Local man loses card in mosh pit

Hi fellow Monzo-ers,

I was at gig in Wood Green, N22 on Friday evening (24/6/19) and lost my card. I logged on the the app as soon as I realised and froze it but received a message from someone saying they’d found it and were handing it into the bar. By this time I had left and decided it would was ok as the card had been cancelled, thinking I could contact the venue the next day to let them know.

On Saturday morning around 4am the card was used somewhere around Convent Garden; luckily it was declined as the card had been frozen. This morning (Monday 24/6/2019) I received an e-mail from TFL saying they were charging me £5 for a transaction from Saturday, and this evening one saying £7 for a transaction from Sunday.

I’ve chatted through the app with someone from Monzo and they’ve said TFL transactions don’t register whether cards are activated or not until a few days later, which is making me slightly concerned as the card has been frozen.

I was wondering if someone could answer these questions for me:

1). Will TFL refund that money after they realise the card is frozen?

2). When will whoever is using my card be prohibited from doing so outright?

3). Has anyone else been in a similar position to this before?

Any other help would be massively appreciated!

Thanks in advance,

Paul

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Did you inform Monzo the card was lost/potentially stolen, or just freeze it? I’m doubtful we can help with this situation on the forum.

I doubt it as that’s the main selling point of the “freeze your card” feature - if you lose it, freeze it until it turns up. If it doesn’t turn up, report it lost and order a new one.

Perhaps the advice needs to be updated given the card can still be used for offline transactions?

Well he did do his bit by speaking to customer service and they knew it wasn’t in his possession, so I don’t think he’s liable for any transactions, he wasn’t negligent.

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Thanks for your help all, it’s very much appreciated. The customer team at Monzo have been incredibly helpful and are looking into it for me.

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Have I read about this sort of thing before…?

I believe it has something to do with TFL not being a live card payment so it bypasses the act of freezing a card? Every service that offers a freezing service would be bypassed.

My card has definitely been declined by TfL terminals when it’s been frozen.

However, I think you can still get charged by TfL with a frozen card if the card was unfrozen when it was tapped on a terminal.

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[…] some payments – such as when contactless cards are used to pass through London’s tube network barriers – are waved through as offline transactions and only checked later.

And a case study:

The person who stole my handbag also committed fraud totalling £135 across my various contactless payment cards, nearly all of which I was eventually able to reclaim (although there was a stray payment to TfL that I didn’t spot until later). What it meant, however, was that instead of being a one-off event, the theft continued for around a week: the last transaction was five days after my handbag was stolen.

tl;dr, because TfL is offline and not live, contactless cards can be used with them even when blocked. You should be able to reclaim the money later, but this does require checking your statements (easier with Monzo) and reporting them.

(The article is from 2015, granted, so maybe that have changed something since so that the poster just above had their frozen card declined (either that or they managed to use a live TfL machine).)

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Is there another step from “Freezing”? Like can COps actually “kill” (for lack of a better word) a card whilst you wait for a new one to be sent? If not then Monzo should really refund you as you did all you could in the circumstances. Otherwise, bearing in mine you knew you’d lost it maybe having the “kill” feature would have been the best step forward.

Hopefully as it appears above, it is TfL not being ‘live’ and you’ll have enough proof to dispute any charge.

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