Ethical problem - items ordered and received not charged
 

Around Feb 25th I ordered $ 200.00 worth of Gift Certificates and a special pillow ( 2 separate orders) from Brookstone through the Goldpoints website.
All expected Goldpoints posted promptly but as of today my Diners Club has not been charged ( now almost 3 months) in addition I received double the order in pillows, but my wife likes them so we decided to keep them both and if they charge us for both no problem.

What would you do?
Should I call them and ask about the charge, wait longer and/or hope they somehow never find out about it ?

The gift certs were a gift for a friend who has not redeemed them yet and I would be very embarrassed if they were not honored by a local store.

Brookstone no longer at the Goldpoints site, anything like this happen to anybody else?

Mike

I had a Virgin flight that took 5 months to post to my credit card (I forgot about it so I never called them about it - or even noticed it missing), I say they will work it out in time. I would give it past 6 months to avoid the possible "double billing" from them.

Aside from things such as tips added to the bill afterwards and some manual entries, all of the other charges are almost sure to show up...eventually. Just be patient.

That's really something only you can answer.

I once had a house payment not clear but credit to my loan. I called the lender and they insisted it had been paid. My credit union said it had never been put through. Not much more I could do.

Are you sure you put it on Diners? I frequently think I've put something on my debit card, write it down in my check book, think it never cleared and then realize I actually put it on Amex.

As for the double order of pillows being sent ... I've had it happen quite often that a mail order company will send me the items twice. Most often when I call they tell me to keep the second item (usually it's of less than $50 value) because the cost of shipping it back to them and restocking isn't worth it to them.

[This message has been edited by letiole (edited 05-21-2002).]

Last year I ordered a portable bath spa from Shop4 (NW WP partner) and a week after receiving the unit I received a second unit that was never billed (about $50). I decided to wait a few weeks to see if the charge would hit my credit card. It did not. Then I called Shop4 to see if they had a record of the second unit being shipped and they did not. Shop4 buys merchandise from third party suppliers and items are ship direct from the supplier's warehouse. Called Shop4 again and had them send FedEx by the house to pick up the item. I know I would have felt guilty about keeping the spa I had not paid for. Must be that "do unto others..." thing my parents drilled into me. It was also a great lesson for our kids. Anyway. it was the right decision for me. As in past moral dilemma type posts, if you are asking the "should I, or shouldn't I" question, then you probably already know the answer that's right for you. More importantly, just think of the FF miles you'll miss out on if your card never gets charged! http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

If you call them, here's probably what will happen:

They will thank you, charge your card, and tall you to keep the extra pillows.

Buzz?

I had a restaurant meal (about $25) that posted six months late; I figured they had caught the discrepency while checking the books (it wasn't until I went back through my quicken register that I realized that transaction hadn't cleared earlier; at first I thought it was a fraudulent charge.)

I would be cautious to call and inquire about not being charged. Your honesty can lead to a headache for you. It would be terrible if you called and they charge you for it now, then in six months or so the original purchase hits your account.

It is unlikely, but not out of the realm of possibility that this could occur. Just wait it out. If they hit you with the charge six months later, you'll understand why.

Just my 2 cents....


Mike M

I have a similar but different situation:

A couple of weeks ago I received a letter from a car rental company. They told me that they checked their books and that they forgot to bill me one rental more than a year ago (15 months!!!). As I rented a lot back then I didn't even notice.

Now they "asked" me to give them the permission to charge me. Legally I don't have to pay because it's so long ago.

The other replies above convinced me now that I should let them charge my credit card, but now I can't find their letter anymore...

Awhile back I had a similar situation where my account was credited a sum of money in the hundreds of dollars. The money wasn't mine; it was clearly an error. You wouldn't believe the difficulty I had trying to give the money back! I spoke with multiple people at both the vendor who made the credit and my credit card company. They all insisted it was correct. Most of them didn't even want to investigate it! Finally, one of them told me they would look into in. At this point, I left it alone since I had spent more than enough time trying to give the $$ back. Six weeks later the error was corrected.

My suggestion is to call the vendor and explain the problem.....once. If they don't want to look into it, that's there problem.

It is up to the company who is supposed to charge your credit card to do it. You did your part already. You gave them the credit card to which they were supposed to charge things.

Now, if they screw up, and don't do that, well, that's not your problem, it's theirs.

A long time ago I read an article about a company that specializes in going over rental receipts for car rental agencies. The number of mistakes in the customers' favor was so high it was worth it to to rental agencies to hire them - something like 40 percent of all rentals are mischarged. The company worked for something like 50 percent of the amount of money they recovered.

Thanks for all the replies/suggestions I think I will give them another 30 days and if I am not billed by then I will give them a call.

It ironical that just today I received an e-mail from Brookstone that started off
"you received this e-mail because you recently purchased an item from Brookstone.com..."
Mike

A couple of years ago I bought something from SkyMall and the charge took seven months to post on my Visa account. By that time I'd forgotten about the purchase and put the charge in dispute. Some companies obviously don't care about cash flow that much. I bet your GoldPoints charge will show up on your DC eventually.

You'd be amazed how often things like this happen. We've been in business over ten years and still find occasional unbilled orders. Normal auditing usually picks this up.

As for the double shipment, just call them. Sharper Image did this to me and just told me to keep the extra luggage locks instead of returning them. That's what we would do, too.

The reverse is true for me. I bought a part from Compaq and it was defective. After speaking with them, the agreed solution was to buy a new part and return the old. I got charged twice but never got credit for the return. After a while, they said that they mis-entered my credit card number and would correct it. So far, no credit. Need to call them again.

My opinion is that if you did nothing on your side to engineer the non-charge, you really don't have an obligation to try to correct it.

I can think of 3 instances where I recieved goods/service where I didn't end up paying for them: one was a debit card POS purchase (well before they offered MasterCard/Visa-branded debit cards) for a small amount, one was a Visa debit card purchase for a small amount, and one was a $250 hard drive charged to a regular Visa (I had received the wrong item, returned it for a replacement, and received credit for the return but never charged for the replacement).

But, if the merchant figures it out and charges you later on, you of course have an obligation to not dispute the charge and pay for it.

During the same period of time, I can think of three chargebacks I've had to initiate for incorrect merchant charges: a restaurant that charged me twice, a health club that continued to charge me monthly even after I cancelled in writing and got a written confirmation, and an item I mail-ordered but never received. Of course, I expected the merchant and/or the bank to make me whole for these mistakes that were discovered by me after the fact, and it's only fair that I do the same if the shoe is on the other foot.



I'm not so sure about this. In many states, the statute of limitations for civil claims such as this is 2 years. I think it's great that the merchant contacted you, but I'm not sure that they had do (perhaps they have more restrictive terms in their credit card merchant agreement). Had they not been able to charge the credit card, they most probably would have been able to bill and collect the amount directly (whether it would be worth their while is another matter).

This brings up an interesting point. I have no idea how this would work with a credit card account, as you never actually take possession of the non-deserved money, unless you actually pay your rightful charges in full and request a check for the credit balance. Absent that, the worst that could happen is that you have to pay back the money once the error is corrected.

But in the case of such an error being made to a checking account, if you knowingly withdraw the money that isn't yours, you can be put in jail, even if you had no hand in creating the error in the first place. The mere fact that you withdrew money from the bank that you knew wasn't yours constitues theft from the bank.

I'm not saying that I agree with this, but it's a fact. There are many documented cases of people taking out money that suddenly landed in their account due to a bank error, only to end up in jail.

I have no idea what would happen if someone were to make an honest effort to correct the mistake, get nowhere, eventually withdraw the money, then sometime later the bank figures out that it really was a mistake. I suppose that if you made a reasomable effort to resolve the issue, you could make a case that you attributed it to something that you were entitled to, even though for whatever reason you didn't know exactly why. After all, the bank should be experts at determining the validity of transactions, especially in the situation where you specifically bring to their attention a questionable deposit.

A few years ago, there was a case in the local news where someone had received a rebate check in the mail for something he had bought. There had been a data entry mistake made at the rebate company, and instead of the rebate being $2 or whatever, someone had keyed in his ZIP Code as the dollar amount. So, he ended up with a $98,xxx.00 check! He deposited it, withdrew the money when the deposit cleared, then disappeared. Shortly thereafter, the mistake was discovered by the rebate company, and the police were looking for him to lock him up for stealing $98,xxx from the bank. Even though he did nothing proactive to create this error, the fact that he knowingly deposited and took out money that didn't belong to him was a crime.

A well-known CA bank which shall remain nameless deposited an extra several hundred thou into our business account. Took quite a while till they removed the ill-gotten gains! Most banks have downsized so many people that errors like this are common. Ditto the credit card situations on this thread.