Unauthorized Credit Card Charges


Customer Service


On 08/29/2014 you charged my credit card $28.47. On 08/30/2014 you made two additional unauthorized charges for $2.97 and $13.59. In fact, on 08/30/2014 you charged my credit card three times - only one payment, one that I have not stated the amount, was authorized and legal. This is a grand total of $45.03 in unauthorized charges. None of these charges correspond with any items I ordered or received. Refund this money immediately.

Customer Service Ray of Funshine

These are all related to order 3192087.

It looks like the $13.59 is linked to the Unrighteous Villian Print/PDF bundle. At this time, bundles are not charged for until the physical item ships from the warehouse house.

It looks like the $2.97 is related to shipping costs. Sometimes the system has to recalculate shipping costs when items get moved around or combined from other items.

It looks like the $28.47 is related to the Card Game Adventure Mat. As this has to ship as a separate package, and we finalize charges upon shipping, it was a separate charge from the rest of the order.

More details about our billing process can be found here.


Except

1. I was already charged for the PDF portion of the bundle when I placed the order.

2. The third charge covered everything, in shipping and the mat

and

3. The $2.97 would be an overcharge on shipping.

As I said, I already checked everything, which means you charged me twice.

Customer Service Ray of Funshine

I'm a very sorry for any inconvenience or confusion with this. After triple checking our system and the credit card processor transactions:

They are both showing that the transaction at the time the order for the bundle was placed was just a temporary authorization, which should expire from your account soon, if it hasn’t already. Some banks or card companies may display or hold the temporary authorizations longer than others, but this is not something we have control over. Our system did not finalize the charge for the any of that bundle on our side until the $13.59 was charged 8/29.

With regards to "third charge that covered everything" that you mentioned, there may have been a temporary authorization at the time the order was submitted, but the charges are not finalized until the items ship from the warehouse. This means that if an order is shipped across multiple packages, the charges will be finalized as each package is shipped.

The $2.97 is not an overcharge for shipping. It looks like the system was playing catch up on one of the packages that it didn't charge enough for when it was processed initially. I'm sorry for any inconvenience or confusion with that.

At this time, I am not seeing any duplicate charges on our side. I'm seeing temporary authorizations and then final settlements. There are not any final charges that are any more that what was actually owed that would need to be refunded.

A lot banks charge the settlement through the temporary authorization that was already open. But some banks do not do it that way and process them as two transactions. In any case, that means the first authorization should expire at some point, and all that's left will be the finalized charge.

Additionally, some banks show the temporary authorization as a pending transaction, but some don't display it at all until the charge is finalized. How banks display or show the temporary authorization is not something that we have control over.

I know there are some people who don’t like how their individual banks handles the authorization vs. the finalize charge, so they found a different way to work around it.
They buy gift certificates to put on their own account as store credit, then set their subscriptions and other orders to be charged from the store credit. That way they only have to worry about keeping track of the bank transaction once. Feel free to keep that in mind as a potential way to make processing more convenient for you.

If you have any further questions, please let us know. Thanks!


They are not, repeat not, pending transactions. They were already settled.

The $2.97 is an overcharge because it doesn't apply to any order. All of my orders had the proper shipping applied. I did have a past order where the shipping was adjusted, but it was done when the order was shipped.

They are duplicate charges because (1.) the third charge on the 30th covered everything and (2.) I already paid for the PDF when the original order was placed.

I know you are lying because the $13.59 was finalized on the 30th, not the 29th.

Since you refuse to listen to reason and continue to make false statements I will only continue discussing this with your CEO. In fact, I would like her to know of all of the troubles I have been having.

Lantern Lodge Customer Service Dire Care Bear Manager

Lisa is currently out of the office. Jeff Alvarez, our COO, and myself are reviewing your order and transaction history.

thanks
sara marie

Lantern Lodge Customer Service Dire Care Bear Manager

Lisa is out of the office currently. Myself and Jeff (COO) have been looking over your account to make sure everything is squared away.

I think there may be some confusion regarding the Print/PDF bundles. The print/PDF bundles are rather complex on the order fulfillment side and last year we had to make a change to how they function to resolve some rather massive issues that were occurring because of them. Since last winter print/PDF bundles have stopped charging when the order is placed for the bundle and now charge when the physical portion ships. This is also not an ideal way to process these products and we are in the process of revisiting and revamping how bundles are treated on a very fundamental level.

I've gone back through orders and transactions from the beginning of July to make sure everything is correct. It looks like one order, 3183041, had a number of bundles on it. The print editions of some were moved off to different orders and this this caused some display issues, at least on our end, for some of the financial transactions making the review of your order history very confusing. I've moved some of the bundles around from the affected orders. I'm not sure if that will affect how anything looks in your order history, but wanted to give you the heads up in case things do look different.

One of those items, Unrighteous Villains (Print portion of the bundle), from order 3183041, was moved to order 3192087. The Bundle for Unrighteous Villains was left on order 3183041 which was causing the price of that bundle to not show up on order 3192087. I've moved that Bundle over to order 3192087 so it is visually easier to see what charges go where. The subtotal that you would see in the order history now is the subtotal $243.44 from the last confirmation email you have for this order, plus the amount of the Unrighteous Villains Bundle ($14.44) which was not charged until the book shipped.

When items are shuffled around from different orders, and/or there are bundles involved and/or the order is shipping in multiple packages, it can sometimes cause the way an order is authorized and then charged, this also creates multiple points where things can get complicated or go wrong.
Since all three of those situations occurred on this order, I'm not surprised to see it charge in more than one transaction. I'm sorry that this occurred on your order as it makes reconciling things confusing.

All that being said, the overcharge on the order occurred because of a bug. At some point when the order was being edited the prices on the line items hiccuped and prices got bumped around. Correcting the prices leaves the order with a total of $22.45. Looking at the shipping costs issues Gary was able to pinpoint what happened which is that the cost of shipping changed by $2.97 between when the last customer service person was making edits to the order and when the warehouse went to ship the order. Our system is not supposed to alter the cost of shipping like this and I have added the $2.97 to the amount we will refund. The total refund amount is $25.42 and will be refunded as store credit and applied to pending order 3222525.

Speaking of which, pending order 3222525 had a sale item with incorrect inventory in our system preventing it from shipping and now that I have adjusted for what we have on hand the order it is ready to ship 3222525.

I apologize for the confusion and delay in getting this taken care of but you should be all set now.

thanks
sara marie

Community / Forums / Archive / Paizo / Customer Service / Unauthorized Credit Card Charges All Messageboards
Recent threads in Customer Service