OT: any lawyers or law majors in the hizouse?

• Author: cruz (---.sea.clearwire-dns.net)
• joeyo
• Date Posted: 03-25-08 16:06

i’m in need of some legal advice. i posted this on freeadvice.com already but i thought I’d post it on here as well. i figure it wouldn’t hurt.

We recently had a customer buy $2,000+ worth of merchandise from the store I work at. At the time he said he had been having problems with his credit card and that he needed to call the bank. After supposedly talking to the bank the customer said the bank told him that we needed to do an offline transaction. The customer then gave me an approval number which is necessary to complete the transaction. I checked the guide for the credit card machine and followed their instructions for an offline transaction and the transaction went through fine.
We later found out that the credit card he was using was actually declined so the bank charged us instead. The machine at the time never said that the card was declined. However after telling the bank they pretty much ignored us and said that we would have to eat the $2,000+. I told them that it did not seem out of the ordinary to me because I have done similar offline transactions in the past with no problem. The person at the bank said that the mistake I made was taking the approval number from the customer and that I personally have to call the bank in those types of situations (which is what I had done in the past).
At the time I just felt stupid and thought that I had simply made a mistake. But after the fact, it occured to me that I followed all of their instructions in the guide book so I don’t see how I was to blame. I sent them a letter saying this and they pretty much ignored me and denied my “chargeback adjustment reversal” request. If they had simply put “Make sure you call the bank!! Don’t let the customer do it!!” or something to that effect then we wouldn’t have had any issue. It would have been nipped in the bud right there. It does me no good for them to tell me what not to do after the fact. I believe that it’s the banks responsibility to give me the proper tools to prevent these things from happening. But at this point I don’t know what to do because it seems like they’re not listening.