An extended delay in credit card transaction processing left a Patron of Cyn Nightclub in Fort Lauderdale Florida facing grand theft charges. Trusted third party Wells Fargo which issued the card approved an $80 charge for drinks earlier in the night, but failed to approve $600 in charges later in the night. A second card from trusted third party also failed to approve the later charges. $1000 in bail was successfully paid by one of the card issuers to the Broward County Jail.

Credit cards are a notoriously fraud prone payment method which depends on centralized, trusted third party issuers to approve transactions submitted by merchants. Recent large breeches of credit card information have left the issuers struggling to implement additional measures to verify the legitimacy of transactions. This is a challenge as all that is required to process a transaction to a card is a fixed set of information, and the failure on the part of two separate issuers in this case lead to a man facing charges that could have been avoided had he and the club Cyn transacted with a more reliable method of payment.

In a statement to NBC the victim's lawyer said, “I think we are all used to getting those emails from credit card companies saying, ‘Hey, did you authorize this charge? Now, we have to worry about getting arrested for using our own credit card.”