My wife and I are currently driving cross country (US), and earlier in the day we stopped at a Pilot gas station in Tennessee.
I exited the vehicle, tapped my card on the thing to authorize my card and pay, got about 30 bucks of gas, then went inside and paid for a drink and snacks with a different card.
300 miles later, we stop at another gas station and while we do we check our cards and notice a 150 dollar charge on the same card used for gas at that exact Pilot. Strangely the 30 dollar charge for the gas was there too. We immediately call our credit card company and they say its a pending charge and cannot do anything about it until its went through, so we pause the card.
I call the gas station itself and spoke to a manager, and was told its an authorization charge and will go away. 150 dollars is a crazy amount for an authorization charge and makes little sense to me, has anyone ever experienced this before? Is it normal?
(Meta: I didn’t know where else to put this, but wanted to ask my fellow Lemmites, is that okay?)
Update: The charge has been removed from our account, so alls good. This is the first time I have ever seen an authorization charge so big, so it scared me, thanks to everyone for informing me on these charges, I’ll know to keep my eye out in the future and not worry so much!
$150 is the most they can, I believe. It’s normal and it fucking sucks. That being said, I have debit cards that will only authorize for the amount you use (like, I have $30 in my account, it clears, pump for $15 of gas, no residual hold). I know there’s good reasons to use a credit card on a trip, but they’re a pain for the pre-auth. It’s supposed go away in a few hours normally — maybe by the end of the day?
The annoying thing is that the credit cards fully support authorizing for some amount likely to cover the transaction and using the same transaction to capture so no lingering auth sits around.
If a merchant has captured the funds and still has a hold sitting around the someone has implemented something wrong.
I think I’ve only ever had a credit card decline one me once for being outside of my normal area. What kind of cards do you have?
I meant that credit cards specifically tend to get a preauthorization hold at gas stations, at least in my experience.
I will get declines on debit cards from my credit union if I don’t tell them I’ll be out of area within about two states. BofA has a feature where if you open their app with location on, it’ll register you as traveling in whatever area. Amex, never had a problem. Can’t speak for the others.