Discover It Secured Card declined but also approved?

[Anonymous]

I have a Discover It Secured card with a $200 credit line. I recently reached $150 total on it, but made a payment in full this past week when my bill was due. The transaction cleared and Discover sent me an email saying they received my payment on Friday. Today, I went to make an $80 purchase at a restaurant on it, which was approved by the restaurant so I left. Once I got home, I checked my email and saw Discover had actually declined this $80 purchase at the restaurant because my payment is still being processed I assume (although my card balance is $0 on the site, my credit line hasn't updated since making the payment) and it's also not in my pending transactions. My question is, was this transaction actually approved or denied? Will I see this $80 charge later or did I accidentally rip-off a local business? I'd like to contact the restaurant if they're going to find out the transaction was actually denied because it's a favorite spot of mine and I wouldn't want to scam them like that

[Shadowfactor]

In my experience with discover when I had a secured card with them. Payments would reflect in the available credit the next day after the payment was made unless it was after 8 pm on Friday.

Of course this goes out the window if you have any late payments with them.

I would hop on chat and ask

[Kforce]

Just from the info you gave it sounds to me (YMMV) like it was declined due to the payment not clearing before the purchase was made.  Let the dust settle, check, and fix it in a few days.   I am sure the restaurant will be glad to take your money next week.  Also pretty sure they have had others with a CC hiccup before.  In the long term you will laugh at this and wish some of your larger problems were as small and easy to fix.

[Anonymous]

If your checking account or whatever you made the payment through is new or put a security hold on the payment for any reason you can call them to confirm with the bank that the payment is ok and you authorized it and they ll unrestrict your credit line. It happened to me when i made a large payment for the first time on the card.

But the interesting part is the restaurant. Did you went there paid with the card the transaction went through and they gave you the receipts and everything and then you got an email saying that the transaction was declined due to insufficient limit? Because if that's the case you didn't scam them, discover did lol

[Anonymous]

Yeah that's exactly what happened.....you're saying the meal actually was approved THEN declined? So, they got the funds then Discover took them back?

[Anonymous]

To be honest i have not the feintest idea of what really happened here. I've never even heard of anything like that.

If you got receipts for the payment that means that the payment went through. I can only think of one possible explanation which is that because of the hold on the payment discover systems screwed up and when the payment clears completely you'll see the restaurant payment and the mail was a false negative due to the screw up or else literally discover scammed them.

[UncleB]

Hi @Anonymous, I've merged your two identical threads into one.  Please avoid cross-posting on the forums; it's confusing to follow and is against our guidelines.

--UncleB

myFICO Moderator