Two weeks about I bought something at pret at heathrow (past security). Since then I’ve had daily decline notifications. Monzo support - both ai and human - have been a joke. Leave it a few days to resolve itself, silence notifications so I don’t see the declines, contact pret myself to sort it out, and - my favourite - “retry the transaction”. Yes, sure, let me just explain to airport security that they should let me through so I can buy another sandwhich to right the wrongs of having previously bought a sandwhich. They are saying I have a decline code 00 or 0 which means transaction was approved or completed successfully. That’s an odd sort of decline. Perhaps it was declined successfully? Support just keeps repeating this like it helps. And saying that the money was not taken. But I can “reachout” to pret regarding the transaction.
According to the monzo site: “Humans on hand, 24/7 .You can speak to a real-life human through our in-app chat – whenever, wherever. We’re here for you 24/7.”
Right. Perhaps someone on this forum can tell me what’s going on in this process here - why pret keep attempting to take payment? It looks like the original transaction is still pending, followed by a refund. Is this the original pending transaction being reattempted over and over, pointlessly? I’ve been told in the same chat that the money was and was not taken. Is monzo not clear? Is the agent clueless?
Is it on monzo customers to phone/email/visit merchants when things like this happen? What happens if I don’t? If I follow monzo’s advice and silence the notification - if pret have not received they’re money will they be contacting me or monzo about it?
What you experienced is a repeated clawback attempt (basically treated you like you opened a tab, preauthorised your card and then walked out without settling the bill) because there was something wrong Pret’s card machine network, e.g. it may have dropped mid-way through the first transaction when you bought the sandwich.
With High Street banks, you wouldn’t see the clawback attempts until the payment is successful. Monzo is too transparent for their own good so they keep showing you every single clawback attempt. It should eventually drop after about 10 working days, or until that card machine network issue is resolved and your first payment went through.
Unfortunately, there’s not much that you can do here but to contact Pret’s customer service, or leave it to drop off the clawback attempt.
Thanks for the reply. It makes sense. The 10th working day was friday just gone. When you say it will eventually drop off, you mean they’ll give up? Surely at some point they’ll chase up either me personally or monzo and say “it’s been a while but we’d like this money” - before some sort of deadline?
And I’d really rather not have to contact pret. I had a problem with a restaurant where I got charged twice and I spent literally hours contacting both them and monzo with them both saying it was not their problem before it miraculously got sorted out, and I decided at that point that from now on Monzo can deal with these sorts of problems - after all, I didn’t cause them. So I’m happy to follow one strand of monzo support’s advice when they said to silence notifications so I don’t see the daily declines but it’s not clear whether that will be the end of it.
The 10 working day advice comes out of my own experience dealing with similar enquiries at work. We get enquiries like yours all the time, and the payment processor told us the system sets up claw back attempt for 10-15 days long and eventually give up. I don’t think it’s legal to keep a payment bounced indefinitely.
It will drop from transactions lists, not showing as pending, more like it disappears but they can still collect it later.
I had one by Chase collected 8 months later, some few with Curve collected 2 months later