Contactless refund not working

Wow! That’s a comprehensive response, on Christmas Day too!

It’s nice to know how the process actually works, I’m sure it will help for others in the future!

Merry Christmas, put your feet up and have a beer!

2 Likes

Hmmm, actually at the point where an authorisation is accepted by us money moves from your account with us into our Mastercard settlement account - called an Authorisation Hold :wink: At this point it’s splitting hairs but technically that’s what happens.

5 Likes

Really? I never understood that, I thought it was deducted from a customer’s account at the moment it settled. Thank you for the correction and insight! See, that’s where I’d love things to be. Maybe even a little progress bar when you click on a transaction that shows exactly where in the process a transaction is. Like package tracking from a courier company, except Mastercard processing tracking :smiley:

5 Likes

Interesting idea! How would you use that information?

I guess it would probably be quite useful as an audit log, particularly when there are authorisation reversals, refunds and late presentments?

That sounds like it could be a use case for power users to me :wink:

Nerd entertainment, nothing more, nothing less :smiley:

4 Likes

Well you say that, but I think one of the most common support questions is about TfL late presentments!

I have had it a couple of times where a pending payment timed out after about a week, was refunded, then a few days later payment was taken again. Confused me a little. (Amazon did it twice, and it happened with a purchase on a plane, which was more understandable)

I know it’s the vendor that messes that up, but it is a quirk of the whole “pending” state.

Usually it is. However, we did have an issue last week where we only received part of the Mastercard presentment file, so many authorisations were automatically reversed and then presented late when the rest of the file arrived!

1 Like

Slightly off topic question but hopefully not too much. What happens if a presentment comes through without an authorisation?

Good question!
This is something that happens sometimes with hotels, and all offline transactions. With hotels, they usually authorise a deposit amount with a special authorisation that hangs for 30 days before dropping off, and then present separately with your actual bill. Offline transactions of course don’t ever communicate with our systems so we don’t get a real-time authorisation request.

We have to accept all presentments, in the case of offline presentments the card has certain limits on what it will and won’t authorise itself offline. You can of course dispute delayed/offline presentments in the usual way via a chargeback.
The danger with delayed/offline presentments is that because we don’t get to authorise/decline them, they could take you into negative balance etc.

3 Likes

What happens if as a malicious user I drain my balance to zero and then rack up a huge bill of offline transactions - do you have to still accept it (and take the loss) or can you reject and let the merchant bear the loss?

There are a range of methods we could use to recover this. It would entirely depend on what happened and why. Merchants take some risk in not obtaining a proper authorisation but if you made a transaction you knew would take your balance below zero, you would be subject to an unauthorised overdraft and if malicious, we would start the process of attempting to recover this. :slightly_smiling_face:

2 Likes

What if someone ‘froze’ their card before making some offline transactions and then unfroze the card after they had been presented?

Not entirely sure what the point of this would be as card freezing would not have any effect in this very specific scenario. The offline or unmatched presentment would still come through even if your card was frozen (if it was fraud, please report it to us so we can process it as normal). This is why our card tells the terminal to go online and check with us wherever possible. As with everything in card processing, there are endless edge cases and specifics. :female_detective:

4 Likes

If the card is frozen and a fraudster attempts an online, contact, non-M/Chip Fast transaction (e.g. if you have a chance to send a script) do you take the opportunity to set the card to offline decline?

2 Likes

Wouldn’t that unexpectedly backfire if the user then unfreezes the card and attempts an offline transaction?

2 Likes

Perhaps but I think the fraud prevention aspect is worth it. You’d just use the next scripting chance to allow offline authorisation again and reset the risk counters.

On the same note, why is the service code 221? (Prevents offline magstripe).

1 Like

why is the service code 221? (Prevents offline magstripe)

Wouldn’t that be required to implement the “Magstripe ATMs” toggle? Presumably there would always be some stupid ATM operator who’d have an offline-only ATM and so those transaction would bypass the toggle if allowed by the service code.