Given wrong POS machine receipt, should I be worried?

Question

I was shopping today and paid with a local bank debit card (not Visa, MasterCard or some international card, just an ATM card issued by a local bank). Normally there would be 3 identical receipts and I would have to sign 2 receipts, one for the retailer (let's just call it the R), one for the bank (the B). The third receipt (the C) is for the customer, i.e. me, and is not necessarily signed.

So, the situation is: I only signed the R receipt and was given the B receipt (instead of the C receipt as it should be). That is due to the mistake of the new and maybe inexperienced checkout clerk. I was not paying attention either and found out about it at home. Anyway, money was deducted from my bank account already and I have the log of the transaction in the bank's online banking app.

My question is, would I have any issues and hassles later with the "incident" today? More specifically, would I be asked to pay again or deducted from my bank account a second time? I'm definitely confident that this was not my fault to get the wrong receipt. Sorry if this might sound naïve and silly cause I don't have a lot of knowledge and experience about finance.

Answer 1

We have a similar system in Australia, and I’m using that as a basis to answer your question.

There are 3 relationships involved in the transaction:

1. Bank and retailer - your R receipt is the retailer’s proof that you authorised the card transaction.

2. Retailer and you - your C receipt is your proof of purchase.

3. Bank and you - your B receipt (duplicate of R) allows you to check that what you authorised (for R) is what you intended to authorise.

Since you didn’t express concern about the purchase itself (refund, return, warranty, etc), C is irrelevant. This is often the case where the purchase is not retained as-bought for a long period - e.g. restaurant meals, fuel, etc. This receipt is typically generated by the shop’s own till without reference to third parties such as banks, so if you really want the receipt, you can try going back and asking for it. The shop might have a copy for its own records, but not all retailers have their accounts set up to easily retrieve old receipts.

Since you have B, you can reconcile the transaction against your bank statement.

None of the receipts protects you from crooks who swipe your card twice and give you just one B receipt. But if the system you use requires signatures (as you note) or PIN codes for every transaction, that’s a line of defence for you in case the transaction shows up twice.