There are some problems even 32Red can't solve

[nikantw]

Did you ever try to deposit with a card, get "rejected" from the casino, only to find out later that the money were gone from the card?
Of course if you wait 15-30 days you get them back in the card, but does it make it ok? What happened?

Probably not the casinos fault, not directly anyway. Last time it happened to me with an attempted deposit at 32Red. Here is my correspondence:

32Red:

Our Support team have been in contact with us in regard to a deposit that you have attempted to make into your 32Red Casino account. I can confirm that I have checked this attempted deposit with our processors and we have definitely not received the funds in our account. Our Support team have advised us that your bank have advised you that they are going to be holding the funds for the next 14 days unless we confirm that we are not going to be taking the funds from your card. We will of course be happy to assist you with this issue and provide your bank with the details that they require from us to be able to do this for you. If I can ask if you can confirm with your bank the details that they require from us in order for them to be able to do this for you and let us know so that we can ensure we are providing the correct details. If you can also confirm the name of you bank and provide us with a contact name and a fax number so that we can send across all of the necessary details to your bank.

Me:

I contacted my bank again. They require a fax from your processor, with the transaction details and the approval number ************, confirming that the purchase was canceled and the funds should be released. Fax No: ************, ********** BANK.

After 10 days from 32Red:

I can confirm that our Accounts Manager at our processors has come back to us today in regards to the request that we sent to them. They had advised they were unable to do as we had requested and contact your bank in regards to the deposit in question and provide them with the details required to cancel the transaction. They were unable to do this as the deposit in question was not authorized by the card issuer and so we did not receive an authorization code for the attempt which then meant that we had no information in which to be able to supply your bank with as no authorization reserve was placed by us on the deposit in question.



So, from what I understand here is what happens:

When you make a deposit with a card, the casino sends a request to their processor, their processor sends a request to your card issuer who checks if you have the requested amount available and then sends an authorization code to the casinos processor, who informs the casino it's ok to credit your casino account.

Then the casinos processor sends a confirmation to the card issuer and the card issuer makes the payment. That last part takes a few days, maybe to leave a window for cancelation of the payment.

What I think happened with my deposit?

"What we've got here is a failure to communicate"

Between banks. My bank sends the authorization code but the casinos processor never gets it! The money leave your card, ready for the payment, waiting for the confirmation. The confirmation never comes (naturally) and when the bank gets tired of waiting (after 15-30 days) they return the money to you.

What you can do:

Nothing. Your bank does not believe you and request confirmation from the casinos processor. The casinos processor does not believe you, even if you provide the authorization code.

I guess I have to accept that's just the way it is, and be happy that I get the money back after a month.

This happened to you too? How often?

With me it's with different banks and different casino. But I think all the casino were UK based.

 

[vinylweatherman]

Could you get the authorisation code from the bank, as if they sent one, it has to have been generated at their end.

Perhaps what we are seeing is how prone to error online payment systems are, and that there really is NO way to be certain of what has happened when money ends up in limbo, so the banks just have a policy of waiting a couple of weeks, and if nothing changes, releases the money back. Customers who try to speed things up just get fobbed off by being told they can get the hold dropped faster, but only by completing an impossible task.

This looks like something for the regulators to look at, since it involves the banking system as a whole.

There are a whole load of things that banks like to assure us are "impossible" because of how well designed the systems are, yet nevertheless manage to occur with worrying frequency. It seems the bottom line is that online payments do not "fail safe" by design, because some factors are assumed, rather than robustly checked at each point. When an unverified assumption turns out to be wrong, in this case the assumption that if an authorisation code has been sent, it has been received, money ends up stuck in limbo, with neither the sender or receiver having full title to it.
It's not actual money at this point, it is the balance of data in a pair of datasets that have just suffered a communications failure. In fact, it's not actual money at ANY point unless you have just taken it out of an ATM.

It is also a system that simply CANNOT be allowed to fail in a big way, with data actually getting wiped altogether. It is bad enough when the various parties fail to understand the bigger picture when sending their little bits of the datastream around the world, and even without any data actually getting wiped, we had the near collapse of the whole banking system.

What would happen if EVERY transfer on a given day ended up in this 14 day "wait and see" limbo while banks waited for everybody else to NOT do something before they would free up the system so that the transfers could be tried again. To say it would be chaos would be an understatement.