Peggo auto reload glitch charges Winnipeg man thousands of dollars

Scott Hazlitt has a car, but instead of looking for parking downtown, he takes the bus to and from work.

He signed up for the auto-reload function for his peggo card, which automatically charges his credit card $50 whenever his peggo account is running low, sending a confirmation email each time.

READ MORE: Winnipeg Transit’s Peggo tap cards now available for everyone to use

“Friday morning I was sitting on the bus and decided to go check my email. It was sending me over a hundred emails, and I thought, ‘Oh well, must just be a glitch in the system,'” Hazlitt said. “The next day I went to check my bank statement and I saw that my Visa card had been charged numerous times.”

“As of Tuesday, it was $8,050 but I think it’s closer to $11,500. It went right until it could max out my credit card.”

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Hazlitt sent an email to 311 outlining what happened and he got a call Monday from the city to work out a way to refund the over-payment. Despite the thousands of dollars he was charged, Hazlitt’s peggo card was empty.

Winnipeg Transit confirmed on Wednesday that 36 different customers had been hit with overcharges totaling $70,000. They still can’t say exactly what went wrong.

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“We’re not really sure of the cause,” Alissa Clark of Winnipeg Transit Communications said. “With any large-scale implementation of an electronic system such as peggo, there have been a few problems.

“We do realize this is a pretty significant impact to those few customers that were affected and we do apologize for that.”

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Hazlitt told Global News that some of his refund started coming through Wednesday morning, but he still has a sizable balance on his Visa.

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“They didn’t seem to realize the inconvenience. I was lucky that I didn’t need my credit card for an emergency. If I hadn’t contacted them, I’m not sure how I would have heard about it,” Hazlitt said. “I think they should be apologizing to customers for sure to make sure it doesn’t happen again. There may be people out there where it really impacted their life.”

According to the city’s website, the auto reload function has been temporarily disabled because of “an issue affecting a small number of customers.”