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Originally Posted by sickkittens
This is a bit off topic. I've had a few transactions that either never cleared or were kept on pending. ePassporte couldn't cancel these transactions and it's a bit of a pain to get the transactions to drop.
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I've posted about this before, but hey, I'm here to help.
Pending Transactions.
What most of you don't realize is that pending transactions (sometimes referred to as a pre-auth) is an action a merchant takes (such as a restaurant or hotel) to reserve funds on your account to be settled at a later time. This has *nothing* to do with ePassporte.
Pending transactions happen on your credit cards all the time. Some banks allow you to see pending amounts online, some don't. But they are there regardless. The reason you don't notice them is that with a credit card, a pending amount doesn't normally put you over your credit limit, so you notice no change to your account. Even with debit cards, your bank which holds your checking account may have relaxed rules about your spending depending on your history with them. -- However, ePassporte is a pre-paid account. You don't have a credit limit. You must think of your ePassporte balance as 'same-as-cash." When a merchant places a pending charge on your "same-as-cash" ePassporte account, those funds are reserved until the merchant either releases the pre-auth or settles the transaction. -- That's simply how it works. This is card association rules that ePassporte is abiding by. This is not some ePassporte policy.
What happens is that a specific amount of money on your ePassporte account gets tied up until ePassporte can automatically drop the pending authorization because most merchants do not know how to drop a pre-auth or won't go through the effort to do it.