Dear LPG, 

In these days when everything is going up in price and pennies matter, I would just like to remind readers of the importance of checking what is happening to your finances.

The other day I was due for a hospital appointment, and I must admit to having faffed about a bit too much on the day.  The upshot was that sensing that I would have been late, I decided to get a cab and there is nothing particularly remarkable about that.

I paid by card with one simple touch as you do but, a week or two later when my bank statement arrived and I looked at it, I realised that the payment registered twice.  Please don’t think that I believed the cab driver to be anything but honest, but had I not checked the bank statement I would never have known.

I then had to take all the paperwork back to the cab company and it was all sorted reasonably quickly, but I had phoned the cab company just down the road on that particular day.  How much more difficult would it have been to find a black cab driver had I just hailed him on the street?

The point is that the double swipe does happen from time to time, often quite innocently, and if you don’t check your bank statements regularly, you may be losing bits of money without even being aware, and the unintended swipe is also a problem.  All you have to do is pass too closely to a prepped card payment machine or have swipe two cards which are too close together.

With that last statement in mind, can I also remind readers of the importance of keeping their contactless bank cards protected and separate even though having mine in a protective pouch would have not made any difference with what happened to me.  The bottom line is that it is important to keep an eye on those bank statements when they arrive even if you now get them online.

DC.  Downham.