I probably made some random person mad today...Follow

You'd assume wrong.

When someone charges something on a card, it's true that the vendor gets the money within a few days. If that customer then disputes the charge, the company involved (the gas station) is notified by a letter from the credit card company. They are asked to provide proof that the charge is legit, usually in the form of a signed receipt, by a specific date. If the company doesn't bother to fight it and just files those letters away as a budgeted expense, then the charge on the customer's card will disappear, and the money gets automatically taken back out of the company's bank account along with the other fees for the previous month.

At least, this is how it works for all of our clients. I'm in charge of finding the signed receipts and sending them back to the credit card company as proof of payment. If we don't have a signed receipt or if the cardholder can prove that it's not their signature, then the money is taken back out of our client's account. It's entirely possible that a much larger corporation like Shell would have some sort of either deal with the credit card companies about disputed charges or some insurance against disputed charges, but if they do, I assure you that the credit card companies are making it up some other way. Most likely by charging a higher percentage per swiped transaction.

That's how it works for our hotels. At least, any I've worked in. It could be different when dealing with CC companies in the US due to different laws, but since you're saying the same thing as I am, I'll assume it's not different.

This is one reason why not all companies accept credit cards, even though it's "really convenient" and "good for business."



This can easily be contested by saying the card information was stolen. Someone stole your card information and created their own version of your card, for example. It's pretty easy to convince as well if you live in, say, Ohio, yet the gas station transaction was done in Nevada. Alternately, multiple transactions in totally random locations could start popping up all at once. You just can't prove who stole it, but most people just aren't going to care about that.

What I'm saying is that the circumstance brought forth in the OP seems more likely *as* a stolen card. Everyone has been assuming that the card info wasn't already stolen and that someone was just really sloppy. I find that very hard to believe, considering that there's just too many jackals out there ready to scavenge. Even the most retarded person learns fast when their money is on the line, even if the person's too stupid to know how to properly dispute.

Depends on the size of the charge. If it's a dollar or three, I probably wouldn't invest that much time looking for it. If it were $100, I'd probably dig that receipt up as fast as I could.

To Shell, that $60 is like a few dollars to our clients.

I had a few friends in High School who worked at gas stations. They all got deducted for any shorts, including drive-offs. It's possible that would be the case here as well. Also, gas stations can frnachise, so it may not be the big guy feeling the hit.

Agreed. It's not an impossibility though, given ow some gas stations operate.

I completely disagree. First off, there's no such thing as "money" not being your own. People may care less about things that are not their own, but any money in your hand is something you can use to buy something that now becomes "yours". As to a stolen credit card, the person in question is breaking the law. People tend to pay a hell of a lot more attention to what they're doing while committing a crime than they do while going about their normal daily routine.

I just don't buy it.



It's "plausible", but not even remotely close to "most plausible". A thief will be more careful because he's committing a crime. A friend will be more careful because he's borrowed something and is on the hook if he screws up somehow.

At the end of the day, we're still taking about someone making a mistake, right? I assume you agree that neither a credit card thief or friend who borrowed a card would deliberately charge gas to it and then drive off without putting the gas in their car, right? So the fact that a charge was left on the pump was a mistake. From there, it's just statistics. The odds of a random person putting a charge on a pump with a stolen card is about 1/10000000th as likely as the odds of a random person doing so with a legally obtained card.

For your argument to work, the odds of a thief making that mistake would have to be as many times more often as the ratio of gas purchases with legal cards versus stolen cards. I just don't think that's likely. It can't even be close to likely.




Occam's Razor is a principle that says that you should always look for the simplest explanation for something (well, mostly). We have two possibilities:


1. Random person made a mistake and left without pumping gas he'd paid for with a credit card.

2. Random person made a mistake and left without pumping gas he'd paid for with a credit card *and* the credit card he used was stolen.


The first case is all that is required for the result to occur. The second case completely includes the first case, but adds something extra which is not required for the result to occur. The same result from the OP's perspective will happen in either case. So. Occam's Razor tells us that while it's possible for the second case to be true, it's not necessary to explain what happened, so there is no value in assuming that it is true.

Edited, Aug 19th 2011 2:03pm by gbaji

The bold is a fallacy as is. You need to add "If there is a chance of getting caught, (...)" in front.


- Thief: The real thieves steal a large batch of card information and have others make their own physical cards out of them. Just because someone's using a stolen card doesn't mean that the person is the one who originally stole the information. That's why things like SOE getting their database information hacked is still bad, even though that credit/debit card information is ~5 years old.

- "Friend": I put "friend" in quotes for a reason: I'm not talking about a real friend that you loan your card to for a favor--I'm talking about the "friend" who sees your card accidentally left out on the table or your desk and takes it.


Nope. I'm not ONLY talking about someone making a mistake.


Nope, I'm not ONLY talking about someone making a mistake.



Uh, no.

The core fact is:
Someone swiped a card at the pump but left without pumping and paying.

When trying to guess at what could have caused it:

Possibility A) Someone made a mistake.

Possibility B) Someone did not make a mistake.

Plausible reasons for: "Someone made a mistake"
- Card was stolen.
- [The many reasons in the thread]
...

Plausible reasons for "Someone did not make a mistake"
- Card was stolen.
- Person had never used that type of pump before. (Whoops, this would actually go above.)
...

Simplest reason: Card was probably stolen.


Edited, Aug 19th 2011 7:21pm by Ravashack

If more people did this, bankers would be a lot happier.

Huh? There's always a chance of getting caught. I'm not sure what your point here. Certainly, someone buying gas with a stolen credit card is no more likely to leave without pumping his gas than someone doing so with their own credit card. I'm still totally confused as to why you think the opposite would be true.



I'm still waiting for any sort of rationale as to how that would make that person more likely to pay for gas and then leave without pumping it. You're talking about everything *except* the question at hand. I don't care how someone ended up with a stolen credit card in their possession. What I am curious about is why you think that if someone pays for gas and then leaves without pumping the gas that this would somehow be more likely to have occurred if the someone was using a stolen credit card.

You still haven't explained this at all.



And...? How does that make him more likely to charge a tank of gas on the card and then leave without pumping it into his car? I mean, I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that he swiped the card because he needed it to pay for something (like, say a tank of gas). Why would someone take someone else's card to pay for something, then use it to pay for that thing, and then not actually take the thing they just paid for? That makes no sense at all, right?



So you're talking about someone deliberately charging gas on a card and then leaving the pump without taking the gas? Because I can't see how anyone would do that, whether they'd stolen the card or not. It seems astronomically more likely that whoever did that, did so by mistake.



Ok. So important you said it twice!



First point. "card was stolen" isn't a *reason* for someone making a mistake. It's an unrelated fact. Kinda like "driving a blue car" is unrelated as well. I mean, we could assume that the guy who left the pump with a tank of gas charged on it was driving a blue car, but you'd have to have some pretty warped logic to assume that driving a blue car was the reason why that happened.




Same issue. "Card was stolen" is not a reason for not making a mistake either. Also, "person never used the pump before" would seem to indicate a mistake, right? Do you know what a mistake is? It's when you do something you didn't intend to do. If the reason you left the money on the pump is because you were not familiar with the pump, then it was a mistake.


I'm not seeing any rationale here. The only way for it not to be a mistake is if someone deliberately did it. Can you explain to me why *anyone* would deliberately charge a credit card to a gas pump and then drive off without pumping the gas? Can you explain why you think this would happen more often than someone doing so accidentally? And can you explain why if someone did do this deliberately, it somehow indicates that he must have been using a stolen card?



What?! You can't just rattle of random words and follow it with a conclusion. Not a single thing you posted supports the case that the card was probably stolen.



It was almost certainly an accident. And simple probability says that since most credit card transactions are performed by those who own the cards (else the whole system would collapse), it means that most likely the person who did it owned the card. More significantly, it's really irrelevant whether the card was stolen or not. It has no bearing at all on the result.

Edited, Aug 19th 2011 4:53pm by gbaji

Honestly? I don't want a credit card company to know what I'm buying in terms of sundry purchases. It's bad enough that every store tries to weasel name/address/email info out of you if you buy anything from them (plus their "rewards" cards), all done entirely for the purpose of tracking people's purchase and incidentally creating the modern problem if identity theft, but I'm not going to make it just that much easier for them.