If you were one of the Navy MWR or youth services customers who recently found hundreds, maybe even thousands, of dollars in erroneous charges on your credit or debit card and were hit with huge fees as a result, well, there's now a form for that.
Of course.
First, a little background. On September 24 the Navy ran a server update that resulted in many payments made at Navy MWR and child service locations, including CDCs and ITT, in four far east and Pacific regions as well as the Naval Postgraduate School in California to post again. The original payments were all made between late January and late June of this year, and they reposted regardless of whether or not they were paid by debit or credit. In some cases they even posted on previously closed accounts.
How bad was this? The duplicated charges equaled about $5.5 million over about 133,000 transactions. Many people had multiple transactions each, and the Navy doesn't have information on exactly how many folks were impacted. But a little math shows that's a lot of money spread out over not a lot of folks.
That means if you spent, say, $15,000, on childcare between January and June - surprise! You might have just spent it again. All at the same time. And if you spent that much on your debit card and not your credit card, well, you might have woken up to quite the overdraft and some fancy fees to go along with it.
Bummer, right?
You can read more in the original news story here.
Now the Navy says that as of September 30 all of the charges have been reversed. They're also working with banks to reverse fees that some may have faced when the bad charges hit. They said Navy Federal customers will have the fees waived and refunded, and can call 1-888-842-6328 for more information.
Here's where the new form comes in. If the fees you were charged are not reversed, you need to fill out a form (of course). You can find the form here.
Then, take the form and a copy of a statement showing the fees to your local Navy MWR office. You can also email those documents to: mwr_creditcard_FAQ.fct@navy.mil.
And in case you're worried about this happening again -- the Navy said thanks to the upgrade to chip card readers, the Navy's servers are no longer acting as a go between for transactions. Instead they will live only with Bank of America, eliminating the possibility that the Navy's servers will cause this glitch again.
