My magstripe reader is having trouble swiping card...

cdkrager · ‎03-10-2018

Today I had an unusual problem. The customer had only a mag swipe card so I plugged in the mag swipe reader, entered the charge amount ($3.50) and pressed charge. Immediately, droid pay on my phone became active and my personal credit card was charged. Thinking I had done something wrong I repeated the process with the same result. The customer ended up paying with cash, but it was frustrating. I immediately requested to cancel both transactions and received confirmation that they were indeed cancelled. I realized that NFC was turned on and that was somehow triggering my droid pay when the card was swiped. I turned off NFC and could not reproduce the problem. Is this a known issue? A bug in the programs that should be corrected? Or did I just not see instructions where it explains this?

DanK

DaoDeJing · ‎03-10-2018

Sorry if this is obvious, but do you have Apple Pay or Android Pay active on the same device you used to process the payment? Or di you have an NFC card and the device was near that?

cdkrager · ‎03-11-2018

The Droid pay app is installed but inactive, or not running. NFC was turned on as was bluetooth to run the Square contact reader which was about 24" away at the time of mag swipe. I'll have to test more, but I thought Droid pay had to be running to respond to anything NFC. In any case, the only NFC device other than my own Droid within range was the contact reader. The phone behaved as I expected with NFC turned off, but with NFC on and Droid pay inactive, I wouldn't expect Droid pay to try to respond to the mag swipe and charge my own card! That's unexpected and very iffy behavior. DanK

DaoDeJing · ‎03-11-2018

So the NFC reader was active and nearby? Could it be possible your pocket or bag containing an NFC card was near it when you were processing the transaction?

cdkrager · ‎03-11-2018

The only NFC devices in the vicinity were the phone and the contact reader.

Helen · ‎03-13-2018

@cdkrager Could you call our CS team about this? They'll be able to review your recent transactions and investigate what happened.

️ Helen
Seller Community Manager

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My magstripe reader is having trouble swiping cards, what can I do?