£1 Pre Auth Payments

It (almost) sounds like a challenge :see_no_evil:

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You’ve not seen the McDonalds bill my children rack up in the drive through then!

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This seems the logical explanation to me. I use the Shell app (connected to Google Pay) to avoid having to queue in our local Little Waitrose when filling up. In the app you can set the authorisation amount for Google Pay yourself. I set mine at £80. No idea what would happen if I put more than £80 in.

What normal car takes £99 to fill up? My Toyota Aygo costs £25 to fill up to a full tank, so I definitely wouldn’t want to be pre-authorised £70 more than it’d actually take. It’s one of the reasons I wont use pay at the pump

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My Seat Altea XL (a family car) has a ~60L tank, and would cost ~£80 for a full tank, so it’s not out of the realms of possibility (especially as fuel prices increase).
I would suggest that your Aygo has a particularly small tank (must be about 20L).

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Oh for sure it does but the one size fits all model that the £99 charge is using doesn’t really work. Although not suggesting that their should be a different model for every care depending on tank size etc. I would have thought most cars hatchbacks but maybe I am wrong

Well, the two most popular cars on the road today (Ford Fiesta and Focus) have 45L/55L tanks, which could push £60/£75 respectively if you’re filling from empty.

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iTunes does the same thing for me. I get charged £1 but the refund comes through almost instantly

My classic car has a 78L tank so it’s quite easy to hit £100 in some places filling up, my BMW has a smaller tank but can still cost me over £70 in diesel to fill it :frowning: Still, drove over 400 miles on half a tank in the last week so it’s not all bad!

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IIRC the £99 is an anti fraud thing… people were going from pump to pump getting £1 authorisations on stolen cards and making off with a load of fuel. At £99 it’s going to stop them quicker.

Also IIRC the £99 should clear within 20 minutes according to mastercard rules (posted here by someone a while back).

I have just found 9 transactions in my feed from Costco which show as £1 pending, how can the merchant justify holding the £1 for so long…

I must say most do reverse off the account quickly just seems to be that some get stuck for seemingly forever.

You should be able to go in to the transactions in the app and reverse them yourself

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It should only hold for 7 days and then auto release

I had an auth for £12 that was held for nearly a month… They don’t always drop automatically (it took them so long the timeline shows two transactions - the first one still pending - because Monzo couldn’t even link them).

One of the reasons I won’t use Asda fuel stations.

Likewise. I have an Ancient and Venerable Yaris, which costs £40 max to fill.

You can self reverse some holds on Monzo app or if it doesn’t let you then you can go go via in app chat to see if they can.

The retailer can still take the money even if you ask for a reversal as it’s still been authorised

The interesting thing about this one as the hold release shows up as a credit and the hold is still there… so if I was able to reverse it I’d be £12 up…

I never owed the company anything… it was just a card activity check basically.

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Haha! You didn’t need to add that in - We were all fully sold :joy:

Appreciate you coming back to it though!

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44L tank, most I’ve ever spent at once was ~£50 whilst I was running on fumes! :joy: So £1 pre-auth is fine, £99 is excessive.

Being an ex-Aygo owner it cost around £36 to fill a tank from ‘low’ ish :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I’ve not really thought about how that £1 plays into things though - from what I see, the £1 gets charged and then 1-3 days later the amount turns into the full amount. It’s not £1 + {full_amount} :slight_smile: