Toyota Nashua would not refund my deposit

You know, sometimes CC charges (and refunds) just don't go through. It's all connectivity based. Some machines use a cache that phone home later, some do it on the spot, there is little standardization.

You could both be correct. The dealership could have processed your refund through their machine, and they got the little receipt slip. And you could have no received the refund.

There are only so many options here throughout the chain:

(A) Dealership is lying. They processed nothing, they refunded nothing. Resolution: Court
(B) Dealership is telling the truth. CC machine/company dropped the ball. Money was never debited from dealer's account, never made it to Chase, never got to you. Resolution: Have the dealership check their statement to see if the transaction made it out of their system and to Chase. Dealership then needs to deal with Chase because they lost their money, which happens.
(C) Like B, except the money was debited from the dealership's account. In this case, the dealership is done, the money went to the bank. Resolution: Call Chase and show the money trail with the transaction ID. Money was debited from the dealership and never credited to your account. It was lost in Chase somewhere.
(D) You're lying or mistaken, and the money was refunded but missed on the statement sheets somewhere.

Those are really the only possible options. I'd assume that before you made a public post such as this, you'd have thoroughly gone over your bank statements for the past 3-4 months and we can rule out (D). Trek on down to the dealership and figure out if it is (A), (B), or (C) and resolve it.

 

Not really news, but most local TV stations have a "consumer reporter" helping viewers which these kind of problems.

 

I know but they usually select situations that are a little more interesting to viewers than a $400 credit that for some reason didn't get posted to someone's bank account. They might select that story but only if there was nothing else, and they would show it only on a slow news day which is what I was referring to.

 

I'm not following the last sentence, if the transaction never went through and no money left the dealer's account, then they need to run the credit through again. Sure they may want to call the CC machine company to report the incident but that's not the OP's problem, the dealer owes the OP money.

Are you sure this actually happens or is this just speculation? I would think it is extremely rare that a transaction goes through successfully, meaning it completes without any error, and the money is deducted from the senders account but doesn't make it to the recipients account. Before the transaction can go through the account is validated at the recipients bank.

I think you need to add:

(E) Dealer incompetence. The finance clerk (probably the same one who forgot to deduct the deposit in the first place) didn't process the credit but still entered on the customer's account that it was processed. Based on the initial dealer error of not applying the deposit to the purchase, it would appear that a lot of this is still done manually at this dealer, via computer yes but using software that is not fully automated. We don't have the receipt in front of us, but whatever amount it shows for a refund was probably typed in by someone at the dealer.

Keep in mind that these are the same people that didn't deduct your deposit from the final purchase. Not an easy mistake to make unless they are still doing much of this manually. So either they do that on purpose hoping buyers don't notice, or they are extremely incompetent. I'll have to flip a coin on which one of those two explanations is the most likely.

 

This might be an interesting conversation BUT......the bottom line is: It is the DEALERS PROBLEM; between them and whatever company does their transaction processing. Nobody else can do anything about it. If their story is true, the dealer needs to give the transaction number, date and time to the processing company and they take it from there. NOBODY ELSE CAN HELP WITH THE PROCESS.

Applying a little pressure might speed things up a little but the receiving end can ***NOT*** do anything to trace something that they never received.

If I were you, I would visit the dealership, find out who is responsible for the transfer of money and camp out in their office until they DO what I described above.......while you are in the room so you can hear the result. Take no excuses. If necessary, find the owners office and camp out there. This is pathetic.

Almost as pathetic as the dealership that "lost" my trade-in vehicle a few cars ago.

 

it's actually the o/p's problem.

 

Well of course semantically that works but we are referring to the dealer making excuses. It's the dealers obligation to refund the money and whatever technical problems they are claiming to have are their responsibility to solve, not the OP. Especially since the dealer caused the problem in the beginning by failing to deduct the credit from the purchase.

 

Do you have a local TV station that does one of those "Solve your problem" segments? If so, dealerships hate bad publicity and will resolve the issue if they think they will be shown in a bad light.

 

Yes, you're correct. Misstatement on my part.

Yep, happened all the time. I've done my time at fast food restaurants and local small business restaurants working my way through high school and university. At the Chinese restaurant I worked at, I was a delivery driver (one of the reasons I got a Prius!) but that meant when I was in the restaurant I was the "do whatever odd things need to be done now since you aren't driving". That was everything from packing orders, taking them over the phone/person, whatever. But sometimes that also included going over the credit card print outs versus the bank statements of a week or so ago. You would line up each and every transaction the machine reported with the transaction reported to the central bank of the CC machine before the money was ACH'd to the shop's bank. There would be at least 1 a week that didn't line up. Sometimes it was a $7 transaction, sometimes a $100 transaction. It was random.

CC processing is a multistage process. The machine phone homes multiple times to validate the card and to process the transaction. Sometimes it drops the ball.

If I had to guesstimate, it was a few hundred CC charges a day minimum for 6 days a week so lets say 2500 transactions a week on average. Of those, 1 or 2 didn't make it. That's not a high failure rate, but they got every dollar they were owed only because they were diligent and put a value of $0/hr on their own time for checking or similarly no extra expense to make me do it when I wasn't delivering since they had to pay me hourly anyways. If I was a car dealership paying people actual money, I don't think I'd have anyone go over the books so thoroughly each week unless there was a problem reported and then track just that down.

Even at the chain American fast food restaurant I worked at, when things didn't add up, oh well. As long as it was +/-$20 a shift they were cool with it. Not worth their time to pay us to figure out where $3.50 went over the day when it was routine for people to just steal the entire napkin dispenser ($40 to replace) or similar. Just the cost of doing that type of business.

I lumped that in with (A) as I would treat the dealership as a singular unit. But yes they really are separate and sometimes they don't talk to eachother or even like eachother and actively try to cause problems between them.

Reading car dealership horror stories are one of my life joys. This one is pretty tame, but it could be indicative of a larger problem for sure.

OP, any update?

 

I bet I have you beat. I had a dealer "sell" my car as I was out on a test drive in one of their cars. I gave my keys to the dealer so he could get a trade in value and when I came back, my car was in a stall being prepped for the new owner. I bet I was gone 10 minutes max. At first, they wouldn't give me my keys back. That was a crazy visit.

 

Incompetence and lying are not the same thing. The end result may be the same however the cause is very different. Incompetence can happen to anyone even the most well meaning, but lying is deliberate. Although I agree that incompetence could be lumped into (A) even though it's really a separate root cause, in both cases the original problem was with the dealer, not the bank or CC machine company.

So just to make clear I am questioning (C). Your past experiences sound more like (B).

(B) CC machine doesn't complete the transaction even though it indicates that it did.

Although this scenario seems technically plausible I'm really surprised that a CC machine company that does this even once would stay in business for very long. I can understand that near instantaneous processing is demanded especially in a fast paced retail or restaurant environment. So I'm guessing all it does in those few seconds is validate the CC number with the cardholder's bank and request a hold for the amount of the purchase, then display a confirmation and spit out a receipt. Then later the CC machine company (or the bank that they work with) actually processes the transaction with the cardholder's bank, at which point the merchant is paid and the cardholder is actually charged with the purchase.

What you are describing is that while in the pending stage the transaction gets dropped, the merchant is never notified of this, and unless the merchant catches it by comparing their sales receipts with their bank statement they lose the money because the transaction never went through. Again, how can a CC machine company stay in business if they do this even only a small percent of transactions? I'm not saying it can never happen but I'm surprised if it's common.

(C) The transaction does goes through and the cardholder is charged however the merchant doesn't receive the money. This is the one that I asked are you sure you know that this actually happens because this would be an even bigger and higher level issue, and I would think much more rare. In your restaurant experiences you would have no way to know if the cardholder was charged or not, so I'm guessing that all of the issues that you saw were actually (B), i.e. the transaction actually never went through.

The dealer that the OP is disputing with is claiming that (C) occurred, i.e. the dealer says they were charged on their bank statement even though the OP did not receive the money in their bank account (as a credit). This seems highly unlikely and points either to lying or incompetence by the dealer i.e. the transaction didn't actually go through (B) but the clerk who is researching it misreads the bank statement and perhaps confuses with another $500 transaction that did go through. Again a coin flip on whether the dealer is incompetent or lying.

 

Yes at the restaurant I would only see (B). However as a merchant myself, I have seen (C). It has only happened (that I know of!) once to myself and all my processed payments are online. I don't even own a physical machine. But basically imagine a "hey why haven't you paid yet?" "yes I have" "no you haven't here is the record" "yes I have, here is the record"... Now what. Call the CC merchant, they figure it out. In that case it was PayPal acting as the Visa merchant on my business account. I still use PayPal merchant processing as well as others like Stripe.

The physical machine at the restaurant like most today, are still dial up based. They have a phone line and use that to communicate with the CC servers. But of course in a small business paying for a second land line just to run credit cards was too much a waste of $9.99 a month. So they wired in their own splitter so that the Line-1 calls would use the Line-2 wires if Line-1 was busy that way customers wouldn't get the busy tone. It did result in "I have to wait to run your card until he gets off the phone" moments. Or if a call came in while L1 was busy and the CC machine was in the middle of a transaction, it was a gamble. Sometimes it would work if you just didn't answer the phone. Sometimes, immediate error. Sometimes it would say declined even though it wasn't. It was credit card roulette.

 

I'd like to see a scan of the receipt documenting the $400 credit to the customer's credit card.
If correct, it would explain Chase's claim denial.

And as for where that $400 actually is, well that will take some digging on OP's (and Chase) part.

 

Not sure how other credit cards work, but USAA Visa fights these disputes as my advocate. If I provide them the proof, they will reverse the charge and zap it right off my bill. But I guess this was never charged to the credit card?

 

Go with USAA Bank Visa....

 

I'm not sure what situations USAA Visa helped you with, can you give an example? I'm guessing they were not quite like this one. Credit card companies get involved in disputed charges like being charged for something you never purchased, receiving the wrong item, being double charged etc. Then there’s purchase protection but that is normally related to damage, loss or theft of items purchased with the card.

In this case the OP used their Chase card to put a $500 deposit on a new vehicle, but the dealer later failed to apply the deposit to the purchase. The OP unfortunately didn't catch it during the paperwork signing. After informing the dealer afterwards, dealer says they will refund it but also comes up with a hokey story about how they forgot to add a $100 transfer fee, and so they will only refund $400. OP went along with that but in hindsight probably should have said I wasn't informed of that fee during the sale and it's not on the contract so I'm not paying it, I want my full $500 refund. But anyway OP agreed to $400 refund, so okay, but they never got even that. Dealer now claims they refunded it to their card back in February, but Chase says they only have a record of the original charge not any refunds.

Now if you think USAA Visa would jump in feet first into that type of quagmire to get a car dealer to refund a deposit that they say they already refunded, then sure we should all switch to them. I’m just not sure they would. Maybe you can call and ask them, tell them you heard of this happening to someone and you are wondering if they would protect you if you got into a similar situation.

 

Well, thanks for the forensic analysis LOL! Based on this quote from the original post, "Then I got a receipt via mail showing that they refunded $400 back to my CC on 2/16 but it never appeared on my statements. Call my CC and they also didnt see it so I started a claim," there is no doubt in my mind that USAA would rule in my favor. The receipt showing where they refunded my money, coupled with the bill of sale showing where the money was not credited back to me as part of the deal--USAA would surely take care of that!

 

These are far from equivalent statements. You are jumping to conclusions.

 

When you say USAA would take care of it, which of the following do you think would they do ( I'm not being snarky I'm really just wondering)

1 USAA would call the dealer and tell them they need to run the credit through again, and they will keep calling and hounding them until they do.

2 Reverse the original deposit charge, taking the money back from the dealer and giving it to the OP

3. Pay the OP the money out of their own pocket.

For legal and/or practical reasons I can only see them doing number 3. Which may be what they did for you in one or more of your situations. CC companies do that at times because it's small change compared to how much money they make on merchant fees, and of course the huge cash influx from all the people who can't pay their CC bill on time. So okay maybe they would help you in a similar situation by paying for it out of their pocket, but I doubt if they would tell you that, you would just see the refund magically appear on your statement and most people aren't going to call and ask them where the money came from.