Touch ‘n Go user furious he was overcharged 19 times
Zing Touch ‘n Go owner Nitin Bhoria says he was not only overcharged a total of RM1,800 but had to do his own investigation to prove he was cheated.
PETALING JAYA: For Nitin Bhoria, linking his credit card to a Touch ‘n Go access card was a matter of convenience as it would spare him the hassle of manually reloading it.
Little did he know it would turn out to be one of his worst experiences fighting bureaucracy.
This came after he was charged a total of RM1,800 extra for using the card to pay tolls. And if he had been careful, he would not even have known he had been billed wrongly.
Touch ‘n Go has finally reimbursed Bhoria for the extra charged.
But the experience has left Bhoria far from happy.
The episode forced him to vet “hundreds of pages” of itemised billings from Maybank and Touch ‘n Go to crosscheck and prove to both companies that he was overcharged.
This task took him over six months to complete, with multiple correspondence and initial denials.
It began when Bhoria suspected something amiss with his credit card billings.
“As we know, online credit card statements are only available for the last few months, but I found some discrepancies there. I managed to prove five of the charges from Touch ‘n Go were duplicate charges,” Bhoria told FMT.
From then on, he said he was shuttled from one department to another in Touch ‘n Go before the company admitted that the five payments were erroneously billed to his credit card.
They refunded RM500 for the five duplicate charges, but Bhoria still felt uneasy with Touch ‘n Go’s explanation how the mistake happened. The company blamed the overcharging on a technical glitch, but chose to keep quiet about it until Bohria brought up his discovery, with proof.
Not satisfied, Bhoria decided to probe further and requested for the past one year’s credit card statements from his bank to allow him to cross-check with Touch ‘n Go reload transactions.
After laboriously checking these statements, he was shocked to find a total of 19 duplicate charges to his credit card from his Touch ‘n Go, with a value of RM1,800 billed to him.
Touch ’n Go reimbursed the amount and offerred him a Touch ’n Go card with a reload value of RM200 as its “apology”.
Bhoria felt he deserves at least RM1,000 in compensation for the trouble he went through, with almost six months wasted on cross-checking the statements and waiting for replies from Touch ‘n Go.
He said as a customer, Touch ‘n Go should have treated him better.
“I expected better service from Touch ’n Go. They could have helped me to investigate. But they only investigated what I told them.
“I had to do the job they are supposed to do,” he said, adding this reflected poorly on the attitude of the company and staff.
He said he is one of the lucky ones who noticed the overcharging as it was RM1,800.
“But not everyone would notice if it is only a few hundred ringgit more. What about all the rest of them?
“All because they said it is due to a system glitch. Shouldn’t they then be more careful?”
FMT had emailed Touch ‘n Go for their response. The company apologised and said the overcharge transactions were due to a system glitch after its system migration last year in charging auto reload transactions into customers’ credit card accounts.
It said some of these transactions then became duplicates.
“TNGSB has taken proper action by working closely with the related financial institution to make full recovery and at the same time those duplicate charges have been refunded accordingly to the affected customer,” the response from the company read.
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Touch ’n Go Chief Executive Officer Syahrunizam Samsudin, in the email, said the company would like to assure that the system glitch had been rectified and all its Touch ‘n Go card customers can enjoy the service as usual.