Restaurant Accidentally Overcharges Customers Anywhere From $8K To $99K
Some Knoxville, TN, residents are fuming mad at a local chain restaurant after seeing that their debit and credit cards have been charged 1,000 times what they should have been for their meals, leaving people in the red for anywhere from $8,000 to $99,000.
WATE-TV in Knoxville spoke to several people who had been grossly overcharged, including one man who should have paid $26.94 for his order of chicken parm and a few beers, but who found out last Friday — weeks after eating at the restaurant — that he’d been charged $26,940.
“I was just kind of in shock of the whole thing,” he says. “I’ve never been in that situation or anything like that happening to me before.”
That $27,000 charge is nothing compared to the area woman who was hit with an $80,000 charge for her dinner at the restaurant on the same night.
The company’s CFO tells WATE that the cause of the overcharges was a glitch with the restaurant’s third-party card-processor, which inadvertently added three zeros to the end of every customer’s bill during the course of one evening. The CFO claims that about 80 people were affected.
And even though all of the overcharges occurred on the same evening — Oct. 21 — they didn’t hit customers’ accounts until Nov. 7.
The restaurant says it is in the process of reversing all charges and will handle any overdraft fees that customers may experience.
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