I've known about this for a while. I recall my brother telling me to not use my debit card to purchase gas. He said they'd put like $50 hold. That was back in early 2000s. That's ridiculous, but $175 is evil considering most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.

This is crazy. I didn't know about this pre-auth bullshit, but then I usually use cash for gas because of the lower price.

It’s an issue with the way paying at the pump works

You put in a card and it unlocks the pump, it then charges the amount after you fill your car.

But if you don’t have funds there is no way for the machine to know that until after you fill the car…at which point you could just skip out

Gas stations themselves run on pretty thin margins selling gas, so a couple SUV drivers taking off with 30 gallons of premium each would be a significant hit

I'm not sure why, in this day and age, they can't just instantly deduct the proper amount from your checking account.

I've used my debit at the place before and this never happened. Either they didn't hold it as long or I just didn't charge enough after getting the gas to notice.

I got an alert from my bank that I'd been hit with an overdraft fee. When I checked my account, it was actually FOUR overdraft fees on the same day at THIRTY FUCKING DOLLARS A POP.

I'm careful about money and knew I shouldn't have been overdrawn, so I immediately checked my balance on the bank's app. The hold doesn't show up, so I was confused as to why I got the first overdraft charge when I supposedly still had a high enough balance to cover the charges. It was four transactions. Each charge came with a THIRTY FUCKING DOLLAR overdraft fee.

And the last charge was for the twenty dollars of gas.

That's right, the gas station held ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FIVE of my dollars for so long, the twenty dollars of gas I bought from them the previous week had resulted in an overdraft fee.

The very kind lady who answered my call at the bank explained what had happened and advised me to only use credit for gas purchases, never debit. She also refunded all the overdraft fees bringing my account back to the proper balance.

I'm never using that gas station again unless my need is dire and I'm only going to use credit or cash for any gas purchases going forward.

Be careful, everyone.

My gas station has this but when you insert your card it asks how much you want to prepay - default is 200(?!) bucks. I never knew that was 5 day hold, What in the hell.

It’s called cash-flow! The dirty secret of most companies is that the overall profitability does matter as long as the month to month cash flow happens. Just keep kicking the debt can down the road!

Absolutely nothing some judicious abuse of the “ALL PUMPS OFF” button can’t fix. Just play with it a few times, the jamoke working the counter will just turn them off for the rest of the night and they’ll lose that income. Pick a Labor Day weekend for maximum impact!