Woman using Apple Pay charged $2,200 for bunch of bananas

By Stephen Warwick
published

Apple Pay
Apple Pay (Image credit: iMore)

What you need to know

  • A London woman was charged £1,599 for a bunch of bananas by a faulty in Marks & Spencer.
  • In a hurry, the woman used Apple Pay and the payment went through because it has no limit.
  • She has since been refunded and compensated.

A London woman was charged more than $2,200 (£1,599) by a faulty till for a bunch of bananas in UK supermarket chain Marks & Spencer, whilst using Apple Pay (which has no limit) to pay for her shopping.

As reported by The Mirror:

Cymbre Barnes, from London, claims she popped into a branch of M&S on her way to work to grab some food for the day, including a £1 bunch of bananas.In a rush, she used Apple Pay at the till (which has no limit on the amount you can spend) and didn't realise until it was too late that there had been a big mistake.

To Barnes' horror, a faulty till which caused an "isolated payment error" charged the poor woman £1,599 (more than $2,200) for the bananas. Her total shop should have cost four pounds but ended up being £1,602.

Barnes said "I was in a rush before work so when I got to self-checkout I used contactless and it was instant. I did a double-take when I saw the screen but by then my receipt was already being printed. It was too late."

The fault had nothing to do with Apple Pay, but rather the M&S self-service checkout the woman was using, however, because Apple Pay does not have a payment limit in most supported UK retailers the payment went through no problem, leaving Barnes £1,602 out of pocket with nothing but bananas to show for it.

Because the only till in the shop was reportedly broken, Barnes had to walk 45 minutes to the nearest M&S to claim a refund. Marks & Spencer said they have contacted the customer to apologize and offer a refund.

Stephen Warwick
Stephen Warwick
News Editor

Stephen Warwick has written about Apple for five years at iMore and previously elsewhere. He covers all of iMore's latest breaking news regarding all of Apple's products and services, both hardware and software. Stephen has interviewed industry experts in a range of fields including finance, litigation, security, and more. He also specializes in curating and reviewing audio hardware and has experience beyond journalism in sound engineering, production, and design.

Before becoming a writer Stephen studied Ancient History at University and also worked at Apple for more than two years. Stephen is also a host on the iMore show, a weekly podcast recorded live that discusses the latest in breaking Apple news, as well as featuring fun trivia about all things Apple. Follow him on Twitter @stephenwarwick9

6 Comments
  • How is this news? Any card that you have that you have the available room on will allow this. This was remedied. The retailer was more the issue with broken equipment. No need to be a content factory. The quality of stories on iMore is widely divergent, is this due to an amount of advertising that needs to be met. We need X amount of stories a day?
  • It's an important reminder that NFC payments can be faulty. You are certainly free to skip over the article if you don't think it's relevant to you instead of attacking the site.
  • Hi Dave, contactless is capped at £100 at retailers in the UK, the transaction only went through because the woman chose to use Apple Pay, which has no limit. If she had used a card the transaction would have failed. Hope that clears it up!
  • Have to agree with Dave: iMore is increasingly cluttered with clickbait, ads masked as reviews, and silly (but “Oh, so urgent!”) gaming news.
  • I once had faith in imore for valued tech news. It is incredible how the quality has deteriorated. The issue was the till not Apple Pay, this is total click bait, misleading news and miss repression of the issue. The way the title reads you would be led to believe this is primarily an Apple Pay issue or somehow related to Apple Pay. There must be vast amounts of occurrences of various point of sale systems malfunctioning that lead to inaccurate charges. That is why you must look and check before you pay.
  • Yes, iMore has somehow made this all Apple’s fault. Evil Apple screwed this woman out of her life savings. Maybe she should sue Apple and run them out of business for their skullduggery. Pretty soon the activist crowd will be bringing a class action against Apple for not having a limit on Apple Pay. Everybody STOP USING APPLE PAY. iMore says so. Since Rene, Serenity, and Lori left this place has become clickbait central.