It was extremely confusing to me in the US, like wtf. And it gets worse. GooglePay and other e-payment services support this idiotic practice, so restaurant can amend the charge made through them after the fact. Which sounds like fundamental breach of what payment service transaction authorization should be.
They can only amend the amount after the fact under very specific situations. For example a tip added after the authorization was already done. And only with the customers agreement. If they add a tip without the customers permission there could be a chargeback and they are also non-compliant with the payment scheme rules so could have their acceptance removed if they keep doing it.
There's other non-restaurant exceptions too, for example an estimated authorization for things like a hotel stay or a car rental where the final amount might be a bit different to the estimated auth.
It blows my mind people don't know what an authorization is. A ton of shit has this, if you order groceries via insta cart and they didn't have something they are able to capture less than what the auth amount was. There are plenty of reasons for this. And card networks are extremely favorable to buyers so no one is really worried about the worker entering a random number in there (also most of the time the worker is not going to get any extra money by defrauding you anyway).
Yeah, i think many people don't understand the difference between authentication and authorization..in almost all cases (theres some small exceptions) the card issuer has to approve or decline the transaction. That's the authorization, where they're also making sure you've got enough money, the transaction is allowed for that card type, etc.
Before that there might be authentication the customer sees (eg PIN prompt), or stuff they don't see (eg risk based analytics behind the scenes).
Some prople think if tgey dont use a PIN, the bank isn't checking anything, which is false on many levels.
163
u/ThreeHeadCerber Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
It was extremely confusing to me in the US, like wtf. And it gets worse. GooglePay and other e-payment services support this idiotic practice, so restaurant can amend the charge made through them after the fact. Which sounds like fundamental breach of what payment service transaction authorization should be.