I encountered this and thought it was interesting. If my company had charged someone and found there was no trace of it in our system, I would be very concerned. But at Zipcar they seem to play it off as not a big deal. I wonder how much revenue they make from randomly charging people who don't notice.
https://imgur.com/a/ET3ckK9
I saw this happen to a business once and they never got any answers when they tried to engage their payment provider. It was a franchise, so they didn't have a direct enough relationship to really push the issue.
What would happen is a customer debit card would fail a transaction, so they'd redo it and it would succeed. Later that day the customer would be back to show them how they were double charged, but the merchant account only showed the successful transaction.
That was 5 years ago and as far as I know that money just "disappeared". It happened infrequently enough the business always ended up eating it.
To this day, I still want to know what happened.
In the case of the OP, I can imagine something similar. If ZipCar doesn't have any record of the transactions, why not get the customer to do a charge back? That way whoever ended up with the money loses it.
Naturally, something messed up because the project was rushed out the door, stranding my partner and I when our car wouldn’t unlock.
Support team was backed up because they never knew to staff up, so we were stuck on hold for an hour. In that time, I secured another car, started driving and then they told me they can’t see my current rental because the CRM changeover migrated half the fleet data before getting stuck. This was nationwide.
Due to this snafu we had to deal with multiple calls, all with awful wait times. One of the lower level support people _thanked me for not yelling at them_. That’s how badly they execute.
This company is full on Blockbuster for cars. They take as much money as they can while managing as piss poor an experience as possible. They’ll refund you to your account (not your credit card!) for their mistakes as long as you chase them, then eventually take the money back anyway because their refunds have expiry dates.
File a complaint with the FTC and your state’s attorney general.
They will resist giving it to you, likely by telling you "it's online on their website". or they will send you to a "contact us" page on their website that doesn't display their corporate address. This is when you know you are winning.
They may still not resolve it on the spot, but when someone sees that notes that you requested the necessary information in order to sue, they will likely fix it in short order.
It's worked for me a few times when it was very obvious the company had policy of telling customers to go screw themselves, even when the customer is right.
There is something about actually knowing how to file a lawsuit for real that seems to motivate them.
Many places have a policy that invoking legal is a one way street, and once you’ve threatened to sue they will give you the contact details for legal and then refuse to speak to you through normal customer service channels for any reason.
You’re now stuck dealing with the people who’s job it is to mitigate risk, and not those who’s job it is to keep customers happy.
Several times I have received an email from someone saying that my website charged their card incorrectly. In each case the amount charged has been an amount that is impossible based on what I sell (my product is $10, but they are billed for $17.23). I attempt to lookup the transaction in my Stripe dashboard using the date, amount, and last 4 digits. Nothing. I have to reply with something similar to what OP got back from support. In every case where I received a followup with the customer, they had misread the credit card statement and it was for a totally different company's charge. I guess there was a company with a similar name. Sometimes customers get quite irate, but they never apologize when they realize it was their fault.
I'm still charged for the actual hires I make though.
