Ian

17th October 2018

Do not recommend using their Money Card as pre-authorisations can result in not being able to access large amounts of your cash for anything up to 30 days. I pre-loaded a Money Card with CAD for a Canadian road trip. On a stop to fill up the car with fuel I initiated a card transaction at the pump, removed the hose then realised I had parked against a diesel only pump when I needed unleaded fuel. Without drawing any fuel I immediately replaced the hose, cancelling the transaction, moved to the correct pump and used the card again to fill up with unleaded. I later checked my transactions and found I had been correctly charged 40CAD for the fuel I withdrew but also had a pending transaction of 278CAD for the cancelled transaction. After 3 days of this 278CAD block on my credit I called customer services to say I needed access to this money that was wrongly being withheld. I was told it would take 7 days to clear but they would raise an urgent request for it to clear within 24-48hrs. After 48hrs and still blocked from accessing this amount I called customer services again to complain and was told it could take up to 30 days to clear the errant transaction. The block was eventually cleared after 8 days, by which time I was back in the UK. I have therefore cashed out my card, for which I was charged a £6 fee and given a very poor exchange rate to convert to sterling and unload the balance on my card. There are plenty of zero fee foreign transaction credit cards and other pre-load debit cards to choose from so I will not be using this company again.