[ Fair Use: For Educational/Research Purposes Only ]

Did Y2K Double Your Credit Card Bill?

Local Business Suffers Glitch In Charges

PORTLAND, Posted 6:33 p.m. PST January 13, 2000 --

A Y2K glitch is being blamed for nearly $40,000 in credit card overcharges at a Portland restaurant.

The overcharges have been paid by 126 customers of Allesandro's Italian Restaurant and Bar since Jan. 1.

The restaurant is among hundreds of merchants nationwide who have been hit by problems with outdated versions of card-swipe software. The mistake causes charges to be duplicated.

Those affected can seek to have the charges reversed by their bank or credit card company.

One woman spent $130 on a New Year's Eve dinner at Allesandro.

The woman, Teri Venezia, has now been billed that amount seven times, for about $900.

Allesandro's manager Ty Wells tells KOIN 6 News his processing bank, the Bank of Omaha, and others are working to make sure everyone's covered -- and that no one pays any fees.

"I was Y2K compliant. I had the software, I upgraded, I did everything I was meant to do," Wells says.

Wells says the temptation to go back to a cash system would be too much of a financial loss for the restaurant.

"(Would I) go back to a cash system? It has occurred to me, but unfortunately, a lot of people like the plastic. We would lose a lot of business that way," he explains.

Visa and MasterCard claim to have checks in place to detect double charges on bills. E-commerce company Cybercash, the one used by Allesandro's and many other retail businesses around the nation, says failures of this type are the fault of individual merchants, for failing to upgrade properly.

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), January 13, 2000

Answers

Good post. Thank you. =)

-- Dee (T1Colt556@aol.com), January 13, 2000.

Whew! Guess when it affects ENOUGH ppl it gets reported. Time Will Tell.
But with the infrastructure holding it's become (to appearances at least) mainly a BUSINESS COMPETITION issue.

Only one minor problem so far with our bank, and they kindly tell us it's 'reversed' *crossed fingers*

Never have had or used credit cards, so spared on that one ...

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), January 13, 2000.

oops! were so busy applying the hair dryer treatment to our still tea-infested keyboard that we forgot the URL ~ ~

Did Y2K Double Your Credit Card Bill?

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), January 13, 2000.

[ Fair Use: For Educational/Research Purposes Only ]

http://hotnews.oregonlive.com/cgi-free/getstory.cgi?o1225_AM_WA--Y2K-B illingBug&OR&news&oy2k

Seattle ISP bit by bug; billed customers daily instead of monthly

The Associated Press, 1/13/00 7:19 PM, By MICHAEL J. MARTINEZ, AP Business Writer

SEATTLE (AP) -- It started with a handful of calls on Monday, Jan. 3, and a couple of customers complaining about duplicate billing. More calls came in on Jan. 4, and even more Jan. 5.

Seanet Corp., an Internet service provider with 17,000 clients, was billing credit card customers for monthly service every day since Jan. 1.

That's $20, not every month, but every day. The problem seemed to stem from the software program Seanet used in its billing department.

"I first heard about it when my chief financial officer exploded at his desk," said Mark Grosz, corporate sales manager for Seanet.

"Needless to say, we stopped it as soon as we figured out what was happening."

That was on Jan. 7, when as many as several hundred customers were out as much as $80, and many had no idea. Dan Peters, a Seanet customer from Belfair, Wash., didn't know of the problem until he went to the bank to cash a check on Friday and found he was overdrawn $72.

The bank forgave Peters' overdraw fees, however, when it learned that it wasn't his fault, and many credit card companies, including MasterCard and Visa, have upgraded their computers to detect multiple credit card withdrawls on consecutive days.

ICVerify, a subsidiary of CyberCash Inc. that makes Seanet's software, had reports of numerous software problems in the past week, but CyberCash spokeswoman Sydney Rubin said that they stemmed from problems with the end users' computers, not the company's software.

Rubin said that the company had offered Y2K information and software fixes for the better part of a year, and that some small to mid-size companies simply didn't take advantage of it.

That, Grosz said, seems unlikely since the company took steps to ensure that its Y2K problems were corrected. However, he said the company was checking to see if the software problem was on Seanet's end.

He added that Seanet was unaware of any communication from CyberCash, though Rubin insisted that the company contacted all of its clients.

The CyberCash system is used by more than 100,000 retailers and merchants around the world.

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), January 14, 2000.

I love how Visa and Mastercard claim to be checking for duplicates.

I guess that process is not, ah, Y2K ready. ;-)

-- cgbg jr (cgbgjr@webtv.net), January 14, 2000.

Tip of the iceberg. Watch the banks.

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), January 14, 2000.