I May Be Cheap...
But it wouldn't take me an hour to see that I had paid £2000 for a ride.
Bug at payments processor WorldPay swipes £2k+ per ride ticket from Brighton Pier revellers
Hundreds of visitors to Brighton Pier have been left thousands of pounds out of pocket after a Worldpay payment snafu left them less than amused. Frolickers at the famous pier looking for some traditional bucket-and-spade seaside fun were charged more than £2,000 a pop for ride tickets after vendor WorldPay systems mistakenly …
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Friday 25th June 2021 21:25 GMT logicalextreme
Re: I May Be Cheap...
My experience with Worldpay and other payment providers, the fact that the charges took place two months later and the fact that one datum consistently ended up masquerading as another datum absolutely screams to me that there was a processing issue with that day's payments and somebody cobbled together a CSV file (incorrectly) using Excel (I'm aware that's a homonym for "incorrectly") in order to put the missing payments through.
Maybe I will start checking my bank statements more often.
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Friday 25th June 2021 18:08 GMT NoneSuch
Re: I May Be Cheap...
I only keep £1,000 max in on my daily flexible friend and top it up weekly as needed for situations just like this.
Whenever I use it at the shops I put my fingers in my ears before they swipe it through. The attendant always pauses to ask why I'm doing that and I reply it's in case the wife has been shopping.
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Monday 28th June 2021 06:14 GMT Nifty
Re: I May Be Cheap...
Over 10 years ago I was at a UK tourist spot cafe with a group of Chinese tourists. One of them was using a Chinese based payment card. She was getting a text for every transaction no matter how trivial, showing amount paid. As it happened she had what seemed like a failed transaction at the till and was asked to repeat the payment. However her texts showed she now had 2 approved payments, she demanded and got a refund in the spot.
PayPal app can notify you of every transaction which is why I use it wherever possible for recurring payments. Its a disappointment that something similar isn't offered wth payment cards.
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Friday 25th June 2021 15:50 GMT Ol'Peculier
The question is...
I used WorldPay's payment gateway from 2004 until about 4 years ago and the only question I have is "how?"
Way back when, they were pretty good that as an authorised integrator I got a small % of all transactions through all the sites I built that used them. Maybe this is their way of clawing some of that back?
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Saturday 26th June 2021 11:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: The question is...
WorldPay has been borged into some US based corporation, and in my experience their services have suffered from a lack of development ever since. The support staff at the parent company don't even seem to know their own product portfolio (not surprising, as they have multiple products that do the same thing).
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Friday 25th June 2021 15:50 GMT Wempy
The thing that always ticks me off when financial companies make a cock up, debits are instant yet credits take ages. This may have been a genuine mistake, but mealy mouthed apologies will not be good enough. World Pay personnel need to seek out these people and apologise to them in person, while handing them their cash back including a payment for interest and bank charges. Now wouldn't that be a thing, also it'd stop it happening again.
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Friday 25th June 2021 17:01 GMT Flocke Kroes
Re: The return of the Y2K bug
When I have no other choice but to deal with a spreadsheet file the first thing I do is convert it to CSV and run each field through a bunch of regexes to identify which column the field belongs in. I am sure few people here would be surprised by the large number of errors this corrects in every single file. It looks like WorldPay need a similar level of paranoia. I wonder if account number YYYYMMDD, sort code YY-MM-DD gets a pile of unexpected payments.
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Friday 25th June 2021 15:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
We had a good one (not via WorldPay) where the credit card number went through as the amount.
Most people's credit limit wasn't the GDP of Belgium, so the transactions didn't happen - (actually the payment provider realised something was up and it didn't get as far as anything which upset the customer).
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Friday 25th June 2021 18:20 GMT Dante Alighieri
Compensation and Credit Scores
Unfortunately, the consequences of having an unauthorised overdraft extend to more than refunding the missing money and paying the bank fees.
Failed mortgage and bill payments may incur significant costs and fees, and a huge hit to credit ratings.
Are these to be compensated and corrected?
What about the lost 0% on a credit card for a late / missed payment.
And up to 56 days to get the bill depending on the billing cycle for credit cards so might explain why this is just showing up.
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Saturday 26th June 2021 00:34 GMT DS999
Re: More proof that using a debit card is stupid
No but it CAN happen, as can other problems where a charge goes through for the wrong amount or goes through more than once. Obviously it is much more likely that someone will get your number and make charges on your account, but the point is that no matter how it happens these are major issues with debit cards.
It takes time to undo bad charges regardless of the source, and in the meantime you may effectively be broke and unable to buy groceries or gas, and depending on when it happens automatic payments like mortgage, rent, utilities, etc. may fail to go through leaving an even bigger mess.
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Monday 28th June 2021 08:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: More proof that using a debit card is stupid
You're advocating separate accounts, not necessarily credit vs debit.
Credit cards have additional legal protections (chargebacks etc), but a good bank will give the same protection on debit cards too.
It's quite likely that people would notice the issue a lot sooner on a debit card.
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Friday 25th June 2021 22:55 GMT JassMan
Even if they eventually pay everyone back in full...
They will make a massive profit out of this. Large corporations often have a 10hour (or some other nomiminal timespan) and for the rest of the day (and weekends) the balance is placed on spot markets where interest rates are much higher than Joe Bloggs can earn even depositing for a fixed term. If they manage to take a couple of months to repay their victims, the directors will be giving themselves some massive windfall bonuses this year.
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Saturday 26th June 2021 08:08 GMT ecofeco
What the hell?
Something is going on that's bigger than this instance.
A few years ago where I live, the toll road system stole hundreds of dollar PER driver, for 10s of thousands of drivers, for weeks. It took a year for people to get refunds. Meanwhile people were caused serious hardship when their bank accounts were drained AND they got hit with overdraft fees.
This isn't negligence, it's theft and should prosecuted as such.
I've heard of this same problem in other parts of the world as well. Not frequently, but enough to make me wonder is it's deliberate. But deliberate or not, it's still theft.
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Monday 28th June 2021 11:03 GMT TechHeadToo
WorldPay
Bunch of charlatans. 2 years ago we had an account. Closed it. Have the records to say it was closed. Suddenly they invent a £150 debt under the heading misc, with no invoice or backup.
Not for the first time, either. Totally incompetent back office systems. Not able to blag money from me, they turn to outright fraud.
Might also add that despite them using paper mail with all manner of threats and legalese, they never, ever, respond in print to letters, evidently preferring the anonymity and deniability of phone calls and emails.
Bunch of charlatans.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
