Credit cards make your life easy in many ways, there is one situation that spoils the experience. This is the situation where your bill statement is wrong. This is a very common occurrence where each year hundreds of customers face this problem where instances of wrong credit card statements create stress and sleepless nights for the card holders.
The purpose of this article is to help such card holders and provide them with various solutions that could help solve the problem of wrong credit card statements.
How to Check for Incorrect Entries on Credit Card Statements
First things first, it is always best to check your credit card statement each month before paying the dues. This is a habit that is good for you as this is the only situation where you can find any discrepancies.
Double swiping of credit cards
Consider this situation – Ajay got fuel using his credit card costing Rs.1000. He did so as his credit card gives him 1% fuel surcharge waiver and rewards for each time he purchases fuel with his credit card. Now on this particular day the POS machine had some issues and the vendor swiped the card twice since he did not get the receipt from the machine the first time. But, Ajay got alert messages twice for the same transaction. Now Ajay has 2 options
Option 1: Directly talk to the merchant at once and request him/her to revert the payment or pay the money in cash
Option 2: If the merchant does not agree to Ajay’s request, then he needs to contact the bank who will send the transaction for reversal to the merchant who will have to revert it.
Apart from the above-mentioned situation you can also dispute transactions where
Un-authorized Transactions
Any transaction that was not authorized by you or if you had given the card to anyone then these transactions can be disputed. This includes fraudulent transactions and double credit card swipes etc.
Credit Card Statement Mismatch
If the receipt you have, and the credit card statement do not match you can dispute the transactions in that case. You need to be very careful and go through every receipt before coming to this conclusion and disputing your transactions
In case of emergencies when a credit card is used to withdraw cash from an ATM, there is a possibility that this can be miss-reported on your credit card bill statement; this too can be disputed.
Debiting post cancellation
If the credit card amount is debited from your account after you cancelled autopayment facility, you can dispute the transaction
Refunds that have not been processed or if the cancellations of products which were done within the timeframe stipulated by the merchant has not been processed then you can dispute such transactions.
Some lenders also offer a credit card chargeback option which allows the user to cancel the items purchased online.
Conclusion
It is always best to read your credit card bill before you pay. It is a hygienic habit which each and everyone must cultivate. Similarly, before you dispute any transaction double check all the bills and receipts with you and keep the necessary documents ready. This way you will be able to answer any queries asked by your bank to expedite the fund reversal process.