Mysterious refund

Just happened to me. I woke up this morning to find a notification of a £1 Amazon refund to my Monzo account timed at 1:01am. I see people are commenting this is common practice when buying tickets, which I never have. As far as I’m aware, everything I’ve purchased with Amazon recently has been paid in full too.

When you add a new card to Amazon it often authorises a quid for 30 days, check if you bought something 30/31 days ago.

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Oh, I’ll most certainly have bought something 30(ish) days ago, there’s always something coming from Amazon in this house. Definitely won’t have been a new card added to the account though. The only (current in date) card on my Amazon account is my Monzo card, and that’s been there since I had it last year.

It doesn’t have to be a new card. I’m still waiting for my £1 to expire from a week ago and it’s certainly not the first time this card has been used with Amazon.

Hi @UncoupledSPY & welcome :wave:

That does sound odd and is probably the result of an order cancellation, rather than a financial error on their side. As you say, call them and ask them about the status of the order.

(Don’t spend any of that £1,920.62 just yet :wink:)

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I have had a lot of issues with Smarkets (betting website) and Monzo this week.

I credited my smarkets account many times and was getting some of the transactions matched by full refunds on Monzo in subsequent days (and the new balance available to use in Monzo, whilst also showing and being available to use on smarkets).

Before I knew it all the money had been re-refunded again and I felt a bit poorer, even though the money was just a refund error.

I asked smarkets what was going on and they said the issue is on Monzo’s side.

As always, I take the merchant’s reasons with a pinch of salt (it’s never their fault, is it?), but hearing your story makes me think it could be.a wider issue with Monzo.

This could be a bit of a :cowboy_hat_face: incident for certain reasons, but I don’t want to spell out why for all the lurking journos desperate to fire shots at Monzo.

TLDR: don’t get your hopes up that you’ve won the refund lottery jackpot as it’ll undoubtedly come out again very soon!

Was this monzo? And how long was it until it said payment review completed,

If it’s been over 7 days since you ordered it , Monzo could have auto refunded the money, but at any time they could ( and probably would) re-take the money, I would say just before despatch.

This is due to the way card payments work with there being 2 stages, authorisation and presentment.

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In my experience, it’s always the merchant’s fault when strange things like this happen, and that it’s only more apparent with Monzo than with legacy banks because of the way Monzo only ever shows your actual balance and updates it right away. Legacy banks on the other hand have balance and available balance, and only adjust your balance at completion - so if there’s any flip-flopping of auths and refunds and presentments, you’d only notice if you were paying especially close attention to the available balance.

In any case, it may still be worth dropping Monzo a message via in-app chat asking them if they can tell you what was happening with the transactions.

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Monzo should have an a available balance and actual balance for this very reason.