I was in Lowe's 3 weeks ago purchasing a garage door opener. It wasn't worth the box it was packaged in, so I returned it a few days ago. I got home and looked at my return receipt and noticed that the return was credited to two different cards. A small portion being my Visa credit card and the largest part of the balance was credited to an unknown card. My wife and I double checked all of our cards and confirmed that we do not own a MasterCard, nor a card ending in the numbers shown on the receipt.

I gathered all of the information and documents and went back to Lowes to settle up. Initially the clerk at the service desk was dumb-founded and spent considerable time trying to find a reason for the error. He was adamant that it should be impossible because the system simply pulls the transaction data and reverses it. The clerk presented a theory that my credit card must have only been partially charged and a glitch charged the balance to the "ghost" card. My credit card statement showed the full amount paid by my credit card, thus disproving his theory. Ultimately, the store manager was brought in to answer my questions as to how this error could have happened. His solution was nothing more than issuing another credit back to my card.

Although I have been made whole, I still have questions about how something like this can happen. The manager was just so smug and annoyed that I was asking questions, which is what really bothered me. Is it possible for a point of sale return such as this to be fraudulently credited to another card? That seems to be the simplest explaination.

I'm not sure what my next step is, as Lowes corporate seems to be uninterested as well.

It’d be interesting to compare to the credit cards owned by the employee doing the returns

I think you should write it up, as you have, and save it for an interesting story for your grandkids someday.

As you say, you are even now. It’s Lowes problem. Maybe it’s a one off aberration. Maybe it is an internal scam in progress. Maybe it’s a sting to uncover an internal scam. Maybe the Ruskies have hacked Lowes books.

In any event, apart from curiousity, not unnatural, it’s not a worry of yours.

Someone is running a scam. I might avoid that Lowes.

I would suggest that you run down the "Fraud Dept" or "Internal Audit" at Lowe's corporate and forward them your write up. Definitely not right! Could be a computer glitch or could be more nefarious - either way one of those two groups would like to know, I suspect.

quote:

Originally posted by Sailor1911:
I would suggest that you run down the "Fraud Dept" or "Internal Audit" at Lowe's corporate and forward them your write up. Definitely not right! Could be a computer glitch or could be more nefarious - either way one of those two groups would like to know, I suspect.

I manage a business with 25,000+ credit card transactions a month. If I were Lowe's audit/fraud dept. I would want to take a second/ third look at that transaction. As Sailor said could be a glitch, could be more nefarious (including the Manager being in on it).

On the flip side of the coin I occasionally get a little annoyed when a customer has their card hacked and they "know it was us" when they just returned from a 5 day business trip and used their card 6 times a day, or some ring from Ukraine has been sitting on their card list for 2 months and decided to hit them all. It could happen to my business anytime, but we check for skimmers every day, have good employees, and have a good audit dept.

quote:

Originally posted by berto:
Someone is running a scam. I might avoid that Lowes.

that is what i am wondering.

he / she wanted to give you back 'something' on the idea you would never return to collect your full refund - the rest was 're-paid' to a fraud card the crook has access to.

that's all i can think of. the thought of a refund being randomly split between 2 un-related accounts doesn't seem possible. in 35+ years of shopping with CCs I have never heard of that happening.

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Don't know about Lowes, but:

at Home Depot, the computer automatically refunds back to the original card and there is no way to override it or use a different credit card.

The only alternative is to do a "no receipt" return and receive a store credit, in which case the refund will be the lowest recent price and possibly not what you paid for the item.

Yeah call and ask for the district loss prevention manager. This is likely fraud occurring at that location and they need to start investigating that store.