Tesco charged me twice

Help
1

Hello.

Maybe someone know how to return my money?
Tesco or Monzo charged me twice…
I made a purchase at Tesco around 10 am they charged me normally. Following night I received spending notification from Monzo for same ammont 1.30am card purchase when stores are closed.
I contacted Monzo support…

Thanks for getting in touch! Sorry to hear about the trouble with this.

It looks like Tesco have created a new payment today instead of collecting on the original authorization from yesterday.

The next step for us here would be for you to follow the link I’m sending you below. It takes you to another part of your Monzo app, where you can fill in a form to give us a bit of information about what happened, and share any correspondence that you’ve already had with the merchant. That form then goes straight to our disputes team, and they’ll review the information you’ve given as soon as they can.

They may be able to reach a decision with the information you provide in the form flow, so please provide as much information as you can! They may not be able to create a dispute for you if there’s some key information missing, which usually includes:

Proof of any receipts or booking confirmations
Screenshots of conversations you’ve had with the merchant already, that proves they aren’t cooperating with you.

Tap here to be taken to the form inside your Monzo app.

If the link doesn’t work, follow the instructions below to find it in your app

Tap on a transaction in your app, and then scroll to the bottom where you’ll see in red text ‘Something wrong? Get help’.

On the next screen, scroll until you see the heading that fits your situation best, and then tap ‘Dispute this transaction’.

From there you’ll be taken into the flow to enter the process for raising a dispute with the merchant with our disputes team.

If you still can’t find the form, just let me know! with this.

Proofs? I have no receipts… nothing

Once Asda charged me twice and HSBC returned my money in few minutes…

2

HSBC took a risk by refunding you because they would have been left out of pocket should Tesco collect on both authorisations if there wasn’t enough money in your account.

There’s no obligation for banks to do this, it’s an issue with the merchant.

Out of interest what was the purchase amount in Tesco? I think monzo refund ( or at least used to) double payments if the value was low.

The charge should drop off after a max of 30 days but is usually 7 days.

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This has been reported before, Tesco seem to do this frequently. This may help:

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4

£45 so I’m quite worried…
Now I’m in overdraft till Friday - payday.
Thanks for your replies.

5

Someone else here should be able to confirm, but I don’t think pending transactions will cause you overdraft charges.

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6

I had the village shop and a vending machine do this to me at the same time.

Filed with disputes and hopefully will get it sorted.
(Showing only 1 charge on the village shops card machine and their records)
Accidentally did it on the second charge but chat told me they would be able to sort it out and the disputes team will contact me via chat.

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7

There should be an option to remove a pending transaction, I don’t have any so I can’t provide screenshots:

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8

You shouldn’t be charged any overdraft fees for a pending payment.

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9

Tesco do this to me very couple of months - charge at time of purchase, then duplicate the charge later that night when I’m sitting at home, or in middle of night when I’m asleep.

First one always pending (2nd one, the duplicate, is always a completed transaction) and on contacting Monzo they’ve always told me Tesco have in error not matched the authorisation code correctly or something. They’ve told me multiple times it is known issue with Tesco they are in contact with them about, but don’t know when it will be resolved.

Monzo have always immediately removed the hold on the original pending transaction for me. It’s always been low value though so not sure if that impacts it.
Can imagine getting the complete runaround if I tried to raise it with Tesco, so hope the process hasn’t changed especially as Monzo seem to be aware of the issue with Tesco in particular.

I haven’t been able to remove the the hold on the pending transaction myself in the app for a long time now - always have to do via chat now.

I would have thought the disputes process would be for a completed/settled transactions, not for pending transaction where the merchant has created a new transaction instead of settling the original one?

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So I’ve just had my normal every-few-months duplicate Tesco charge today. Bought something last night, and around midday today, instead of completing the pending transaction, the original transaction was left pending, and they settled on a brand new transaction.

As @Mogolent has experienced, Monzo support for this error seems to have changed recently, for the worse I think.

As normal, I couldn’t complete the automatic pending reversal flow you get the option of in app, due to the error message I have added screenshots for below.

I contacted Monzo support via in app chat. They confirmed they are aware of this issue with Tesco and that it is being looked into, but that there are no updates yet (same thing I have been told for between 18-24 months now).

They seem to be aware of what goes wrong with the transaction to cause the duplicate, and know that the original pending one will never settle, but unlike previous times, I was advised the new process is either to wait for the 7 days for the pending charge to automatically reverse, use the pending reversal flow on the transaction (which doesn’t work), or start a chargeback process.

Of those 3 options, only 1 is actually possible (wait 7 days) seeing as the pending reversal flow on transactions throws up an error message, and the chargeback flow can only be done on the completed transaction, not the pending one, meaning if it worked, I would end up not having paid Tesco anything at all. A chargeback does not seem like its intended for this kind of issue, and when you start the flow, it says you have to contact the merchant and allow them 14 days to resolve first - so I may as well wait the 7 days then.

I was initially told the error message I see when trying to do the pending reversal flow on the original transaction was a bug, and to delete and reinstall the app. I have deleted and reinstalled the app numerous times over the past 12 months, but I entertained it, and reinstalled it again, and obviously it still did not work. I was then told by another advisor that the error message I am seeing is not a bug, but still haven’t been told why I cannot use it.

I contacted Tesco a while back to try and explain what is happening with some of them transactions, but they didn’t understand what I was trying to tell them.
I know this issue seems to be Tesco’s fault, but I feel like Monzo should be working with them to try and resolve it. I am pretty sure this didn’t happen with my previous bank - not on pending transactions that were visible to me anyway. I never had visible pending transactions for an entire week.

It might not seem like a big deal when we know that after 7 days it should automatically reverse, but over this next 7 days I will continue to have this “what if” anxiety that it doesn’t clear as expected.

It just seems like as it is a known issue to Monzo with Tesco, there could be a better support flow for dealing with them :slightly_frowning_face:

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After receiving a few responses from chat support, none of which tried to address or answer my questions around this whole process or the issue, Monzo have raised this as a complaint and referred me to the customer advocacy team (I did not ask to raise complaint, but I guess they had to). They got in touch to say they are looking into it, and asked what would be a appropriate resolution, to which I replied that I was just looking to answers for my questions, which I outlined again.

I have contacted Tesco again, but I suspect like before they will not understand my issue and refer me back to Monzo. It is not easy to try and explain something to Tesco, when I don’t have the technical knowledge, nor access to the data on Monzo’s (or MasterCard’s or Tesco’s) systems to be able to explain what is going wrong. It seems like something Monzo should be actively working with Tesco or MasterCard to resolve.

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I had the same issue a couple of a weeks ago, All Tesco would say is they’d automatically release the pending within 8 days, I got the same error on the chargeback.

Luckily Tesco released the pending a few hours later, but seems to be an issue somehwere in Tesco’s systems

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Was yours a duplicate charge at the till (after the 1st attempt didn’t fully go through on Tesco’s systems), or a duplicate many hours later like mine?

My ones always happen many hours later, and I don’t have the experience of the pending one reversing in a few hours.

I think you’re right - I don’t expect Tesco to say anything to me other than the pending one will automatically release after the set period.

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A few hours later, i guess I just got lucky, I settled in my head with “Ahh the dispute with Monzo must’ve actually worked” but i was probably just lucky

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It’s odd that Tesco has so many problems with this. I thought it was settled because it hadn’t happened for a few months, but then the other day I had a duplicate transaction at the till (Gpay failed first time). Luckily for me the pending one was refunded by the time I got home (within an hour) so I didn’t have to try contacting anyone about it.

I can only presume there’s perhaps a particular failure state of Tesco’s that doesn’t play nicely with Monzo’s systems. It almost seems like something is timing out somewhere and Tesco junk the transaction at their end but Monzo don’t always know that straight away.

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It seems (anecdotal evidence only) that the duplicate transactions at the till seem to refund (reverse the hold) the first transaction relatively quickly, but when the duplicate happens hours after the first, you are then waiting 7 days (unless Monzo reverse it like they used to).

Is anyone on the forum reading this able to advise whether you have had issues with Tesco using other banks if you don’t use Monzo primarily? i.e. duplicates happening hours later even though everything at the till went ok? Or with duplicates at the till due to an initial failed attempt?

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I think the problem would be much harder to identify with other banks (if it happens). You’d have to be paying exceedingly careful attention to your ‘Available balance’. That would be the only way of telling if Tesco had authorised money from you twice, because most banks don’t show the pending transactions in your feed.

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I was with Bank of Scotland and they showed pending transactions - I think you had to click a little arrow to expand, it didn’t show them expanded by default.

I don’t remember ever seeing Tesco transactions remain pending for a whole week, I would have noticed this. If it did happen with BoS, the bank must have automatically removed the hold way quicker than 7 days.

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I have just done a quick twitter search of “[bank name] Tesco” for various banks.

Only the search for “Monzo Tesco” brought up multiple tweets of duplicate Tesco transactions in the last few weeks alone.

I also tried “Starling Tesco”, “Revolut Tesco”, “NatWest Tesco”, “RBS Tesco”, “Lloyds Tesco” and “Barclays Tesco”.

All the searches apart from Monzo brought up no reports of the duplicate transaction issue as far as I could see, except for one tweet in relation to Revolut from a year ago about a duplicate transaction at the till after an initial attempt didn’t go through.

Admittedly not very scientific, and maybe altering the search terms would offer different results, but from a quick search it would seem that there is more of an issue with Tesco and Monzo than other banks.

A Tesco employee responding in the tweet I have linked below seems to indicate a pending transaction which isn’t expected to complete would usually have the funds automatically released within 48 hours.

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Have you tried using Tesco Plus?

I know you shouldn’t have to and it seems ridiculous this issue is still ongoing, but I use Plus all the time and have never had this double charge problem.