Swiss couple pays 616 euros for their tank of fuel instead of 61 euros

This couple will remember their holiday in Tuscany (Italy). The Swiss media Blick reported the misadventures of one of its readers. The man was travelling with his girlfriend in “Marina di Bibbona campsite”. After an Italian interlude, the time has come for the couple to return to Switzerland. The suitcases are packed, the camper van is loaded, all that remains is to fill up with petrol. The lovers stop at the Distributore IP petrol station in the suburb of La California (south of Livorno). In the words reported by the Swiss media, the man notices that the employee is in a hurry and enters an amount “too fast”. His girlfriend does not dare to look at the amount and pays. The next day, the latter“almost collapsed and could hardly believe it” when discovering the amount displayed on the receipt: 616 euros, instead of 61 euros.

The couple were surprised and immediately thought it was a mistake given the price of Italian diesel (1.6 euros). “Looking back, I think it was a scam.”the man explains. Today, no one can yet attest to this. The Swiss daily also does not say whether the victims have filed a complaint. “There were a lot of people at the gas station. The employee was stressed and kept pressuring us.”he had first said.

Another cold shower

The couple called their bank during the day to request that the transaction be cancelled. “At the time we thought we could restore the situation, because the amount had not yet been transferred,” tells the reader. The couple is still shocked by the negative response from Raiffeisen (their bank). “A transaction confirmed by a PIN (the personal code of a credit card) is an authorization to debit the amount entered on the card,” writes the bank’s spokesman, Joel Grandchamp. For the couple, all is not lost: they decided to contact the gas station on the advice of their bank. They can fill out a complaint form with the latter, according to the spokesman.

“In the case where a high amount like 616 euros is debited for diesel, which corresponds to more than 350 litres, it should be clearly demonstrable that there was an error at the petrol station,” Vanessa Flack, spokesperson for the Touring Club Suisse (TCS), explains to the daily newspaper. These cases are still very rare. On the internet, only one article from the Free Mididated April 23, 2024, mentions a similar error. A Varois was charged 296.66 euros when his tank was not full. The reimbursement from the Leclerc group arrived two weeks after the incident. As for the Swiss couple, the gas station has not yet responded to them.