Reputation and trust are all-important in business, so when customers of a new filling station started seeing what looked like double payments on their bank accounts after drawing fuel, operator Ashraf Michail did all he could to remedy the situation – but it wasn’t until Forecourt Trader got involved that the issue was fixed.
Michail, Lexfox Retail, opened Kingsbury Filling Station on the A51, Tamworth Road, 15 miles to the east of Birmingham, on November 7 this year. As an unmanned site, customers must use the in-pump payment terminal prior to filling up, with a £99 pre-authorisation made against their account to check they have sufficient funds.
Once fuel has been drawn, that £99 pre-authorisation is normally cancelled, and customers would be charged for the actual amount of petrol or diesel taken.
Yet almost immediately after opening, Michail was contacted by multiple customers a day who told him they appeared to have been charged twice for fuel, providing screengrabs of their bank accounts to back up these claims.
On investigation, it transpired that while customers weren’t being charged twice, in addition to the £99 pre-authorisation, two amounts were showing on their bank or card transactions. One was a debit made for the fuel they had drawn, and the other a ‘pending’ charge, which was an erroneous pre-authorisation that equalled the precise amount of fuel they had drawn.
Some banks cleared the pending charge in a matter of hours, but others informed customers it could take as long as 28 days to clear, leaving them in financial difficulty if they had limited funds in their accounts.
Michail contacted the company that installed the pumps’ outdoor payment terminals (OPT), but the issue didn’t lie with them. Instead, it was with Elavon, a firm that processes, or ‘acquires’ card payments, acting as an intermediary between card machines and bank accounts.
Michail contacted Elavon on November 10, stressing that “an urgent resolution is needed as this is becoming a reputational issue that is damaging when we are trying to gain trust from customers in a new site”.
No fix until the new year?
A series of email exchanges and meetings took place with Elavon, which undertook its own investigations and identified the issue, but told Michail that due to a “freeze” on alterations to its software in the run-up to Christmas, no fix could be implemented until week commencing January 12, 2026.
Instead, a patch was suggested, which would see customers select a specific amount of fuel that would be pre-authorised before payment was taken. As well as not being the service Michail had commissioned, this would likely reduce the amount of fuel he sold, while if customers drew even a penny less than the amount they selected, there remained a risk that two charges could appear against their accounts.
To keep the site running and maintain its reputation, Michail took time away from his family to man the Warwickshire forecourt, taking payments from customers on a handheld card terminal. He even paid some customers out of his own pocket to avoid them running into financial difficulties.
At the end of his tether, Michail spoke to Forecourt Trader, who got in touch with Elavon asking what it was doing to fix the issue, and if it was reasonable for Michail to be expected to wait until the new year for a proper remedy to be implemented.
A remedy appears
On November 26 the firm told us: “Elavon supports many fuel sites across the UK and Europe and have been supporting this industry for over 20 years. We would like to assure you that we take this issue seriously and that the service we provide our customers is of utmost importance to us.”
“Owing to a small systems glitch, there have been a number of incidents over the past two weeks where this transaction completion message has failed to reverse the excess pre-authorisation amount, creating a shadow charge on the customer account which is eventually released by the issuer; not a double charge but a hold of funds which we understand can be confusing.”
Elavon added that it has “been working with our technical teams to resolve the issue and have identified a solution that will remediate this issue within the next few days.”
Just one day later, Michail contacted Forecourt Trader to say that the issue had been completely remedied, and his business was trading as designed.
He told us: “Because of your efforts Elavon have now fixed the glitch. What they were planning to do in January took them less than 24 hours to fix after they were contacted by Forecourt Trader.
“The site can now trade as an unmanned site as it was designed and intended. Running a fuel-only facility, on tight margins, can only be viable if we don’t have labour costs.”
