My wife and I are currently driving cross country (US), and earlier in the day we stopped at a Pilot gas station in Tennessee.

I exited the vehicle, tapped my card on the thing to authorize my card and pay, got about 30 bucks of gas, then went inside and paid for a drink and snacks with a different card.

300 miles later, we stop at another gas station and while we do we check our cards and notice a 150 dollar charge on the same card used for gas at that exact Pilot. Strangely the 30 dollar charge for the gas was there too. We immediately call our credit card company and they say its a pending charge and cannot do anything about it until its went through, so we pause the card.

I call the gas station itself and spoke to a manager, and was told its an authorization charge and will go away. 150 dollars is a crazy amount for an authorization charge and makes little sense to me, has anyone ever experienced this before? Is it normal?

(Meta: I didn’t know where else to put this, but wanted to ask my fellow Lemmites, is that okay?)

Update: The charge has been removed from our account, so alls good. This is the first time I have ever seen an authorization charge so big, so it scared me, thanks to everyone for informing me on these charges, I’ll know to keep my eye out in the future and not worry so much!

  • grue@lemmy.world
    9·
    21 hours ago

    Gas station or truck stop? If the latter, it isn’t that shocking that they might lazily use the same authorization charge amount for cars as they do for 18-wheelers.

    • CandleTiger@programming.dev
      3·
      18 hours ago

      Filling up an 18 wheeler can cost $1000. I don’t think the truck stops are using our piddly $150 car-side gas pump limits for the diesel pumps on the truck side.

      Filling up my gas motor home at regular car gas station pumps all over, I find that Truck stops, big chain gas stations, little podunk gas stains in the middle of nowhere all use limits from $100-$200, which is not enough for me to fill up. My guess is that number used to be “safely big enough to fill up anything” and they haven’t adjusted it as the gas prices went up.