WHIPPANY, N.J., Feb. 3, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- On Saturday (Jan. 29), a telco outage at Shell Oil stations directly caused more than $12 million in duplicate charges for its retail customers, according to a report in today's edition of StorefrontBacktalk. The full story can be read at http://storefrontbacktalk.com/securityfraud/12-million-in-duplicate-charges-from-shell-oil-telco-crash/.
"This is yet the latest case of a chain getting burned because the payment industry has no consistent way to deal with in-progress credit and debit charges when systems crash. Does store-and-forward need to be tweaked to be made more crash-proof?" the story said.
First Data circulated a confidential memo on Monday (Jan. 31) that said it was reversing some 401,120 transactions-totaling$12,135,608.19-of Shell's retail transactions from the weekend, the story said.
"The problem of large retailers charging customers multiple times for a single purchase is getting worse and part of the problem is that the payment industry has no clean, consistent and effective method for dealing with payments that are in progress when any kind of an outage hits, whether it's a power blackout, the telecom connection dying or a Web server crashing," saidStorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman. "We've seen this hit Starbucks-which double-charged more than a million transactions several months ago-Macy's, Best Buy and Hannaford and those are the only the largest ones that we know of. For every one we know of, there are far more that are kept quiet."
The full story is available online at http://storefrontbacktalk.com/securityfraud/12-million-in-duplicate-charges-from-shell-oil-telco-crash.
About StorefrontBacktalk
StorefrontBacktalk® is an editorial site that tracks retail technology, E-Commerce and Mobile issues for retail chain IT executives and those who need to understand retail trends. With more than 50,000 subscribers to its monthly newsletter -- in addition to visitors to its Web and various mobile sites --StorefrontBacktalk is a widely respected independent watcher of retail technology issues. It's been quoted in more than 100 media outlets, including BusinessWeek, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, CBSNews, CNN, FoxNews, Computerworld, Wired, The Los Angeles Times, ConsumerReports.org, CNET, U.S. News & World Report, Austin American-Statesman, USA Today, The Boston Globe and The American Banker. More background is available at http://www.storefrontbacktalk.com/who-is-storefrontbacktalk.
CONTACT: Evan Schuman, 973-993-8098, eschuman@storefrontbacktalk.com
SOURCE StorefrontBacktalk
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