Earlier this week, we passed along the story of a Jewel-Osco shopper who found her debit card had been hit with multiple charges for one transaction last Friday, after her card was at first declined a few times and she was told to swipe it again. Jewel said it was an issue with the chain’s payments system and the charges would be reversed soon, though as of Monday she was still waiting for the funds to be returned to her bank account.
Shortly after that, we heard from a Consumerist reader who works in the IT department of “a small grocery chain” who said NCR’s Connected Payments system had gone haywire on that same day, Aug. 28, causing duplicate charges and a big old mess for his employers.
Though NCR said it didn’t discuss its customers and therefore would not confirm that Jewel-Osco was included in the outage, the company did confirm to Consumerist that it experienced an “internal technical issue,” which caused a disruption in the payments system for a few hours on Aug. 28.
“We corrected the issue and restored the system to normal performance that evening. Connected Payments was operating more slowly than normal and declined some transactions,” a company spokesman told Consumerist. “As this was taking place, there may have been some duplication of charges. We are investigating this and are working with each individual retailer to resolve those issues with customers.”
NCR added that the slowdown didn’t affect all Connected Payments retailers, but that customers who were hit by the outage “include a variety of retailers, including grocery, drug and mass merchandise.”
The Chicago Tribune noted in an update today that Jewel-Osco wouldn’t name its payments processor, but a spokeswoman for the chain said that the incident on Friday was a “nationwide problem affecting many retailers,” and that customers should see duplicate charges corrected by Thursday, though “some banks may take longer to credit individual accounts.”
This all makes it seem likely that the glitch in question is one and the same as NCR’s disruption.
NCR says it’s addressed the technical issues on its end, and will work with each retailer on an individual basis to clean up the mess. Shoppers who were overcharged should see those charges reversed “within five business days” of the incdient, which would mean this Friday, Sept. 4. Cold comfort to folks with bounced checks and overdraft fees, however.
by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist
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