Charged twice for dinner

1. Dispute the charge with your bank.
2. Go get the establishment to pull a register tape (or register
tapes) to prove they rang that much in sales.
3. Don't use debit cards in a place where you lose sight of the card
(same with credit cards) since there are enough dishonest people out
there who can "skim" the information off your card to create a bogus
copy card.
4. Don't get your undies in a bundle...stuff happens...it can get
corrected. It may be a pain, but it can get corrected...and sometimes
honest mistakes do happen. Be nice and they should credit you
whatever you're due...and if it caused you to overdraft, then they
should pay for any related expenses for that too. Most times, even
the bank will understand and credit you back...IF YOU ARE NICE about
it.

it should be off by now i mean, even with banks being slow and
stubborn.

You'll need to get your bank and the store/restaurant manager on the
phone with you at the same time. Let the manager give them one of the
transaction ID's and the bank should be able to release the hold.
That is, if it's not already off hold by now since it's Monday.

I can relate on living paycheck to paycheck so ignore these posts
about your personal financial issues it's none of their business.

Taking this to corporate is the long way to solve this. It could take
months for the company's execs to even bother with your letter. The
location manager should be able to fix it in minutes, though it will
cost them a small fee on their credit card approval service bill to do
so.

Go back to the location you ate in and show them a printout of the
transactions in your account, your debit card, and your copy of the
receipt you received. The manager should be able to authorize a
reversal of one of those charges.

"So I have had no money all weekend to get gas or anything because I
don't get paid again until Friday!"

$67 caused you to have no money for the weekend? Me thinks there may
be some budgeting issues there...just sayin....

I had three authorization holds from a local restaurant as they
explained it was accidental...still had money for the weekend.

In my experience, getting someone to reach out to the bank and get rid
of the duplicate auth is much like asking them to cut off their left
arm. Even if they say they have, it may take them a few days to
"process" it on their end and by that time it's usually dropped off.

You may want to contact your bank and see if they will recognize it as
a duplicate auth and jetison one of them. If it's not one of the mega
banks who don't really care, they may help you out.

I hope you get your money refunded back to you.

I've had to do that before - swipe my card in again when the system
said it wasn't reading it properly. I always worry I'm getting charged
twice and I always make sure to check with the clerk to make sure I
didn't get charged twice.

It hasn't happened to me yet, but I always worry it will.

I was out of town last Saturday night!

Maybe it's just me, but I think it's really odd that TWO complaints
about duplicate charges came in to PFB today from the SAME NIGHT in
the same general area.

I wonder if there was some issue with the local authorization centers
that caused this. It's just too weird that this would happen like
this. Too coincidental.

Maybe they didn't know it got authorized twice?
Where I used to work, some times we would get an error message from
the credit card machine and the transaction would not go through. In a
few cases, this led to the customers card being authorized anyways,
even though the charges didn't end up posting.

Have you spoke to the manager? They should be able to tell you what is
going on and issue a refund if needed.

and to be honest it's pretty hard to get the pending charges magically
taken off.

i tried once, even WITh a fax from the company stating that they were
authorizing it to be removed and the bank still wouldn't budge.
eventually they gave me a temp credit though (the bank that is)


so good luck. you may need to fight the bank more than the company
you're actually mad at though