Some Early Apple Pay Users Hit with Duplicate Charges
Large-scale consumer launches are rarely perfect, and Apple Pay isn’t proving to be an exception. Plenty of people using Apple’s mobile payments feature over the past few days have reported successful results. We tried it ourselves around New York City and found that it largely works just as Apple claims. But not everyone’s been so lucky; per Bloomberg, “hundreds” of Bank of America customers were reportedly double-charged for a single purchase in the immediate hours following Apple Pay’s rollout. Apparently it’s not Apple that’s to blame, though who knows if consumers are making that distinction.
Bloomberg reports that “a processing glitch that occurred between the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank and at least one payments network” is responsible for the duplicate charges. Bank of America has said it’s working to refund the extra charges.
“We apologize for the inconvenience and are correcting this issue immediately, and all duplicates will be refunded,” a spokesperson told Bloomberg. To be absolutely sure you haven’t been hit with the same fee twice, it’s probably a good idea to compare your transaction history in Passbook against your account activity at your bank’s website.
Another early Apple Pay glitch involves the preview images for credit and debit cards in Passbook. Some users are seeing the wrong image for their card, This shouldn’t have any impact on actual transactions and is more of an annoyance than anything else. When working properly, the Passbook images provide an easy reference for which cards you’ve set up for Apple Pay. But as 9to5Mac notes, if you’ve got multiple cards from the same bank and are experiencing this problem, things could get pretty confusing. Cards from Citibank and Chase are reportedly affected by this glitch, though 9to5Mac says that a fix is already in the works.
