Disabled Derbyshire woman slams B&M after glitch sees her charged twice – forcing her to borrow money for new mobility scooter

Fiona Jordan, from Mastin Moor, recently travelled to the B&M store at Drakehouse Retail Park, Sheffield.

She said that she had spent just under £100 on shopping – only to return home and find that she had been charged twice.

“While I was there, I spent £99.63, but at first the machine wasn’t accepting my bank card. I was never given a void slip after the transaction failed, but I tried it again and the payment went through.

“When I got home, I checked my banking app and it showed that two payments of £99.63 had come out.”

Fiona rang B&M’s head office, who advised that a refund would be processed, but could take as long as 10 working days – which Fiona said was unacceptable.

“They said it will take up to 10 working days – the money they took was going to be used to buy a mobility scooter. It’s not helpful to be told you have to wait that long to get your refund – I’ve had to lend money off someone else to go out and buy the scooter.

“I emailed back to ask why I would have to wait that long for the refund, but they never got back to me on that one. There’s been nothing from them after the first email back, no concern from them at all.”

Having returned to the shop, Fiona said she was told by a member of staff that B&M were having problems with a new payment system – with customers across the country reportedly being affected.

“I spoke to someone at the store who said they’ve had loads of people complaining about the same thing, and it’s because they’ve changed their payment system – one poor bloke spent £300 and they took another £300 off him

“If you haven’t got that money in, you’re then in your overdraft and getting charged for it. If you have bills you need to pay, that makes it even worse.

“People can’t afford to do that, with the cost of everything going up at the moment – even 50p is too much these days.”

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Fiona said she was also concerned that some customers might not even realise they had been charged twice.

“What worries me is that there might be elderly people who have paid on their card thinking it’s safe, but don’t have banking apps to check straight away. They might be missing a chunk of their pension and not even notice

“It’s really bad – I couldn’t believe it when they told me. People all around the country need to be aware of it, as it’s not just happening up here.

“If they took £30 or £40 off a customer at every one of their stores across the country, that quickly adds up. How many people have they ripped off and not put the money back into their accounts?”

B&M did not respond to several requests for comment.