on line payments, caveat

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tedster
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on line payments, caveat

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I pay most of my bills on-line. I record the transaction number. Just before we left for our Malta/Rome trip, I pre-paid my CIBC Aeroplan Visa bill and made a note of the transaction number. The next day I went to draw money for the trip and the ATM machine would not give me back my Bank Card. So I got a new one. I had to activate it for my on-line banking. Upon my return I discovered that the Visa payment had not been made. When I checked with the bank, they told me that the payment was cancelled because I had a ne bank card. They offered to talk to VISA who reversed the interest charges. I think that inb a situation like this the bank should have paid the pre-authorized bill(s) or at least the system should generate a warning.
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Norbert Schlenker
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Re: on line payments, caveat

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What happened is understandable, even desirable. The ATM ate your card because it looked compromised. (And we know you, tedster. You punched in the wrong PIN three times, didn't you? ;)) So what should the bank do if an ATM card is compromised and there are pending transactions against that card? The safe thing is to cancel them all. For all the bank knows, the authorization to pay a Visa bill could be a scamster's authorization, not tedster's. You'd be even unhappier if your account had been debited to pay someone else's credit card off.
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Re: on line payments, caveat

Post by pmj »

Replacing eaten, lost or stolen bank cards is not a rare event. TD does it over the counter. You'd like to think that the banks would have a regular procedure for this event that would include looking-up any upcoming on-line transactions, and confirming them with the client - especially if (s)he's standing right there ...
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tedster
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Re: on line payments, caveat

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Norbert wrote
What happened is understandable, even desirable. The ATM ate your card because it looked compromised. (And we know you, tedster. You punched in the wrong PIN three times, didn't you? ;)) So what should the bank do if an ATM card is compromised and there are pending transactions against that card? The safe thing is to cancel them all. For all the bank knows, the authorization to pay a Visa bill could be a scamster's authorization, not tedster's. You'd be even unhappier if your account had been debited to pay someone else's credit card off.
Actually I got the money and the receipt but not the card. So I doubt that it was because the machine thought the card was compromised. It was late Friday when this happened, so I had to wait until Monday to get a new card. Once I discovered that the bills had not been paid, I called the bank and they were completely aware that the authorization was BEFORE the card was reported lost. AFAIK, one cannot pay on line using the bank card. Also sine the Bank Card number is only the user ID and I did not change bank account numbers, I see no reason why they would cancel pre-authorized bills. If one loses one's Visa card and gets a new one, all existing purchases get transferred automatically. I only posted this to advise those who were not aware that this is a hidden pitfall.

When I got the new card, the teller just told me to enter the new card number on-line. She told me that my PIN would be the same. She did not mention pre-authorized payments or transfers.
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kcowan
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Re: on line payments, caveat

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Pre-authorized payment to a cancelled card used to continue when a new card was issued. But I noticed that CIBC no longer does that for their Visa cards.
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Bylo Selhi
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Re: on line payments, caveat

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kcowan wrote:Pre-authorized payment to a cancelled card used to continue when a new card was issued. But I noticed that CIBC no longer does that for their Visa cards.
If CIBC ever did it then it was at least a decade ago. I dumped my CIBC Aerogold card when they changed the card number (in order to designate it as a "premium" card so as to extract higher fees from merchants) and expected me to contact everyone who was pre-authorized to make debits on the card, including CIBC itself, to inform them of the new card number. They offered no help in doing this, e.g. a list of everyone who'd made PA debits on the card in the past year. I even escalated to their VP for Customer Service to express my displeasure at how cavalierly they were treating "premium" customers who were already paying $120/year for the card. She essentially told me to f@#$ off (but in a slightly more polite, more bureaucratically acceptable sort of way.)
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kcowan
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Re: on line payments, caveat

Post by kcowan »

Bylo Selhi wrote:She essentially told me to f@#$ off (but in a slightly more polite, more bureaucratically acceptable sort of way.)
Yes it seemed to be after we were coerced into the new improved Infinite card. I went to CIBC after TD had p*ssed me off. And it went well for many years. Now I don't know if CIBC is the worst or just catching up. :mrgreen:
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