Mostly Semantics

This guy!

Yesterday afternoon after running my cat to and from the vet to have sutures removed, I logged into my bank account online to check my balance before going back out into the holiday traffic to buy last-minute Christmas gifts. I had just gotten paid that morning and had a rent check that hadn’t been cashed as far as I knew, so I wanted to make sure I had enough money in my checking account to cover all my expected purchases.

Everything looked fine on the balance, until I checked the transactions list and noticed a charge of $1,412.00 to “US WEB CA” made Thursday. I certainly had no idea 1) what US WEB CA was or 2) who had made that purchase. It certainly wasn’t me. I haven’t spent that much on anything since buying my big-screen TV earlier this year.

I quickly tried running through the list of what that purchase might have been, and the only thing that even came to mind was a month or two of Pepco bills (and I’m not sure if I’d have been happier or sadder had that been the actual reason). Googling “US WEB CA” did me no good, so it was time to call the bank.

Fortunately, the BoA fraud department guy was incredibly helpful, immediately cancelling my card so that whoever had made this purchase couldn’t make any others, and telling me that the purcahse was charged to US Airways. Unfortunately, because the charge was just “pending” and not “completed” I had to wait until it officially processed before I could start my fraud claim, meaning I’d have to call back again in a few days. He did order and send me a new card and told me I could pick up a temporary one for holiday shopping/travel from a nearby branch if I needed it.

So, my next phone call was to US Airways customer support, which after some initial discussions of what my actual problem was, was very helpful in telling me who (Juan Aquino and Nestor Pichardo) had made the purchase and what it was (2 tickets from LaGuardia to Raleigh-Durham, Raleigh-Durham to Charlotte and Charlotte to Punta Cana, Dominican Republic). Obviously, those tickets were neither for me nor for any sort of itinerary I could have used, what with already having US Airways tickets for a flight home tomorrow. The CSR then told me that the order had been cancelled and refunded, so my hopes of getting the money back seemed to be quickly vanishing as visions of Juan and Nestor laundering thousands of dollars via purchased and cancelled airline tickets danced through my head (not quite sugar plums, huh?).

She couldn’t tell me if the money had been refunded in cash or back to the card, but she told me I could call the refund department in 10 days for a status report and see if the money had gone back to my card. Fortunately, I realized that instead of waiting 10 days, I could call the refund department now and just see if they had refunded in cash or credit, so I thanked the CSR and made another call.

After 10-15 minutes of being on hold and talking to various friends online about this, I finally reached Diana, who understood my telling of the story much better than the previous CSR (though me having 10-15 minutes to streamline it while waiting may have helped). Diana told me that the purchase had been made on the airline’s site but then refunded back to the card because (in what appears to be a brilliant stroke of luck, if I understood her correctly) a US Airways employee saw that these two guys had purchased very similar tickets online immediately after the ones on my card, so she cancelled the first one as a “duplicate” order.

Diana told me that the card had to be officially charged in order to implement the refund process, but that I would be getting the full amount back in the next few days. She was as baffled as I was as to what exactly happened and how, but she did tell me that the second purchase was made on a card with a number entirely different from mine, so it wasn’t just an accidental transposition or anything.

After hanging up with her, I realized that while things seemed fine, that refund from the airline would be going to a card that was now cancelled. Afraid that meant that the money would never return to the account, I realized I needed to talk to BoA again. With my hatred of talking on the phone well documented (at least among friends), I drove to a nearby branch to talk to someone in person.

Surprisingly, there wasn’t much of a line for the Friday before Christmas. However, the teller wasn’t able to answer my question about a refund to a cancelled card (though he did agree that it was a very fine question), so he took me over to the only non-teller (henceforth referred to, in my best Billy Walsh voice, as “Suit”, though not in a negative way) and asked him the same question. Suit wasn’t sure, but told me he’d help me as soon as he was done with his current customers.

Of course, they were an old woman and (presumably) her middle-aged son, and she had all sorts of paperwork to sign. So I ended up waiting a solid 45 minutes before I actually got help. However, Suit did come over at one point and offer to take my name and number to call me about this issue when he was done with his current customers if I didn’t want to wait. I appreciated the gesture, but I wanted to get it done and in person, so I continued to patiently play solitare on my phone and text back-and-forth with Tomahawk Chop.

Finally, Suit was available and brought me over to his desk to hear my story. After I told him what had happened, he called the processing department, who told him basically that pending transactions are a nebulous situation and may or may not ever hit the card once it’s been cancelled. So again I was told to wait and see what happened with the charge and subsequent refund, but worst-case scenario I’d have to call BoA, file a claim, sign an affidavit they send me stating that the purchase was not made by/for me or with my knowledge, and they’d credit my account and then work with US Airways behind the scenes to get the money back for themselves. While on hold with the processing department, Suit even offered me, for my wait, a bottle of champagne all branch employees had received as a gift from the next-door liquor store since he doesn’t drink. He couldn’t get me a temporary check card (something about the state where my account was created not being in the same region as DC branches), but he did change my new card to FedEx two-day shipping instead of regular USPS mail.

I thought that was the end of things for now, with me just having to wait out the pending transactions and see what ended up happening before making another call or two and possibly signing some forms. However, when I woke up this morning before going shopping with Tweaks, I checked my account online again to see if anything had changed. Sure enough, something had.

The charge was gone! No charge plus refund. Nothing. Just gone. Disappeared into the ether. Another pending transaction from a couple days ago that was mine had also disappeared and will probably need to be made again, but that’s a small price to pay for not having to let $1,412 float around in the Internets for the next week or so.

So, in the end, basically nothing really happened, other than me losing about 3 hours of a Friday afternoon and having to get a new check card. However, this post probably showed everyone why I’m the one who always gets called on to catch up someone who’s missed the latest episode of whatever show the group happens to be watching.

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