Dear Stumbled,
Last October, my extended family spent a week in Todos Santos on Mexico's Baja California peninsula for a wedding. All went well, but upon my return I noticed an unusual charge on my credit card: $1,500.49, made on the day of our flight back to the United States from San José del Cabo. The merchant appeared to be a restaurant in Mexico City. I remembered that when we went to fill up the rental car at a Chevron station near the airport, the attendant put the card in a portable machine and then told me it had been rejected, asking me to use a second card. Nothing else unusual happened that day, and Google reviews for this gas station contain eerily similar accusations of fraudulent charges from other tourists. I supported the accusation, but Wells Fargo repeatedly denied my request, even when I asked the Better Business Bureau to intercede. You can help? Nate, Wayland, Massachusetts.
Dear Nate,
We can't be sure if the fraud occurred at the gas station, but if so it's a clever scam. The clerk allegedly slipped your card into a phony card reader and charged you $1,500 just as you were rushing to return your rental car and catch a flight out of the country, knowing you were unlikely to report the crime to Mexican authorities . It's a good reminder for travelers that we must always be vigilant on vacation, even when we're irritable, tired, stressed or otherwise out of our element.
It's also a good excuse to consider how dependent we've become on our credit card issuers to bail us out in such situations. As you will discover, this doesn't always happen.
Humor me as I consider the situation from the perspective of a bank like Wells Fargo. What might seem like obvious fraud when it happens to us is not necessarily a crystal clear crime for a fraud reporting team tasked with separating their customers who are honest holidaymakers from others who may be scammers themselves.
Because I trust you are in the old camp, I contacted Wells Fargo and soon after a representative contacted you by phone and agreed to refund the charge, plus interest. A week later, you received a check for $1,609.96.
“We take customer concerns seriously and seriously investigate all customer inquiries,” Jennifer Landan, the company's manager, wrote to me in an email statement. “We worked directly with our customer on this issue and the issue was resolved.”
But, obviously, the problem should have been solved before and without my intervention. Was there anything you should have done differently? Was there anything Wells Fargo should have done differently?
The answers are yes and yes.
Even though you explicitly gave Wells Fargo permission to discuss the incident with me, Ms. Langan told me that the company would not discuss the details of your case. But she dropped a hint, writing to me that Wells Fargo encourages customers to take action “when they receive a fraud alert, phone call, or correspondence about a transaction.”
So I asked you to check your phone and email messages with Wells Fargo at the time of your trip, and the bank sent you a fraud alert, via text message, around the time of the transaction. Then you didn't receive it, you said, because you were unable to receive messages while you were in Mexico. And somehow you missed it when you got home.
While I encourage everyone to log off while traveling, from now on I will recommend an exception for text messages so you can monitor credit card transactions. (You might also want to consider having your bank alert you every time a transaction occurs, even if it's not suspicious, which can also be helpful in monitoring the exchange rate you're getting.)
What happened at Wells Fargo that caused them to repeatedly deny your request? While I was unable to get specific details from Ms. Langan, we know exactly what the Wells Fargo representative said, as she recorded the call with her permission.
The agent told you that it was “normal procedure” for Wells Fargo's fraud teams to deny fraud reports if a chip card had been in the owner's possession the entire time, which you told them had been the case. But that wasn't technically correct: The card briefly slipped out of your hand when the station attendant took it and inserted it into a portable device near the car window.
OK, so you didn't see the text alert and didn't properly analyze what exactly “in your possession” meant. But given your continuous appeals and the online gas station reviews AND others in the area that confirm your reporting, it's disappointing that Wells Fargo has continued to be so stubborn.
The representative you spoke with admitted that the team working on your case could have done better. “We will try to review our procedures,” she said, noting that she had instructed the person who made the decision how to do “better and more thorough research.”
That's good to hear, although I would feel safer if I heard it directly from an official company source rather than from a recorded phone call.
Here's another tip for travelers as mobile card readers become the default form of payment in many places: Whenever possible, ask for the machine and insert (or tap) the card yourself, watching the screen carefully. In much of the world (though for some reason, not in many American restaurants), the days of a merchant taking your card on the back to run it through a machine (and potentially a skimmer to steal your information) are long gone. far away.
Even if you were pretty frustrated with Wells Fargo, let's be clear here. The real bad guys are the ones who committed this crime in the first place and somehow, at the gas station or elsewhere, managed to get $1,500 to a company called Comida Corrida in far away Mexico City.
I got in touch with Grupo Horizon, which operates the Chevron Emerald gas station where you went, as well as dozens of Chevron stations in the states of Baja California Sur and Sinaloa.
Gilberto Gómez, the company's commercial director, responded via email, saying he was not aware of any such issues and encouraging you to send him the details. “We take the follow-up to this type of complaint very seriously and meticulously,” he wrote in Spanish. “If there is any harm to our customers attributable to the gas station, we address it.” (I gave you his email address and you said you would get back to him.)
But considering the Google reviews at this location and many other (non-Chevron) gas stations in the region, I'm skeptical that Grupo Horizon isn't aware of the problem. Mr. Gómez did not respond when I asked him twice if he had seen the Google reviews.
I also got in touch with the Los Cabos Tourism Board. When its CEO, Rodrigo Esponda, responded to me, he said he was “deeply concerned about the situation” and that he had spoken to the Baja California Sur state attorney's office, which told him it was investigating the question. He also advised tourists who have complaints about a business in the region to do so register them with the Mexican federal consumer protection body, Profeco.
In the meantime, could the solution be to simply pay cash at gas stations in the Cabo area? Unfortunately not: there are also reports of petrol station workers changing bills with customers paying large ones for smaller ones and asking for more. And don't even get me started on Tripped Up's complaints about the poor customer service travelers encounter at car rental agencies near Mexican beach destinations. The best solution for sun worshipers may be to skip car rentals altogether and hire a driver, use car sharing services or take public transport.
If you need advice on a well-planned travel plan that went awry, email TrippedUp@nytimes.com.
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