A couple of days before Christmas, Henrika Mercadante, who lives in the capital area suburb of Kauniainen, went to buy a last-minute gift at the Stockmann department store in Helsinki.
However, after that holiday shopping errand, her bank account had a nearly 10,500-euro charge on it for things she did not buy — days later her bank cards stopped working entirely.
The last-minute gift was a bottle of body mist for which she paid 26.50 euros. But after the purchase Mercadante noticed that half of the bottle's contents had leaked out, so she brought it back to the historic downtown store to return it.
Instead of refunding the purchase, Mercadante noticed the cashier had somehow mistakenly charged her card for an entire batch of bottles — a total of €10,467.50.
"I wasn't really in the right mood at the time, but I should've thanked them for the Christmas gift," Mercadante quipped, according to Svenska Yle, the public broadcaster's Swedish-language news unit.
The store told her that the matter would be sorted out over the holidays. But each time she checked her account, the huge charge was still there.
Later, a couple of days before New Year's Eve, as she was grocery shopping she found that none of her bank cards worked anymore.
When she got home, Mercadante checked her account again, seeing that her account showed a negative 8,000 euros, even though there should have been around 2,000 euros in it — and that 10,000-euro charge was the culprit.
A single parent, Mercadante was planning to hold a New Year's Eve party, but she said that became challenging without access to her account.
She made another trip to Stockmann, and showed staff the receipt showing the massive charge.
The department store handed her a gift card and some cash to cover her New Year's party costs — yet how the mistake was made remained a mystery.
Mercadante contacted her bank, Nordea, about her blocked card and was told that she needed to contact Stockmann about the charge.
The mistake was remedied on 5 January, when her funds were returned. But before things were made right, Mercadante said she had to cancel a trip to Sweden with her daughter because of the situation.
According to Stockmann's commercial planning and sales support unit chief, Heidi Dahlberg, the incident was a question of human error.
She said there were errors made by both Stockmann and its payment intermediary which led to the large sum being deducted from the customer's account, rather than refunded.
"Then it was the Christmas holidays, which meant the correction took an unreasonably long time," Dahlberg told Svenska Yle, adding that the company has reviewed its procedures and will do the same with its partners.
"We are sincerely sorry and regret any inconvenience and concern we have caused the customer. We will do our utmost to ensure that it does not happen again," Dahlberg said, describing the mistakes as an unusual, one-time occurrence.
"I've never experienced anything like this. It's very important that customers can trust us in the future," Dahlberg said.
The Finnish Financial Ombudsman Bureau (Fine) offers guidance to consumers dealing with banking problems.
According to Sasu Heino, an expert at the bureau, Fine gets about 20-30 complaints about erroneous bank card charges every year.
But Heino said he has never heard of a mistaken charge as large as the one Mercadante dealt with.
Mercadante, meanwhile, is still waiting for an explanation from Nordea about why the huge charge was able to go through. She is particularly interested in why it happened without direct access to her bank card, and if stores are able to charge debit accounts without the use of a card reader.
Her bank, Nordea, declined a request for an interview about the matter, saying that it does not comment on individual cases.
However, in an email, Nordea's card payment unit business manager Paula Kvist noted that it is the seller who is responsible for refunding incorrect charges.
"If the customer's account has been overdrawn, Nordea may, according to the terms of the agreement, temporarily block card use until the amount missing from the account has been refunded," Kvist explained in the email.
According to Nordea, card purchases in stores are immediately approved, but the actual funds are moved later. That process can take up to 10-30 days, depending on when the shop sends the debit information to the bank.
That means the bank is unable to cancel erroneous debit charges by sellers, according to Nordea.
Nordea said that a bank can stop payment transactions in order to ensure that customers are aware of them, if there are suspicions of fraud, for example. But the bank did not offer comment about what factors trigger such payment interruptions.
Mercadante said the experience raises questions about how card payments work.
"I wasn't aware that companies could empty a customer's account like this," she said.
