Right in Woodbury

Gas vendor backs down on debit card charges

By Christine Young
Times Herald-Record
cyoung@th-record.com

$100 hold on a $12 transaction? No way Sunoco!
If you're running low on grocery money because of high gas prices, watch out. The richer-than-God oil companies are worried that you and your debit card might interrupt their cash flow, and they've devised yet another scheme to make sure your bank account stays on empty.
Vanessa French, single mom of a 12-year-old girl, was heading to her secretarial job in Rockland County Tuesday morning when she stopped by the Sunoco on Route 32 in Central Valley. Her Dodge Neon's tank was in the red; payday was a couple of days off, and with her terrier, Lexi, scheduled for shots that week, French couldn't afford the 30 bucks it takes to fill up.
"I'm thinking, at $3 a gallon, I can get four gallons," she recalled. "That's almost half a tank. That'll cover me for a couple of days."
French slid her debit card into the slot and punched in her PIN. She pumped $12.01 of regular, replaced the nozzle and waited for her receipt. It never came, so she got out her check register and dutifully subtracted $12.01 from her balance.

AT WORK TWO HOURS LATER, French went online and checked her account. The Sunoco debit was there – but the amount was not $12.01. It was a gut-punching $100.
"I bolted from my job in Rockland and back to Central Valley," she said, "thinking that somebody used my debit card number."
On that same Tuesday morning, Larissa Harvey was hurrying to the Bronx, where she teaches second grade. Like French, Harvey stopped at the Central Valley A Plus Mini Mart Sunoco, where she used her debit card to pump $12 worth of regular into her Camaro.
A little while later, her husband called her cell phone. "He had gone online and saw a $100 debit," she said. "I told him I only bought $12 worth of gas. We thought it was something fraudulent – maybe the pump was still activated and somebody came behind me and used it."
For both French and Harvey, using the debit card had triggered a "hold" on their bank accounts for $100 – which means they couldn't touch the other $88 until the actual $12 transactions went through the bank. Who places $100 holds on $12 transactions? And why? Somebody's guilty, but nobody wants to 'fess up. French says she called Sunoco's toll-free customer service line and spoke to Steve Easley, who said, "We've gotten a lot of complaints about this. Let me take your name and number."
Nobody from Sunoco called French back.

THAT'S WHEN SHE passed me the torch. First, I decided to visit the offending Sunoco station.
The manager, Ranjit Bhinder, told me he doesn't place the debit hold. "I have no way to act on behalf of Sunoco."
On Thursday afternoon I called Gerald Davis, a Sunoco spokesman in Philadelphia. Davis insisted the giant oil company (which, incidentally, reported a net income of $358 million for the first half of 2005 – $35 million more than the same period last year) has nothing to do with debit card holds: "It's between the debit card holder and the bank."
Then the banks cried foul. "That is not true," said Heather Newcomb of Commerce Bank, where Vanessa French has her account. "We have absolutely no role in setting those limits. We're merely the issuer of the card."
Betty Reese, the spokeswoman for Bank of America, where Larissa Harvey has her account, agreed. "The merchant, not the bank, determines the amount of the authorization and sends that amount to the bank."
Reese said the actual transaction gets processed at the end of the business day. "That's when the bank receives the final transaction amount from the merchant, and it gets processed for that amount."

ON FRIDAY, I CALLED BACK Sunoco's Davis. "Tell me again – who decides to put aside $100?" I asked him.
"What did I say to you before?" He said this in the tone I use the third time I tell my daughter she can't have a sleepover.
"I think you said it's the bank," I replied. "You said it's between the debit card holder and the bank."
"That's right," he said.
"So you say the bank determines that sum."
"Well, the sum is, is not, uh, $100. The sum is, uh, $1. It, there, the uh, I guess this week we were enabling our pumps to accept the higher, uh – authorization – due to the higher fuel costs, and so there was a two-day period where it was $100. But this was not a hold, it's just the authorization. Now we've returned to the $1 authorization."
I think my friend Gerry just confessed.
"Oh, OK," I said. "So for a while it was a hundred –"
"Just those two days," he interrupted.
"Which two days was that?"
"Well it was this week," Davis said. "But it's a hundred – that's, it's – and now it's a dollar."
"OK, so you've lowered it back to a dollar?"
"It's returned to the $1 authorization."
I think that means we won.
For Harvey, the remaining $88 was back in her account the next morning. For French, whose account is at Commerce Bank, it took two days to release the hold, and Lexi the terrier got her shots on Thursday afternoon.
Both women want to know why no signs were posted on the pumps warning people about the holds.
"I can understand it if I were aware prior to the transaction," Harvey said. "Then I could make the decision. How do I know which merchants are using this practice and which aren't? Had I known, I would have paid cash."