Aurora woman charged $5,700 for cup of coffee at Gaylord Rockies

Always use a credit card for purchases (and pay it off completely every month!), then it's the credit card company's problem. (If you use a debit card then the money is taken directly from your account and you are in the same unfortunate situation as this person was.)

Frank Abagnale (of Catch Me if You Can fame) gave a talk at Google (available on YouTube) in which he said he doesn't possess a debit card: Too much risk. With a credit card, there's no risk. You can contest any charge, and it's not your money that's gone while the bureaucrats fiddle.

This reminds me of work at a client where there were some issues.

The code introduced a bug that causes all refunds to change to charges during settlement. When someone called in pissed and wanted a refund they'd be charged again 2 days later.

There was also an issue with an account transfer into their system where the mapping hadn't entirely been completed. They imported a bunch of subscriptions with their last billed date but didn't properly mark the status of the subscription. The system retried the rebills for some users back four years ago and tried to auth every month for the last four years for some users.

Wow, the story plays differently when I take $5700 from someone without permission. Why isn't Gaylord Rockies in jail on grand theft charges?

I paid $2,000 for a haircut once. It was meant to be $10 but the hairdresser didn't know how the machine worked (it was new) and entered the '00' for the cents. Two transactions in a row.

Five minutes later my credit card had reversed the charges.

I still had to pay $10 for the haircut.

It was the customer’s fault for not checking her receipt at the merchant and agreeing to the charge. The bank should keep the money due to customer negligence in her financial affairs.