Macy’s: POS “Formatting Flaw” Caused Debit Card Snafu
Written by Evan Schuman and Fred J. AunFebruary 25th, 2009
Macy's is now blaming a POS system "formatting flaw" for the holiday payment horror where 8,000 in-store customers' debit cards were charged multiple times for single transactions.</b.
The retailer initially suspected that one of its third-party payment card processors caused the problem. But in mid-January, company officials said no outside entities were to blame. Instead, they attributed the incidents to a problem with a gateway. The lack of new details makes determining precisely what happened difficult, especially when dealing with a phrase as vague as "formatting flaw" somewhere within the POS. What role did the high holiday rush traffic play? Was the system so overloaded that response times were too slow? Or was it more of a programming error, such as assuming that when more than X number of transactions are processed during any one-hour period, presume it's an attack and suspend authorizations?
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One Comment | Read Macy’s: POS “Formatting Flaw” Caused Debit Card Snafu
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Our Comment SPAM system is getting very aggressive these days and has been blocking legitimate comments. If you post a comment and don't see it appear within 2 hours or so, can you please send a heads-up to customer-service@storefrontbacktalk? Ideally, please include the time you posted the comment. That will allow us to try and hunt for it. Thanks! P.S. We're working on fixing the system, but we don't want to lose any valuable comments in the meantime.
-Ed
September 17th, 2009 at 9:32 am
Merchants needs to call their terminal provider to prevent things like this from happening. Sometimes it’s the terminal that has the problem that’s why debit cards was double billed.