retail

Yesterday it became known that due to a computer glitch during transactions last week with 800 thousand payment cards of Wal-Mart retail customers, amounts were written off that were double or even triple the actual cost of the purchase. The error was reported by representatives of First Data Corp., which processes electronic payments for Wal-Mart.
First Data Corp. is one of the leading clients of American retailers for electronic payments. It serves tens of millions of people in 3.5 million outlets of a number of US retail chains. In addition, the company owns a number of similar regional systems around the world, as well as the international money transfer system Western Union.
According to a First Data Corp. spokesperson. Stacey Busby, an error occurred when withdrawing funds from Visa and MasterCard cards on March 31st. Only customers of Wal-Mart, which, according to Fortune magazine, has been the world's largest company for three years now, were affected. It is not yet known what caused the system failure; specialists are currently searching for the cause and correcting the error. At First Data Corp. They claim that work began immediately as soon as the incident became known. The exact number of customers affected by the technical failure is also being determined. To correct the error, Wal-Mart notified its customers about the incident and recommended that those who made purchases using Visa and MasterCard cards on March 31 check the status of their account and, if an error is found, report it to the company's special service. Representatives of Wal-Mart themselves began to contact customers, since many, for technical reasons, cannot check their accounts on their own.
Russian buyers, according to experts, should not be afraid of similar problems. “In Russia, such cases are extremely rare. For example, for preventive purposes, we have installed special Duplicate Processing protection,” says an employee of the UCS company (it accounts for more than 60% of transactions with payments using international plastic cards). And the number of buyers who prefer to pay with plastic cards in Russia is insignificant. According to MR&D Consulting estimates, in the capital's stores, card payments account for no more than 10% of all payments (for comparison: in Western Europe - more than 50%). In the Moscow region, according to the Central Bank for the fourth quarter of 2003, the average purchase amount using the card was 3.23 thousand rubles.
EVGENY KHVOSTIK

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 61 dated 04/06/2004, page 17

Authors:

Evgeny Khvostik

Wal-Mart cheated 800 thousand customers