Oligopolistic PASSPORT LABS, INC. failed to show at the January 2019 St. Augustine beach City Commission meeting and was not invited back to the February 4, 2019 meeting.
St. Augustine Beach Mayor UNDINE CELSTE PAWLOWSKI GEORGE has been a proponent of the scheme since her ex parte discussion with an (undisclosed) "colleague" last year, and her experience with the Gainesville, Florida City Parking Garage. Mayor GEORGE (Florida Bar No. 16872) graduated from law school at Suffolk University in Boston, where PASSPORT's parking app scheme is the subject of concerns about overcharges.
From Boston WCVB 5 and students in the journalism class at Northeastern University:
Boston parking app overcharged thousands of customers
Refunds given but customers not notified
Updated: 11:16 PM EDT May 3, 2017
Thousands of ParkBoston app users overcharged
by WCVB US
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
From ride-sharing services to social networking sites, apps have become a part of everyday life. They can make life easy, but at what point do privacy and protection concerns overwhelm the convenience of using an app?
Last November, Dave Lishansky learned that when it comes to apps, convenience doesn’t always pay off. Like many Bostonians, Lishansky used the mobile parking app ParkBoston almost every day near his girlfriend’s downtown apartment. He used the app for months without any issues. As an independent businessman, it made Lishansky’s fast-paced and hectic life a little bit easier.
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But that all changed when he got a message from his bank, notifying him that his balance was below $40.
“One day I get a notice from my bank app saying I have under $40 left in my account and I’m like, that’s really weird. I don’t know what this is,” Lishansky said. “I had $3 left in my bank account.”
After all the charges rolled in, Lishansky, who had used ParkBoston once on Nov. 14, 2016, had been charged nearly 50 times by the app. All told, that one parking session cost Lishansky over $120.
It turns out Lishansky wasn’t alone. Thousands of other ParkBoston users had been affected by duplicate charges, but most didn’t even realize it. The Boston Transportation Department never informed all app users that there had been an issue, instead responding only to users who were upset enough to complain over email or phone. A technical problem that began with the city’s credit card processor quickly turned into an issue of transparency and consumer rights.
The ParkBoston app is supposed to make parking easier for Boston drivers and for the most part it does. Many cities have taken the leap into digital parking payments. Chicago, Tucson and Detroit, as well as other local initiatives in Somerville and Cambridge, have seen success. While some parking apps, like the ParkMobile app in Washington D.C., have had issues, there have been few reports of any widespread issues.
Launched in some parts of Boston in January 2015 and rolled out over the next year, ParkBoston quickly took off. In 2015, there were around 1.2 million transactions made through the app. By the end of 2016, that number had more than doubled, according to data provided by the Boston Transportation Department. With more parking payments being made digitally, parking tickets have actually decreased significantly.
But the app, which was designed for convenience, only made life more difficult for Lishansky when it malfunctioned last year.
As soon as he found out about the charges, Lishansky scrambled to delete his credit card from the app and contact someone for help. With student loans and rent weighing on him, Lishansky didn’t have time to wait.
There was no contact info on the app, so, with no direction, Lishansky started sending panicked emails – “I am literally scared. Please help” – to a bureaucratic void he wasn’t sure would respond. Even when he did get responses from the city, they didn’t inspire much confidence.
“I think I sent 10 or 15 emails to random people, whoever I could find,” Lishansky said.
"The next day I think I got four emails back and they all said hang on, we’re working on it.”
He didn’t get an explanation of the issue or an idea of when he would get reimbursed. Unfortunately, this was only the beginning of a month-long process to get his money back.
Lishansky was just one out of thousands of affected users. According to emails obtained through a public records request to the Boston Transportation Department, approximately 6,000 ParkBoston users were affected by duplicate charges totaling around $31,000. Those emails included communications between the app developer and vendor Passport Inc. and WorldPay, the credit card processor.
Stephen Maguire, Boston's Parking Clerk, maintained that the technical issue was the fault of WorldPay, an international credit card processor. The emails revealed that a failure with WorldPay’s servers caused ParkBoston charges to go through multiple times.
“We had the one day where we had issues with people being overcharged or double charged. But it wasn’t actually a ParkBoston issue. It was more of a WorldPay issue,” Maguire said.
However, for most people, the duplicate charges became a ParkBoston issue when the city failed to notify users of the problem.
The Boston Transportation Department only became aware of the issue when people like Lishansky complained by phone and email. Maguire and his team had no idea what the issue was and reached out to Passport Inc. Their app vendor also couldn’t find the source of the issue and, in turn, contacted WorldPay. But that information never trickled down to Maguire.
“[Passport] really never gave us a full explanation of it. We just kind of went into fix it mode as far as we were concerned, because we wanted people on the street not to be getting charged for it,” Maguire said.
This kind of breakdown in the chain of communication extended to consumers as well. Although the technical issue originated with WorldPay, the Boston Transportation Department’s response to the issue was problematic, to say the least.
Instead of notifying all app users that there was a problem, like many banks do when there’s any hint of a payment issue, the city communicated only with people who complained to them directly. Nearly a dozen or so people sent emails after looking at their banking statements. Even more called.
But that doesn’t account for the thousands of other affected app users who never checked their bank statements. Users were left in the dark about potential duplicate charges. WorldPay told the city that all the charges were resolved, but most ParkBoston users are still unaware that an issue ever occurred.
“We figured why bring it to their attention that there was an issue with WorldPay if they didn’t know it to begin with,” Maguire said. “The majority of them didn’t even know there was a problem.”
Maguire did admit that the city would consider notifying all app users if there are any other issues in the future.
“Going forward, maybe that’s the case if something like this happens,” Maguire said. “[But] we thought it best not to inform them if they didn’t know about the problem to begin with.”
Even though the city reimbursed many ParkBoston users before they noticed the duplicate charges, many more were left to deal with money being drip fed into their accounts well into December. For people like Lishansky, who had student loan payments due, the slow reimbursement process and lack of information made for a scary experience.
“I was terrified. It was the worst feeling in the world,” said Lishansky. “It was a mess. [I was] asking friends and family for loans to pay off student bills.”
Lishansky ended up borrowing around $200 from friends and family, and he had to work even more to get the money to pay back those loans. Eventually, the city reimbursed him for all his money. But at that point, Lishansky had lost faith in the app. After seeing the 50 charges pouring into his account, he deleted the app and even now refuses to use it again.
Not every ParkBoston user was able to get all their money back. For Andrea Clark, the process of getting reimbursed was frustrating and time consuming.
Clark uses ParkBoston every morning before work when she parks her car near her boyfriend’s Back Bay apartment. She thought Nov. 14 was just another day until the app seemed to glitch and refused to let her pay. Clark continued to try paying – even after multiple “failed” payments had gone through. She realized something had gone wrong, after seeing nearly $50 worth of charges on her banking statement.
“I was really frustrated…I have loans to pay and rent. I’m only a year out of school. I don’t have the money to pay for this,” Clark said.
Just like Lishansky, Clark rushed to contact someone at the Boston Transportation Department. After three separate failed attempts at contacting someone, Clark finally got a response, which gave her little information and told her to wait for the charges to be returned to her. She still doesn’t know what happened, and after a month, only $24 had been put back in her account. At that point, Clark gave up trying to get the rest of her money back.
Any app that requires people to put in their credit card information has a risk attached on a sometimes-invisible asterisk. The helplessness and frustration that Lishansky, Clark and many other people experienced when dealing with the ParkBoston issue is not unique. As more and more payments shift to digital options, problems like this may become more common.
Finding out who is responsible for an issue that involves multiple organizations is part of this digital future, said Susan Grant, director of Consumer Protection and Privacy at the Consumer Federation of America, a consumer advocacy group.
For people like Lishansky, this was an all too familiar problem. However, Grant was clear that consumers shouldn’t give up if they’re having issues. Just because an issue like this can be difficult to sort out, doesn’t mean consumers should give up their right to dispute the charges.
“If you’re using a credit card for payment, you have very strong payment dispute rights,” Grant said.
This is just another reason that app users should be notified of an issue like this. As both citizens and consumers, ParkBoston users and all app users have the right to know if there’s been an issue with their account.
While the server failure rests on WorldPay’s shoulders, the lack of transparency and communication with ParkBoston users left the city of Boston and the Boston Transportation Department at fault in the eyes of the consumer.
That lack of transparency left many users in the dark about the quality of the service they were using every day. For many people, that information is vital moving forward. It informs their relationship with both the app and the city. Lishansky may have deleted the app, but many of the affected users still use ParkBoston, whether they know about the issue or not.
Clark, despite her experience, continues to rely on the app but only out of necessity. She explained that even though there have been no problems since last November, she still resents her attachment to ParkBoston.
“It’s made me bitter that I have to keep giving them money,” Clark said.
After the issue occurred, a customer service hotline was set up for the app. But no real steps have been taken to ensure that if an issue like this occurs again, the city will respond with transparency. Maguire did say that his office now has more open communication channels with Passport so as to react to issues more efficiently. However, this response remains consistent with the Boston Transportation Department’s delegation of duties to Passport and WorldPay.
“On our end, we have weekly conference calls and meetings with Passport Parking,” Maguire said. “We’ve instructed them to stay more on top of WorldPay so they have daily interactions with WorldPay so they will know on a daily basis if something like this happens.”
As of April 2017, the city of Boston continues to work with WorldPay and Passport Inc. There have been no further issues and user adoption rates have remained relatively steady since November. Both Passport and WorldPay refused to comment on the issue.
This investigation was reported on for a seminar in investigative reporting taught by 5 Investigates’ Mike Beaudet, who is also a journalism professor at Northeastern University. The following students participated in the project: Sydne Mass, Cody Mello-Klein, Bridget Peery, and Ellie Williams.
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