Wal-Mart And First Data Offer Everyday Triple Billing For April Fools
from the April-Fools? dept
Ooops. It turns out that First Data screwed up big time last week and pulled something of an April Fool's joke on nearly a million Wal-Mart shoppers: they charged them all either double or triple their final bills if they used either Visa or Mastercard on Wednesday. While the charges occurred Wednesday, they didn't show up on customer accounts until Thursday - April Fool's day. Very little explanation is given for the mistake other than that it was caused by some mysterious "hardware failure" and that it only affected Wal-Mart stores. Anyone know what kind of hardware failure could possibly double or triple bill nearly a million people? The charges have been reversed, though some may not see the refund until later this week. Still, the fact that this impacted so many people and wasn't caught and stopped quickly should make people wonder what happened.
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Card handling
This failure kind of sounds like a multiple-settle situation. At a guess I'd say that the primary system that Wal-Mart was pushing settle data into failed, and Wal-Mart's system started talking to the backup. Wal-Mart's system then re-did the settle (becuase the first one failed). Somehow both settlements then ended up in the processor's database (that's what obviously shouldn't have happened).
Clearly I don't know for sure, and this is all a big fat guess (as I have nothing to do with large-scale credit card transactions like this), but hey, it's a theory anyway.
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I'm sure a few million in extra revenue that day could surely effect a Wal*Mart store, but I think you meant that the glitch affected Wal*Mart stores.
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Fixed.
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bitter ain't she ?
You would think a thank you would be in order but Mike pops off with a snide one.
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I appreciate those who point out the spelling errors, because then I go fix them.
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No Subject Given
Seems to me that there have been a couple of double/triple billing problems recently... but I forget when/what the other was.
Anyway, my point is that a lot of money could be made by someone if they had access to that extra money for a couple of days......
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My guess is that someone was trying to earn extra miles on their card for the summer for a big trip. Or maybe somone was putting in a big bet on the Final Four. Heck, why not blame Bush or Kerry depending on your political views!
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Re: Card handling
I am a credit card consultant. This problem is quite commmon in Brazil where I am from. All transactions, when received, are screened for several filters: valid card number, valid merchant number and so on. If the merchant accidentaly retransmits the transaction file, the credit card processor checks this file vs previous ones and detects identical transactions.
Whenever version updates are done, programmers must be careful in validating all subroutines. My best guess is that this step was overlooked. Here in Brazil I have seen this happen many times and invariably , upon investigation, one finds the missing duplicate detection routine to be off.
Major booboo for a large processor.
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