Nah I haven’t used Tesco Pay+. I find the concept of individual retailers each having their own payment systems not a road I would like things to go down, so I will never use Tesco Pay+ haha.
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Hi there!
Ruben from the payments team at Monzo here.
We’ve recently been investigating a very similar issue, also affecting Tesco. We’re working together with some of our partners to reach a solution to this problem.
I presume what you might be seeing is that one of the two transactions is showing as “pending” (greyed out amount in your feed, and a comment saying “Pending Transaction” at the bottom of the transaction when you open it), while the other is settled (not greyed out amount, no comment of pending transaction).
If that is the case the pending transaction will release the funds automatically after a week, but if you’d like to have it released sooner you can get in touch with Support who are aware of the problem and will be able to release them sooner.
I apologise for the confusion caused here! 
Let me know if you have other questions and I’ll try to answer them 
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Hi @rubendura thank you for coming here and commenting on this, I really appreciate it 
. Yes that is exactly the issue I am experiencing. It is not just a recent issue though this has been happening for as long as I have been with Monzo (approx 2 years). Original transaction is left pending, then many hours later a duplicate transaction appears in the feed - the 2nd one being a fully settled transaction.
I have been contacted by multiple advisors though app support, but the only options i have been given are to wait the 7 days, or start a chargeback dispute on the completed transaction, not the pending one, which doesn’t seem like the right process. On the pending payment, there is a flow to follow release the funds early, but as per my screenshots a few posts ago, this ends in an error message, which I have been told isn’t a bug, but I haven’t been told why I cannot use it.
In app support used to release the funds for me each time I reported the issue in the past, but as myself and others have recently experienced, they are telling me the process has changed, they can no longer do this, and I have to either do a start a chargeback dispute or wait 7 days.
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Won’t that happen with any bank though? This isn’t an issue that’s exclusive to Monzo?
Without getting into many technical details, mastercard card payments are a two step process: when you pay with your card (the authorization), and when the merchant collects the money (clearing and settlement).
We receive messages from Mastercard for both of these and we need to match them up to say “yep, this clearing message is collecting the money for this authorization”.
In some cases we are unable to match them due to data quality issues. In a perfect world, this wouldn’t happen, but in the real world this is a constant problem. When data quality issues happen with big merchants (like Tesco in this case) it’s up to each bank to decide how to handle them. For this particular case, a particular data element we were expecting contains wrong information and as such we can’t easily match them together.
While there’s certainly room for improvement, this is a balancing act where we need to provide as much accuracy when matching as we can without overdoing it. The implementation we have weights heavily on that data we’re currently receiving incorrectly, and changing this could spawn a whole load of new issues, so we have to be very careful whenever we change it.
As we explore our options, we’re in conversations with the acquirer sending us this unexpected data so we can understand why they’re doing this and how we can work together to find the best possible solution.
In the meantime, I wholly understand this is annoying, but the best course of action I can suggest is to speak with Monzo support. I am not in the fincrime / disputes team, so I cannot speak for their reasons to enable or disable the in-app funds releasing option that was there before (mostly because I don’t know them). I will let our support managers that this is a problem so they can review their processes and see if we can allow for Tesco funds to be released when this happens.
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@rubendura again I just wanna say I appreciate you coming here and giving some background on this, it gives me much more confidence that the overall issue is being looked into 
.
I get what you are saying about a balancing act etc but I guess my feedback from a customer/app user perspective is that what currently happens is confusing to end users like myself. There is no indication in the app as to why you have been charged for a 2nd time. I suspect there are users who would experience this and then automatically assume fraud has been carried out on their account. There is no clear support flow (ideally this would be automated) for dealing with the issue either.
Now that support have changed the process on releasing the funds from the pending transaction (thank you for saying you will raise this to see if it can change ), it feels like we are having to go without portion of our own money for 7 days due to an known unresolved issue between a merchant (Tesco in this case) and MasterCard/Monzo etc. This feels wrong. I am lucky enough to be in the position where when this happens, I am financially secure enough for it to not be a problem other than the anxiety it contributes to, but I can imagine if I was struggling financially, and this happened on an e.g. £50 transaction, it would be much more of an issue.
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I meant to come back to this a while ago but didn’t get round to it, people might not be interested but if anyone is…
I was having difficulties getting answers to some of my questions via chat in app, so I was referred to the customer advocacy team, who gave my a final response 11 days later (after my latest duplicate transaction had automatically reversed).
I was told the payments team have been investigating this issue, and found the problem is with World Pay rather than an issue caused by Tesco or Monzo. They said their payments engineers are working with World Pay to get the issue fixed. They said because the issue is with World Pay and not their own systems, they couldn’t uphold that part of the complaint.
They also confirmed the new process for reversing pending transactions is filling out the new disputes form (as has been mentioned in other threads).
I didn’t feel like the the questions that I asked were answered in the final response and so messaged them back trying to clearly lay out what I was asking, but still couldn’t get any solid answers, so eventually I gave up 
. Maybe I am expecting too much, but I just feel like I don’t understand the processes surrounding this, or what I am supposed to do.
This is what I am still confused about - maybe someone has had experiences with this and can make sense of it and I am just not processing it all correctly.
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The new disputes form is only available via completed (settled) transactions, so how can I use this on a pending transaction?
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with the new disputes form only being available on the 2nd transaction, the duplicate (the settled one), if I fill in the form and it is successful, surely that would mean the settled transaction is refunded, and then the original pending one will auto-reverse after 8 days and I would be refunded twice?
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why is there still an option on pending transactions to click to reverse if it doesn’t work anymore and the new process is the disputes form? Shouldn’t the option to click the button to reverse it be removed from the app if that is the case?
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I kept being told to fill out the dispute form, but it specifically states you have to contact the merchant and allow them 14 days to resolve the issue first - this is longer than the 8 days timescale after which the transaction would automatically reverse, so it makes it seem like I shouldn’t be filling out the form?
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if the issue is with World Pay, and this is something Monzo engineers are working with World Pay on, why would I be contacting Tesco to try and resolve before they can reverse the pending transaction and/or fill in the disputes form? If Monzo know the payment isn’t being collected due to the error caused by World Pay, then why am I jumping through hoops? I get that the issue doesn’t lie within Monzo systems, but Monzo have a relationship with World Pay, I don’t, and it’s with Monzo that the issue effects me, with extra funds being unavailable due to the World Pay issue.
Again maybe this is all me, and the things I don’t understand make perfect sense to other people.
I thought about updating this today, as earlier this afternoon, I had 3 transactions fail in Tesco (all Apple Pay - once with my watch and twice with my phone), but after the authorisation had gone through, so I am now waiting 8 days to get the funds for all 3 back. After the 3rd failed attempt, I used a credit card instead (still with Apple Pay), and it went through with no issues. Not quite the same issue as the normal duplicate charges, but the same outcome, except now it is 3 refunds (reversals) I am waiting a week for 
.
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This has happened again, an attempt to take money twice. by Tesco.
Do we have a solution to this issue?
I found a solution… I use Starling instead…
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Or Asda
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How’s your chat button doing 
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I suppose only way of finding out in meantime is tapping that transaction and report it to see what someone on the other end is willing to do
What is the status of this investigation? This is a very serious issue and it’s been around for more than 2 years now and it’s still not fixed. For me, it only affects Tesco (iphone+Monzo contactless) payments and not a single time happened with any other store. I don’t go to Tesco as often as before but once in a while I drop in and even on these few occasions, there is a high chance that the problem arises. As it happened a couple of days ago: my regular shop(Co-op) was closed and I went to Tesco. First payment rejected (no receipt is given), the cashier told me to try again. Second time successful and charge appeared in Monzo app. The next day, out of the blue and without visiting Tesco I got a notification from the app again, for a payment made in Tesco, the same sum as the day before! I can’t exaggerate enough. how serious this is.
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I’m going to go out on a limb and guess - unresolved.
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That doesn’t sound like an issue with Monzo if you ask me. I’ve seen payment terminals do this before (delayed payments), very rarely does this happen - just dispute the charge via ‘something’s wrong’
By all accounts this is a problem with how Tesco presents payments.
Have you asked them when the issue will be resolved?
This happened to me twice last week. Seems this is a long standing issue. I personally am no longer confident to use my Monzo card in my local supermarket which means I now have to cycle or take a much longer walk to Sainsbury’s. Going forward i’m going to try a Monzo rival and close my Monzo account.
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This has happend to me last night, and last week.
However I have a suspicion this is only happening at specific stores. For me it happened both times at the Granville St store in Birmingham. No other Tesco has ever done this.
It also happened at around 5am. The time I’d presume they’d start opening.
This is a random guess. Perhaps when Tesco’s machines get turned back on in store in the morning, that’s when it gets messed up.