Over the past two weeks, I’ve experienced 4 refunds of delayed transactions, 3 of which were this morning. According to Sarah from the support team (I would tag her in but too many Sarah’s to know which one), it happens when the merchant’s terminal times out which causes the authorisation of the transaction to reverse, which shows as a refund. Then the merchant later presents the transaction as offline. I have responded in chat 4 days ago, but it hasn’t been seen yet according to Intercom chat
I now have approximately £45 extra to spend that I know doesn’t actually belong to me and will be deducted in a few days. Until then I have to remember not to spend it.
I’m wondering what other banks are doing differently as I’ve never experienced it until two weeks ago.
I’ve got the same thing this morning, a refunded ATM transaction where the original is still listed as pending.
On a related note, how can you tell if a chat message has been read (Android), as I also started an in-app chat about this too?
I’m not sure about Android as I’m an iOS user, but for me it displays the human relative time (4 days ago) and read status (not seen yet) just below your message. The interface for help chat is provided by Intercom, built in house, so if it’s missing for Android users then I doubt there’s anything Monzo can do short of contacting Intercom to add that feature support.
If you send another message in the chat, it will get picked up. There’s sometimes issues with Intercom which cause agents to miss unread messages, another message will push your ticket back to the top of the list.
I’ve sent an email to help@monzo.com about this, but as it only seems to happen with Monzo, not other banks as far as I’m aware, just wondering whether it should be listed on the known issues / bugs topic?
Dang I thought it was free
I was hopeful the first time round too @anon95680666
I just got a response from Ella saying that there is a server glitch that is causing refunds to appear in our feeds this morning, and that engineers are working on the problem.
I’ve had this same issue recently - I’ve never noticed it before.
Is there a set amount of time that offline transactions must be made within? Just so I know to keep that money available for x amount of days. I made the payment on the 12/10.
Just received this rather helpful explanation from @Ella for anyone else experiencing the same issue
The way that card payments works sometimes causes issues like this. When you initially paid your transaction was approved (which sent an auth message in real time). To finalise the transaction the merchant sends another message (which is the instruction to move the money). This normally happens after 1-2 days and you won’t notice any difference to your transaction. However some merchants can take a lot longer to finalise the transaction their side. Normally we automatically cancel the initial message after 5 days as we have assumed this transaction is no longer going to be finalised (in the case of say a hotel reservation you made, but which then cancelled). Unfortunately in your case it looks like the merchant hasn’t yet finalised the payment.
We would expect the final payment to reappear in your feed as a delayed transaction over the next few days blush
I understand that you are also confused with the way our system works.
Other banks have the same system as ours, with the only difference that we have chosen to show our users their available balance (which includes transactions for which funds have not been deducted from the account yet) instead of the actual balance like other banks do, to be as transparent as possible on your account’s activity. This unfortunately can cause a bit of confusion like today or 4 days ago when a merchant does not present on a transaction in the given 5 days, but we are working on making this smoother for you.
I’ve just had my offline transaction added to my feed, so my balance is correct again.
I don’t really like the way the transaction feed handles this now, as it thinks I have 1 more ATM transaction than the reality (messing up the average spend etc). Also the details for the offline transaction don’t match the original transaction (location wrong, transaction ID very different).
Is it possible to handle these transactions better in the feed? Could the refund and the final offline transaction be somehow combined into a net 0 item which doesn’t break the true transaction count and spend? (Maybe have a special transaction class with 2 sub transactions; the refund and the offline charge)
Mine has also been reauthorised. Additionally as they were made in foreign currency, I also had the difference (due to today’s poorer exchange rate) credited to my account as a goodwill top up.
This happened to me a few months back, but the vendor did not try to reclaim the payment. £25 of free beer!
It happened again yesterday with a payment from Cafe Nero at Kings Cross got refunded this morning, but I cannot believe a chain would fail to process card transactions. We will see if they try to reclaim the money…
This is very concerning. I have recently had similar issues where purchases were refunded and then charged again days later. I contacted support and they said they were aware of the problem but I had hoped it was a recent problem and not 2 years old problem.
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