A Liverpool fan was shocked to see more than £5,000 leave his account when he renewed two season tickets.
Ian Stewart, 63, and his uncle have season tickets at Anfield. Ian pays for the tickets - a regular adult season ticket for himself and an over-65 ticket for his uncle.
On May 1, Ian renewed the tickets - along with purchasing FA Cup final tickets and opting into next season's FA Cup and Champions League matches auto-ticket scheme. He paid £1503 for the two season tickets and £230 for the two FA Cup final tickets.
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However, when Ian looked at his bank account a few days later, he saw that over £5,000 had left his account as pending transactions and he was not able to access that money.
Ian, from West Kirby, told the ECHO : "I thought ‘what the hell’s going on here’. So I rang the bank and said that there were some weird transactions. I could see that I’d paid my legitimate payments for the season tickets and the FA Cup tickets but they’d also put on ‘auto-debits’ for two more pairs of FA Cup tickets and three pairs of season tickets.
"Their computer had sent an allocation to the bank to put the pending amount to be paid from my account, which removes this from the balance I was able to spend and puts it into a pending transaction, so it would come out of the account in the next few days.
"Effectively, my balance was down around £5,000 in terms of what I could spend. The bank explained that they'd put a reservation on, like in a hotel, they take a reservation in case of costs. That’s what they’ve effectively done, so that locks up the money, as far as the bank is concerned, for up to seven days until the computers reconcile whether or not the money is required."
Displeased, Ian spoke to the club about the issue. However, he was less than impressed with the service.
"I then go on to Liverpool - they don’t have a phone service in any way shape or form. Everything is either webchat or it’s physically at the ticket office. I tried 3.5 hours on webchat, waiting 55 minutes at a time before it crashed on three occasions.
"I went to the ticket office, queued up because they were giving out FA Cup tickets, I eventually got to speak to a staff member, who said ‘It’s a ticket reservation, we can’t do anything about it’."
Frustrated with this response, Ian said: " If I were absolutely destitute now, I have no money to pull out from the bank." He said he told the ticket office: "You’ve got £5,000 of my money allocated - your accounts department needs to remove those allocations for those false transactions."
Ian said the pending transactions remained for five days until the money returned to his account properly. Though he was able to cover the hole in his finances during this time, he fears other fans caught up in a similar position may not have been so fortunate.
He told the ECHO that other fans he spoke to at Anfield had been hit with similar issues. Ian added: " I have a good pension so I can handle it, but somebody now in a cost of living crisis could’ve been in real trouble. It took five days to come off my account. If I had been living hand to mouth, I’d have been in a mess."
An email sent by Liverpool FC 's ticketing services to Ian on Wednesday, seen by the ECHO said: "We are aware of the issue, we have a team of people liaising with our finance team to try and rectify this so supporters are not then left in a position like the one you explained."
Liverpool FC declined to comment when approached by the ECHO.
