Posting here cos monzo customer services have been utterly useless and unhelpful with conflicting information given.
I have a pending transaction on my account that a hotel put on with a view to taking the money. This was the 14th Dec. On the 15th they took the money and the pending transaction is still there. First chat agent said that if I gave evidence they could sort it for me. They then logged off and I got another agent who said no you need to raise a dispute. Then I read on here that you can’t dispute pending charges.
I was told by several agents that a dispute is the right thing to do, so I raised it anyway, but now I’m concerned that due to this dispute the pending charge won’t drop off on the 14th Jan at the latest. Can someone provide some actual helpful advice? It was about 420 quid - only realised when I got a notification saying I was in an unarranged overdraft so I had to transfer some money in to get me out of that but now the money is obviously not usable until mid Jan which I could really do with having back.
Thank you for replying Annoyingly, I did use my credit card for this when I booked it months ago (no money taken, just needed a valid card) but the bank declined it in December, presumably because it looked fraudulent with it being a German transaction. Ended up giving them my monzo card - won’t make this mistake again!
I have an email from them explaining that they’ve already taken a payment that has cleared and that the pending charge has been cancelled and should drop off soon. I also have the transaction in my monzo that’s shown as cleared in addition to the pending one. No idea if this is enough evidence but monzo CS in the app has been poor - one person said yes please provide evidence, but then said to raise a dispute. It’s a bit tiring trying to get them to understand so I’ve tried to cancel the dispute I raised and I’ll probably end up having to wait for it to drop off
“I have a pending transaction that won’t be collected due to the hotel taking a separate payment. You can see this payment for £x on date. Please see proof from the hotel of this and that they won’t be collecting”
Then if that fails “I would like to raise a complaint” about how they have acted. Not just about not reversing the hold, but the misinformation etc. It’s the only way they learn!
Magic, thanks. I’ve put in the request to cancel the dispute so got to wait for that first. Will try again and if no joy will raise a complaint. Such a shame - I like monzo to use abroad, but the customer service has been pants.
Just to point out…this exact thing would happen with any bank its not just because its monzo. The difference with monzo is they show your the pending transactions in a clearer way than other banks have done historically, so you’re more aware of pending transactions
Essentially it’s how we now treat it in the app.
I’ve posted about this before - but the pending auth is the responsibility of the merchant. It sounds like they’ve authorised and presented the payment under different authorisation codes, so you’re seeing a double debit on your account.
The merchant (the hotel in this case) can send an 0400 reversal message through Mastercard which would return the funds back to Monzo. In this case they haven’t done this.
We can reverse the authorisation ourselves, manually, but need some form of evidence the merchant won’t collect the money from your account. When we reverse it, we silently create a potential dispute on our back end so that if they were to come and collect the money, you wouldn’t have to raise an additional dispute with us.
There’s a blog somewhere on our website which, I think, is called the two second sandwich which explains the auth process in more detail!
Well this thread is full of info, not sure how this would fall under a dispute of any form though even in Monzo.
This sounds like an auto hold which should drop off within 30 days, usually sooner.
You can try the Monzo sandwich thing, maybe that’ll work but I doubt it. Also, what do the hotels T&Cs say, some will only reverse the hold when the payment has cleared for example.
Not sure what the t&cs say but it’s definitely cleared and they’ve confirmed that. It will drop off which is fine but it was £400 that I wasn’t expecting to be unavailable (first time it’s happened and I’ve stayed here before). The biggest issue here is the fact that Monzo CS have been crap with telling me lots of different things, including to raise a dispute several times. So yeah - I’ll be waiting for it to drop off because my patience with CS is wearing thin. I’ll also be raising a complaint about the conflicting info.
So Monzo have finally managed to find someone to help and they’ve reversed the pending charge. Pending charge is still shown but the reversal is shown as though it was a refund. Chat have said its not a chargeback at this point - just a reversal and they’ve reached out to the merchant to confirm with them that they’re not going to collect again.
which I could really do with having back.
Annoyingly, I did use my credit card for this when I booked it months ago (no money taken, just needed a valid card) but the bank declined it in December, presumably because it looked fraudulent with it being a German transaction. Ended up giving them my monzo card - won’t make this mistake again!