Again. Fucking AGAIN.
A restaurant altered my credit card charge post-sale. This time, it wasn’t the usual $1 tip added on. This time, they took a $2 tip. Just for the record, this bullshit happened to me only 3 months ago.
Ok, ok. Calm down. After talking to the restaurant manager, it turns out that it wasn’t a case of theft, just incompetence. Another person’s tip was put on my card. But it still remains that tip fraud is a very real and a very easy-to-do form of credit card fraud.
I have an issue calling out these restaurants for this fraud. The places certainly have a small hand in the problem in that they’ve hired a piece-of-shit thief, but it’s not their policy to hire thieves and I’m sure they would be fired once exposed. So, you know, I can dispute the charge with my CC company, but that just hurts the restaurant. The thief gets away with their scam. I could write a yelp review calling the place out, but again, that just hurts the restaurant. I need a name. I want to expose this person and make it difficult for them to just move on to another restaurant and continue their scamming operation.
As I’ve said multiple times in the past, I log my receipts then reconcile them with downloaded transactions from the bank. If you aren’t doing this, you will be unaware that you are being stolen from.
There is a way to retroactively check and see if you have been ripped off. But it will require that you remember how much you tipped, if you tipped at all. First, you need to enable alerts on your credit card so you get an email or a text message for every charge on your card. I originally had mine set to alert me for charges over $20, but now I’ve set it to $2. When you have this alert set up, you will then have a record of the pre-tip amount. You can then compare the amount in this notification to your CC statement to see if it differs from your finalized amount.
I have an idea to assist in exposing cases like this for people who do not log their receipts. With many people relying on online-only solutions like Mint or their bank’s website, there needs to be a way to capture the tip amount prior to finalization.
My Capital One card shows me pending transactions. What if I could view the details of the transaction and enter the tip amount I charged, then that new total could be used when the transactions settles to see if there was a discrepancy? Sounds pretty wonderful right?
But I know that many people aren’t going to log in to their CC website and enter their tips any more than they would use MS Money to track their transactions. So here’s another idea. Bots are the new hotness in the programming world. People are also very responsive to talking with computers now. What if Capital One texted me with new transaction notifications?
Doesn’t that sound amazing? So if the transaction settles for anything other than $14.48, you would get an alert of the discrepancy.
Clever. You should like, work in computers or something.
That is a great idea, I usually don’t double check and assume they are honest, but now I feel like I need to go through my cards.