Your PIN Isn’t A Good Tip Amount
A woman keyed her bank card PIN into a keypad asking for a tip amount, and now she’s out nearly $8k.
By DAVID on May 4, 2018
Chalk this one up as a big “oops.” A woman accidentally left a massive tip at a restaurant because she keyed her PIN on the “tip” line at a restaurant. Good thing PINs are only 4-digits (and not 5 or 6) I guess?
A woman from France was visiting Switzerland when she wanted to go out to eat. The restaurant she visited was a pay-at-the-counter type of place. They use one of those electronic card-swiper keypad terminals like at a grocery store (or anywhere else really). When the keypad prompted her for her tip amount, rather than entering the tip for her $23.76 meal, she entered her PIN. Her PIN (which will now have to be changed since we all know it after this story) was 7686. So, she left a tip of $7,686 on a $24 dinner.
Simple error, right? Just have the restaurant cancel the transaction and issue a refund, right? Well, no. She called her bank and tried to get them to reverse the charge, since it was an obvious error. Problem was, it wasn’t a “fraudulent” charge, so the bank couldn’t do anything for her. She then asked the police in the town where the restaurant was, but they say that it wasn’t (obviously) a “criminally relevant” problem. I can hear you screaming “call the restaurant” from here, and let me tell you – she did that. But they “soon stopped communicating with her.” Come to find out, the owner filed for bankruptcy and shut down the restaurant. Check out the story here.
Have you ever accidentally left the wrong tim amount before? Did you ever do what this woman did and enter the pin on the tip line?
