My sister and her family are all on Monzo. Recently my nephew and niece both had issues when using the card at two different stores.
My nephew had £15 in his account and he wanted to spend £10 on petrol. However his Monzo car was declined due to there not being enough funds, so he transferred it to his Santander and paid for it no problem.
I don’t understand how this is possible? I thought pay at pump’s checked for £1? Either way Santander wasn’t rejected and Monzo did, the help desk didn’t really confirm why this was.
My niece bought some shoes from Office.com. When the order was placed, Monzo took £168.20 for the order. My niece then got an email stating that money would be taken upon dispatch. The next night, Monzo took a further £54 from my niece’s account. I believe my sister at this point contacted Monzo and they sorted it out but I have never heard of that happening before.
Can someone in the community advise what happened? My nephew should have been able to buy petrol and my niece should not have had to worry about Monzo taking the money out of her account for an order twice.
It’s a little different by PFS brand but you usually need to have £99 in available funds for most petrol stations even though only £1 is held otherwise Monzo decline to authorise. This prevents you from going in to unauthorised overdraft.
Sounds like Office made an error and put two authorisations on the card.
I’d imagine that the one would have expired after 7 days and she’d have only got charged the correct amount on dispatch. Unlikely to be a Monzo specific issue.
£168.20. But then it started taking the individual price of the shoes off as well when they were being dispatched. After the first installment went out my sister got onto Monzo who corrected it. I just wondered if anyone else had something similar?
That’s a classic ‘authorisation’ vs ‘presentment’ issue.
When you pay for something by card, the seller gets an authorisation from your bank so they can be sure they’ll get the money. Then, usually on the third working day, they ‘present’ that request and take the cash. The actual money only leaves your actual account at this point.
Most banks only show the transaction when the money leaves the account, that is when the ‘presentment’ bit has happened, but Monzo shows it when it is authorised because otherwise you can’t have real time authorisations.
So, it seems that Office authorise the full amount and ‘present’ as the shoes are dispatched. The authorisation would eventually (usually after 7 days) lapse and the £168 would have been ‘credited’ back to the account.
Instant notifications are better than ‘three days after you’ve spent it’ notifications, but they do cause their own issues, like this one…
I think the AFD checks are slightly more complex than just having £99 available, as I’ve used my Monzo card with them with only £10 or £20 in the account, but have been declined at other times.
I did complain to Monzo when it was declined, and didn’t get anywhere - it’s part of their fraud checks, so they can’t reveal the algorithms.
(There are a few ways to steal fuel/defraud banks with AFDs if the banks aren’t careful).