X is a very big business and employs way over a hundred billing reps. We can’t see your full card number, but we can search for your card in our system if it’s set to bill recurringly or if it’s purchased items in Area A. If it’s purchased items in Area B (stuff that doesn’t require shipping, basically) we’re hosed, BUT our fraud department can find the charges and share the info with your bank. If for some reason I want our fraud department to do a search, I can send them the card number and get an answer back, usually on the same day.
Why does Company X do it like that? The company line is that it encourages the caller to handle things with their own bank and deal with the problem at its root. Lots of our fraud – the stuff we don’t catch and automatically refund, that is – is just a result of a family member making a charge that their family members didn’t know about. And there’s the aforementioned not wanting to give everyone absolute knowledge of all our transactions. I can only imagine what would happen to the merchant program’s servers if it had fifty reps at a time accessing all charges between May 3 and May 7 on a card ending in 5572 when some cough valued caller does not trust us enough to read us the whole number. And with as many accounts as we have, that’s going to be a LOT.
Company Y was vastly different. Company Y was a much smaller company. We kept record of every card used on an account within the account info visible by any billing rep – at max, there were four or five plus our manager. Not everyone could search the transaction log, as I recall, but we could always go and talk to someone who could. I could, if you called and said “I was billed $189 on March 2 on a VISA card ending in 9920”, track down the charge and the account with little trouble. I had access to the software so I could do fraud checks – checking out odd or international accounts with unverified information. We didn’t have a fraud department: the duties were shared among the billing reps.
