I've just had an email saying my pay as you go Oyster auto top-up failed
(on W15 bus) on Friday because it couldn't charge my credit card. But
I've just logged in and resettled using the same credit card. What
gives? It's worked fine for six or so auto top-ups before and the card
doesn't expire until next year.

The only thing I can think of is that on Friday I made a lot of atypical
journeys in the east end - could it be some anti-fraud algorithm?

E.

eastender wrote

I've just had an email saying my pay as you go Oyster auto top-up
failed
(on W15 bus) on Friday because it couldn't charge my credit card. But

I've just logged in and resettled using the same credit card. What
gives? It's worked fine for six or so auto top-ups before and the
card
doesn't expire until next year.

The only thing I can think of is that on Friday I made a lot of
atypical
journeys in the east end - could it be some anti-fraud algorithm?

I think it has been mentioned here that most things that happen on
buses are done as a batch when the bus returnes to its garage.

Thus this may have been the first time auto top-up was done via the bus
or via this garage ?

Even if it wasn't some new bug may have been triggered.

As in all "card said to have been rejected" cases, I suggest you call
customer help at your card issuer and ask. They should have the
information on a screen in front of them. If the issuer denies any
rejects Friday-now, ask TfL what happened.

--
Mike D

On Jun 19, 11:27*am, eastender wrote:
I've just had an email saying my pay as you go Oyster auto top-up failed
(on W15 bus) on Friday because it couldn't charge my credit card. But
I've just logged in and resettled using the same credit card. What
gives? It's worked fine for six or so auto top-ups before and the card
doesn't expire until next year.

The only thing I can think of is that on Friday I made a lot of atypical
journeys in the east end - could it be some anti-fraud algorithm?

Dunno - I haven't got auto top-up activated at the moment but when I
did I never had a failed payment - can't recall any friends saying
they've had this happen either, so I dare say it's just a glitch of
some sort.

I don't imagine that your atypical east end journeys would have
triggered any sort of anti-fraud algorithm - the charging to your
nominated debit/credit card is done centrally at 'Oyster HQ', and I
don't think there's any information about what journeys you've
actually made that is passed to your card provider (bank or credit
card company) - if they do have an anti-fraud algorithm then it should
simply recognise that you've made Oyster auto top-up payments in the
past and so they're not suspicious (esp. given that you live and spend
in London etc), but maybe it threw a wobbly, or something else went
wrong with the payment authorisation.

In article 01cc2e75$ebaf7e60$d3cd403e@default,
"Michael R N Dolbear" wrote:


I think it has been mentioned here that most things that happen on
buses are done as a batch when the bus returnes to its garage.

Thus this may have been the first time auto top-up was done via the bus
or via this garage ?

It's the first time I've been on that bus certainly. The message from
TFL starts:

"The pay as you go balance on Oyster card number xxxxxxxx was topped up
with £40.00 on bus route W15 on 17/06/2011.

We are writing to let you know that we were unable to charge your credit
or debit card ending in XXXXXXXXXXXXxxxx for this amount.

You need to pay the outstanding balance now against top-up number
xxxxxxxxxx.

In message of Sun,
19 Jun 2011 14:08:36 in uk.transport.london, eastender
writes

[snip]

It's the first time I've been on that bus certainly. The message from
TFL starts:

"The pay as you go balance on Oyster card number xxxxxxxx was topped up
with £40.00 on bus route W15 on 17/06/2011.

We are writing to let you know that we were unable to charge your credit
or debit card ending in XXXXXXXXXXXXxxxx for this amount.

I had a similar failure at London Bridge LU station on 13 June.
It was not helpful that my email was down for a couple of weeks until
Friday. Fortunately, I had logged on to Oyster in the meantime to chase
an overcharge for a circular journey. The system wasted no time in
advising me of the problem, which I corrected with the card used for the
failed transaction.

That's two card failures. Can anybody report a third? I begin to suspect
system failure.
--
Walter Briscoe

On 2011-06-19 14:08:36 +0100, eastender said:

In article 01cc2e75$ebaf7e60$d3cd403e@default,
"Michael R N Dolbear" wrote:


I think it has been mentioned here that most things that happen on
buses are done as a batch when the bus returnes to its garage.

Thus this may have been the first time auto top-up was done via the bus
or via this garage ?

It's the first time I've been on that bus certainly. The message from
TFL starts:

"The pay as you go balance on Oyster card number xxxxxxxx was topped up
with £40.00 on bus route W15 on 17/06/2011.

We are writing to let you know that we were unable to charge your credit
or debit card ending in XXXXXXXXXXXXxxxx for this amount.

You need to pay the outstanding balance now against top-up number
xxxxxxxxxx.

If you do not make this payment within three days your Oyster card may
be stopped."

There's no limit issue with the credit card as it's well below the
limit. I'll call TFL and ask if they know what happened as I don't want
it happening again say after I've flown out of the country for a week.


E.

Have you spoken to your credit card issuers? I find these days that
rejections of payments are becoming more and more frequent due to
anti-fraud procedures. In fact I've just binned one card due to my
total inability to buy any software on-line.

If that's not the reason it could be something as simple as a comms
fault at your card issuer - M&S (more accurately the bank behind their
card) were failing to authorise any card transaction during a week-day
morning a year or so ago.

In article ,
Ken Wheatley wrote:

Have you spoken to your credit card issuers? I find these days that
rejections of payments are becoming more and more frequent due to
anti-fraud procedures. In fact I've just binned one card due to my
total inability to buy any software on-line.

No, life's too short for all of this.

If that's not the reason it could be something as simple as a comms
fault at your card issuer - M&S (more accurately the bank behind their
card) were failing to authorise any card transaction during a week-day
morning a year or so ago.

I guess that may be the reason - but I will make one call to TFL to see
if they actually have some kind of fault code on record. But that will
be the extent of my investigation.

In my experience though faults are rare - I travel a lot abroad and this
particular Mastercard has never let me down from Kiev to Lisbon and many
points in between. The only time I've had problems with cards is when
they physically breakdown, which obviously is not the case this time.

E.

In message , at 20:59:02 on Sun,
19 Jun 2011, Ken Wheatley remarked:

Have you spoken to your credit card issuers? I find these days that
rejections of payments are becoming more and more frequent due to
anti-fraud procedures.

The card issuer will almost certainly claim that no authorisation was
sought. I've had this several times.

My impression (having had a card charge declined via East Coast' website
the other day, and then accepted a minute later) is that the vendor
fires off a request to the card company, and if it gets lost on the way
out they interpret the lack of a positive response as a rejection. And
the card company then says "no-one tried to charge the card, it's not
our fault".

You'd think they had a more synchronous system that that, but it seems
not.
--
Roland Perry