So, everyone on here loves Monzo’s habit of deducting pending transactions immediately from the balance, except me. I have the perfect example from tonight of why this can be disastrous:
Now, a lot more went wrong with this to get to this point. John Lewis’ fraud team cancelled my first transaction (despite it going through 3-D Secure and thus them being protected from fraud; it was a bit of a show). The email looked a whole lot like a phishing attempt, too. They called me ‘Mr’ in the email despite it not being on the order, they gave a phone number that isn’t their normal one and when I called it wouldn’t proceed without my name. I should be able to give the order number and nothing else so you can prove you’re John Lewis.
The whole experience was just terrible and is the kind of thing that desensitises people to phishing attempts.
I refused, of course, and called the number on their website who confirmed it was legitimate and authorised it - but ran a second authorisation against my card! This is, of course, problematic for any debit card user and the only logical thing to say is you shouldn’t use a debit card on John Lewis’ site (though frankly, the whole experience has earned John Lewis a place on my bad list very quickly).
However, it would be especially problematic had this been on my Monzo account - that’s a huge chunk of money to have deducted from the balance and have to wait a week or more to get back! At least with other debit cards, while it becomes unavailable, it doesn’t throw off your balance calculations by that much for such a long period.
P.S. the really hilarious part is that by making a new authorisation over the phone, instead of using the original 3-D Secure authorisation, my understanding is that they lost the fraud protection from having a successful 3-DS authorisation, is that correct?
