As you can imagine, I feel rather stupid right now. A couple months ago, I found someone selling tickets to the Camp Flog Gnaw Music Festival in LA. I had just missed the cutoff to buy them directly from the festival website, and I was so desperate to go that I ignored my gut feeling and better judgement.
I agreed to send the other party $550 via Apple Pay Cash for two General Admission Passes for the two-day festival. Knowing this was risky, I elected to use my Capital One Venture Credit Card to fund the Apple Pay Cash transaction. My understanding was that credit cards protect you from financial loss due to fraudulent transactions.
It became evident I was being scammed weeks after sending the money, when the other party deleted our entire correspondence and blocked all established means of communication. Initially I contacted Apple Customer Support, who referred me to an “Apple Pay Cash Specialist.” This Specialist informed me that there is no Apple Pay Cash dispute process for fraudulent transactions, and advised me of three options I had to resolve the situation: dispute the charge at my financial institution, try to contact the other party, and file a police report.
I immediately contacted Capital One and disputed the charge. I was informed that the entire amount of $550 + a $16.50 fee Apple charged me for using a credit card for Apple Pay Cash would be posted back on my statement, as well as any interest that I had been charged on that purchase. They did this almost immediately, and I thought I was out of woods.
A few days later, I go to retrieve unrelated funds from my Apple Pay Cash account, and see that Apple Pay Cash charged a $566.50 “Balance Adjustment,” putting my Apple Pay Cash account in the negative. I’ve simply gone from owing Capital One $566.50 to owing the same amount to Apple Pay Cash (who I’ve recently come to find out is operated by Green Dot Corporation (yuck)).
I have gone back and forth countless times over the past two weeks between Capital One’s and Apple’s customer support lines, and have gotten nowhere. Apple Pay Cash’s stance is that they have satisfied Capital One’s dispute/chargeback by sending the funds back to Capital One, but they are holding me accountable for that amount because I authorized the transaction. Capital One’s stance is that they have disputed the transaction, and because Apple Pay Cash is not challenging that dispute, there are no further measures they can take to have Apple reinstate my funds. Apple’s actual customer support representative has been very forthcoming, but his hands are tied as Apple Pay Cash issues are handled exclusively by Apple Pay Cash Specialists (who I believe work not for Apple, but for Green Dot.)
Am I completely out of luck? I specifically used Capital One and elected to pay the Credit Card fee because I wanted to be protected from this exact situation.
Thank you for taking the time to read this far, and any advice would be appreciated!
Submitted October 12, 2018 at 05:51PM by josdc https://ift.tt/2NCAs91
