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!
$150 sounds about normal. I put gas into a motor home with an 85 gallon tank. Generally the pumps will cut off once or even twice before the tank is full — sometimes at $100, sometimes at $125, sometimes at $150
They don’t actually charge the extra, so once get over the initial shock of thinking you got stolen from, this is not a real problem (unless you’re running your card right up to the ragged edge of your credit limit.)
So it’s basically yet another way to screw over poor people? Gotcha.
I feel like this one is more just total indifference to the screwing over of poor people, rather than active attempts.
It’s not like rearranging the order of your daily back transactions to put deposits and small withdrawals last, where they’re creating more overdrafts on purpose to extract more fees from poor people. That one really steamed my gizzard back when I was living paycheck to paycheck. That was active malice.
This one is not making them any money. It’s more of a casual “I want to make sure nobody rips me off by taking gas they’re credit card won’t cover, and I don’t give any shits about how that makes poor people unable to buy gas and groceries on the same day “
It’s mostly to prevent people using a prepaid card from buying more gas than the card has funds for.
They’re making a fortune in interest this way.
Not so.
The gas station putting the hold on was never getting any interest anyway.
The credit card company is not getting interest because a temporary hold is not a purchase.