Lenovo - Payment Not Processed

[TylerD321]

Name of Brand:

Lenovo

 

Description of your issue: 

I received the email below indicating that I needed to pay the amount within the next 10 business days. I have seen this payment try to come out of my account and disappear several times. No messages from my bank indicating fraud protection or anything blocking payment.

 

Cropped my name and order number out of email.

 

Have you tried solving your issue through the brand's customer support channel? If so, what was the result?

I called the 1-800 number in the email and they asked for my order number and then immediately asked for my credit card information. Given there being no issues with the payment going through on my side, I was not comfortable providing my credit card information, especially by phone. I expressed this concern and then they emailed me a PDF of wire information for Lenovo that was seemingly "signed" by Lenovo's CFO and includes Bank Account #, ABA, and SWIFT code. This whole situation seems very weird, and it is entirely possible that I am just being paranoid. I don't know why they would share this with a random customer, though I did place this personal order through my work email as it was in connection to a work program discount. I am not sure if this is where things got weird.

 

I then contacted the customer support chat at lenovo.com/us/en/contact/order-support/ and had the following snippet of conversation - note that they indicated that they would escalate but no resolution has been found:

Tripat

Advisor message

What I can see in the system is that it is an authorization hold which got expired three times and then was placed again last time on 09-11-2025.

 

Me

Why is the authorization hold getting expired? There's plenty of money on the account that it is trying to get paid through

 

Tripat

Advisor message

This situation occurs in cases where the order has not yet been shipped. If the order remains unshipped, you may encounter this issue.

 

Me

I received this order a long time ago.

 

Tripat

Advisor message

Thank you for letting me know. Since you’ve received the order, the hold should not still be expiring. I’ll escalate this for review and resolution.

 

What would an ideal resolution of your issue look like?

A non-sketchy payment of goods.

[danalog]

Shouldn't the first thing you do in this situation be to call your bank? 

[TylerD321]

22 minutes ago, danalog said:

Shouldn't the first thing you do in this situation be to call your bank? 

The payment didn't go through. It would fall off at pending. However, the new payment structure is strange when they could just charge the card I included.

[manikyath]

so.. if i get this correctly, you bought something from lenovo, they filed the payment in a way that is "held" until the item arrives.. the item has long since arrived, but lenovo is unable to release the held funds.

 

correct?

 

in that case.. poke your bank about it, or request lenovo to provide an alternaitve way of payment pending the cancellation of the initial hold.

 

43 minutes ago, TylerD321 said:

However, the new payment structure is strange when they could just charge the card I included.

perhaps they're unable to, and that's why this comes up. so.. contact your bank, ideally.

[dizmo]

This seems like an issue you should be contacting your bank about.

Did you pay for the item? You said the other attempts failed, but you also state that you received the item a long time ago. So, did you ever actually pay for it?

[TylerD321]

1 hour ago, manikyath said:

perhaps they're unable to, and that's why this comes up. so.. contact your bank, ideally.

 

1 hour ago, dizmo said:

This seems like an issue you should be contacting your bank about.

 

2 hours ago, danalog said:

Shouldn't the first thing you do in this situation be to call your bank? 

 

I called my bank and got transferred many many times. In short they said to go ahead and pay it and if anything crazy happens they will take care of it which is nice. Not sure how Lenovo managed to mess this up, the bank can't even see a payment attempt ever.

[manikyath]

18 minutes ago, TylerD321 said:

the bank can't even see a payment attempt ever.

then your bank checked with their eyes closed, because if you can see it, they can see it:

3 hours ago, TylerD321 said:

I have seen this payment try to come out of my account and disappear several times

[dizmo]

30 minutes ago, TylerD321 said:

 

 

 

I called my bank and got transferred many many times. In short they said to go ahead and pay it and if anything crazy happens they will take care of it which is nice. Not sure how Lenovo managed to mess this up, the bank can't even see a payment attempt ever.

So...you knew you hadn't paid and didn't understand why they were trying to collect?

[TylerD321]

1 hour ago, manikyath said:

then your bank checked with their eyes closed, because if you can see it, they can see it:

Yeah it is strange, because I actually have a bank notification text saved from when it tried to come out.

 

50 minutes ago, dizmo said:

So...you knew you hadn't paid and didn't understand why they were trying to collect?

It's not that I didn't understand why they were trying to collect, it was just weird their methods of trying to collect. As it turns out for whatever reason Lenovo does an account hold the day you pay it which only lasts 3 days and then they collect the payment when the delivery is delivered, but it took 4 days to get to my house. I don't understand why the payment they attempted in October didn't go through either but oh well.

 

My big concern was not that they wanted money for the laptop, don't get me wrong. I just didn't want to share my CC info via phone and they were going about it weird. How can they not charge my card on file when I asked them to, but they were able to attempt payment three times?? 

[manikyath]

55 minutes ago, TylerD321 said:

How can they not charge my card on file when I asked them to, but they were able to attempt payment three times?? 

because they have the necessary information to collect the payment, but your bank is blocking it as potentially fraudulent.

[wanderingfool2]

23 hours ago, TylerD321 said:

I called the 1-800 number in the email and they asked for my order number and then immediately asked for my credit card information. Given there being no issues with the payment going through on my side, I was not comfortable providing my credit card information, especially by phone. I expressed this concern and then they emailed me a PDF of wire information for Lenovo that was seemingly "signed" by Lenovo's CFO and includes Bank Account #, ABA, and SWIFT code. This whole situation seems very weird, and it is entirely possible that I am just being paranoid. I don't know why they would share this with a random customer, though I did place this personal order through my work email as it was in connection to a work program discount. I am not sure if this is where things got weird.

Okay, so knowing that the number is correct, the following would be my comments on this (I googled it and found government filings with an invoice from Lenovo that contained the same number and email address...so I'm assuming it's correct, and on your original invoice it probably had that number on as well...thus being a valid number).

 

With PCI-Compliance, Lenovo likely doesn't have your credit card readily available (and there would be a limited few members who would have it IF they are fully in compliance).  If they are using a third party to maintain PCI-Compliance, it makes it a whole lot easier, then they only likely have a token in relation to the transaction.  Those tokens eventually do expire, which might be why it's doing that.  That would be why they are asking for the CC again, like at a place I worked we would occasionally have to do a card not present transaction and would have a pin-pad next to the customer service desk where they put in the number (the key about using a 3rd party the pin-pad encrypts the number and sends it to the third party payment provider of which we had no access to the card number).

 

Anyways, I would not be surprised if that is why they are initially asking for the CC number, and then when you refuse to they will send you a wire information...which isn't really out of the norm especially on business accounts. 

 

Now, there is extra tid-bits on payment providers,  holds etc.  The general flow, CC information through the payment providers site/etc is "processed" by putting a hold on, a batch is done at EOD which effectively changes the holds to transactions.  This is where things can go wrong if lets say something wasn't quite right about the input information.  Sometimes it can be triggered by invalid names etc.  Either way, sometimes the process gets messed up...which is why they would then want your CC information so that they could manually put it into their pin-pad (I mean not necessarily exactly this process) to actually create a transaction bypassing the hold.

 

23 hours ago, TylerD321 said:

The payment didn't go through. It would fall off at pending. However, the new payment structure is strange when they could just charge the card I included.

See above, but effectively there are things that could prevent this; which is likely why they were asking for the CC number...because there is something wrong with the processing of your card through their current system (and they are likely trying to trigger a full on transaction manually).

 

20 hours ago, TylerD321 said:

Not sure how Lenovo managed to mess this up, the bank can't even see a payment attempt ever.

This is where wording is a key.  Differences between lets say payment holds, etc...they might not necessarily be looking at the right things.  Anyways, if you called the bank itself (instead of number on credit card) there is also a likelyhood that the bank is using a 3rd party as well.  Like things like Mastercard, AMEX etc, they all have to an extent a backend etc.  So while the bank might deal with a portion of things, they don't necessarily deal with the entirety of transaction.

 

 

Anyways, that is just my 2 cents on the situation...having dealt with making my workplace PCI-Compliant I can tell you when it involves credit card stuff and PCI-Compliance it can be a pain in the butt and if something's gone wrong it can mean a lot of phoning around to the payment providers/3rd parties trying to sweet talk enough information out of the agents to try figuring out what has gone wrong (I'm talking about from having to call up personally during a few fraud investigations that occurred at my work).  Is Lenovo like my work?  Don't know, but I could definitely understand how something could to wrong

[TylerD321]

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

-snip-

This is the most likely thing I can think of. I believe my bank transferred me to a third party Visa credit processor to discuss this. I went back through my texts and didn't get any fraud notifications, but I could see where the payments were attempted but didn't ever fully clear which is strange. Picture attached. If my bank declines a charge I generally have around 15 minutes to send a text response to the bank to let it through but I never got any fails.

 

20 hours ago, manikyath said:

because they have the necessary information to collect the payment, but your bank is blocking it as potentially fraudulent.

As mentioned above my bank is/was not blocking the payment, the issue was on Lenovo's side.

 

In short, this issue is likely just my paranoia of providing CC details over the phone to be honest. It would be nice to just be able to log into my Lenovo account and click on the order to re-enter CC details rather than giving them to a person but it is what it is.

 

In the end, I was able to attempt payment again, it still is pending on my account and hasn't gone through but Lenovo support provided me an authorization number for proof the payment was attempted so I suppose we will see if this issue has finally gone away.

[jlouis72]

Did you ever get this resolved and if so what happened?  The same thing just happened to me.  I ordered a laptop and the payment was attempted twice and then just disappeared twice into thin air.  I contacted my bank and they said there was no problem on their end.  I contacted Lenovo and they said that I would hear back within 24-48 hours and I still haven't heard anything back.