I’ve seen stories about debit card holds at gas stations since the Spring. The problem is that at a gas station, where the pump authorizes payment before it knows how much gas you will pump, it typically does an authorization for $50 or $75 first and then when you are done, releases the hold and runs the correct amount. These holds can stay on for quite a long time. With debit cards, this can tie up your funds, which is a problem if you don’t have a lot of funds.

With gift cards, the side-effect of holds can make your cards very hard to use. My experience has been that holds on gift cards can last up to 30 days for authorizations that are correctly canceled. When merchants process credit cards online, it isn’t possible to tell if any information is incorrect (CVV or expiration date) without doing an authorization, which puts a hold on the funds for up to 30 days, even if it is cancelled. Just how long is up to the cards issuing bank. Basically, you can lock up your gift card funds easily if you try to use it online and type in some of the info wrong.

Well, in the latest issue of Consumer Reports, there is an article about Consumers Union and other groups putting pressure on Visa and Mastercard to fix the debit hold problem, at gas stations in particular. Looks like Visa is moving to a real-time clearing process for gas stations.

I am curious to see the effect this will have on gift cards. One side-effect of the debit hold process at gas stations, as I found out by accident once, is that you can go to a gas station with a $50 gift card, it will do a pre-authorization for $50, and then you can charge more than $50 of gas on the card. This works at some, but not all gas stations. I wonder how often this happens. Like most cases of fraud, the merchant, not Visa, probably eats the loss in this case.