Charges from Dollar General have never shown up on my debit card. How can I resolve this?

Question

During the summer of 2016 I lived by a Dollar General and went there about once a week. I only had a debit card then and paid for everything this way. DG was notable in that I never had to enter my pin or sign a receipt for anything, the cashier would just swipe my card and say I'm good to go. I just realized that this is weird and checked my bank history, and there's never been any charge from Dollar General, or any similar-looking recurring charges that could be it.

I think they might have ran my debit card as a credit card. It's a Visa like this question says can be used (Is there a fee if you used your debit card as credit card?) but there's no charge showing up. Is there anything I can do now to resolve this? Credit Karma doesn't show anything about a debt to DG, nor do my other credit reports from Mint, Capital One, and Discover. Is there a chance that I'm "in debt" still?

Answer 1

Charging a debit card "as a credit card" doesn't mean that your debit card will actually act as a credit card. It doesn't build up a debt which must be explicitly paid later, as a credit card would. The amount charged is directly taken from your bank account.

The main difference in charging a debit card "as a credit card" is that the authentication requirements are different; that's why you didn't have to enter your PIN, like you would at an automatic ATM. Other differences are largely on the merchant's side -- transaction fees, chargeback rules, things like that -- but none of that will affect where the money comes from. Using a debit card as a credit card just means that you're going through a different payment network, one which also supports credit cards.

In any case, using a credit card at a store doesn't mean you build up a debt to that store. The store gets paid by the bank that issued the credit card. Your debt would be to the bank. Again, though, that's for a credit card, not a debit card.

If you're looking for the transactions in the place where you expect to find credit card charges, you won't find them there. You'll find them with your debit card transactions. (Note that it can be difficult to associate the line items from your statements with the actual transactions. Try matching up the amounts, not the names.)

Answer 2

It's been 3 years, just let it go. Chances are the transactions did go through but you are either not looking at the right statements or the transactions are showing as something that you can't recognize as DG.

Even if you were never charged nobody knows how much exactly you owe. DG has written those charges off as loss and moved on.

There is nothing that can be done.

Answer 3

The lack of a signature isn't particularly concerning. Credit card and debit card companies have been phasing out signatures since 2015. Individual merchants may still require signatures.

More troubling is that you claim the charges never showed up on your bank or credit card statements. Long delays sometimes happen with overseas use, but having multiple charges never submitted by a local merchant over several months would be remarkable. Banks and credit cards typically impose surcharges for delayed charges by merchants and may impose a strict time limit, but that's between the merchant and the bank or clearing house. You may be protected from long overdue bills from by local consumer protection laws, but those vary by state. Typically those protections don't keep you from getting sued by the bank or credit card agency, but can be raised in your response.

This is so odd though, that my first advice would be to review you bank statements with a fine tooth comb. You likely missed something.

Answer 4

I've encountered similar situations in retail.

• In the first instance, the cashier was intentionally not charging the customer for their purchases (alcoholic drinks) because he found them attractive. This was his way of trying to get their attention.

• In the second instance, a worker mistook the customer for an extended family member and gave them the usual (100%!) discount without realising that they were a total stranger.

• The final instance involved an elderly volunteer. She had been shown how to use the credit card system but struggled on the days when she'd forgotten her glasses. She would pretend to take a payment but just pass the card from one hand to the other and tell the customer that a payment had been taken.

Obviously without interviewing the cashier, it's not easy to understand why your card wasn't charged, but it could be intentional rather than accidental.

As to how to resolve it, sufficient time has passed that unless you're wracked with guilt, there's really no cause or need to do anything other than chalking it down as a weird experience.

Answer 5

If it was Dollar General then you're fine. The full process on PIN transactions is

1. Swipe, insert or tap your debit card
2. Enter your PIN
3. Store withdraws whatever your total is from your account (there's a bit more to this but it's not relevant here)

The credit process on a debit card is slightly different

1. Swipe, insert or tap your debit card
2. Store authorizes the total amount (this is how all credit transaction work, debit or not)
3. Your bank withdraws the authorized amount from your account
4. At the end of the day, the store runs what it called a settlement. That tells their merchant service to capture the money. Since the full amount of the transaction has already left your account, you're none the wiser

If the amount is low enough, most stores have an agreement that you don't need to sign for it (hence the clerk swiping and telling you you're "good to go").

There's two places where that debit-as-credit process can trip you up, however

Gas station pay-at-pump credit

Virtually all pumps run an authorization of some low amount (in the US, this is typically $1). The gas station then captures the full amount at the end of the day. This can be problematic for you if you don't remember the full balance of your transaction.

Let's say it's Friday night and you buy $50 in gas, having run it as credit at the pump. You check your bank balance on your phone and see you have $200 showing as a balance. You spend $180 over the weekend. The problem is that the pump only authorized $1, so come the next business day (typically Monday), the merchant account of the gas station is going to have captured $50. Your bank will process that the same or next day (depending on how they do things) and try to debit $49 from your account, but you only have $20 left now. This typically carries an overdraft fee.

Online transactions

A slightly different problem exists online. It's gotten less common now, but it's still out there. By definition, you only run online orders as credit. Most of the time that's not a problem, but if your payment failed, it could cause issues.

Some merchant accounts will try to authorize the full amount of your transaction as a way to ensure there are sufficient funds. This typically happens after they verify your CVV2 number (3 or 4 digit number printed only on the card, separate from the card number) and zip code (address verification). Some merchant accounts then wash it through a fraud filter. If it fails, they will respond accordingly to the merchant site and the sale will not complete.

Did you notice something, though? They made a successful authorization against your card. Here's where things get messy for you. The bank (per their terms and conditions) has now withdrawn that amount from your account. Because there's no capture forthcoming, that money will go back to your account... eventually. How quickly depends on business days and the specific rules of your bank. The company I work for occasionally has people who used debit cards and made several tries with it, not realizing there was a corresponding withdrawal every time. In some cases, they overdrew their accounts with nothing but authorizations. Unfortunately, the bank holds all the cards there with their rules on authorizations. You're at their mercy as to when it expires and goes back into the account. Merchants and their service providers cannot work around that, since they never captured the funds in the first place.

Credit cards with a credit line avoid the problem because the authorization draws against the line of credit, and you're never billed for unsettled authorizations.

Answer 6

Was "the cashier" the same person each time? If so, I suspect either incompetence or malfeasance on the cashier's part. If there were different cashiers, as I would expect, the charge might have appeared under a different name and with a fee that—however small—threw off searches by amount.

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I have a story around this: In 1984, I was driving to south Florida from the Gulf Coast. My fuel was getting low as I was crossing through the most rural part of the Panhandle (or armpit, as some call this part, near Perry) in the wee hours.

Fortunately I happened upon a Shell station that was open. In those days, Shell had a proprietary card and Shell stations had a two-foot wide console covered with dozens of colored-coded keys arranged in groups (this was long before pay at the pump existed). I had already noticed that Shell employees seemed to need to go through an inordinate number of keypunches to enter a charge, similar to what airline gate agents still do today when changing a booking.

Anyway, the half-awake attendant at this remote Shell was clearly not up to speed on this impressive device and its complex protocols. He grew frustrated and starting banging on the keyboard randomly until a slip came out. Finally I had my little three layer form to sign.

I wasn't paying close attention to the amount, but later I thought I'd better look. The charge was listed, in all caps with stars, as "CREDIT" and apparently one of the codes he randomly entered was "44". Instead of a ten dollar tank of gas (back then, $1.15/gallon) I had a $44 credit.

I expected Shell to figure it out and charge me back, but I'm still waiting. I have always wondered whether that station's management caught this and how it played out for the attendant.

Answer 7

You're wondering why people aren't charging you money from 3 years ago? What?

If they haven't claimed you owe money then what exactly is the issue?

Dollar General doesn't bill their customers. Either you paid for it at the point of sale or it's their problem. Even if you flat out shoplifted they can't prove it unless they said something at the time.

Even if they did charge you after the fact how would they argue that (and prove it) in court? The burden of proof would be on them.

Finally, there has to be some equivalent of a statute of limitations. Most checks are stamped with "valid for 90 days" or something similar and debit cards follow the same rules. If they haven't said anything for three years, I can't imagine they would have a valid complaint or even care for that matter.