Answer from Brian: There is no "stale date" on a debit card transaction. The cardholder received benefit for the purchase and the bank is entitled to recover the funds from the unposted debits. The game card "Bank error in your favor. Collect $200." doesn't work in the real world. If the bank makes an error, it wants the $200 back.
Answer from Andy: It has been years, but we did. We discovered that during a midnight IT maintenance function debits would be properly funded to customers, but the other side of the transaction never hit the deposit account. We had to collect many, many thousands of dollars and we detected a pattern of users abusing this. We went through law enforcement in a few cases for fraud. Some customers were keeping the funds in their accounts, others claimed it was an error in their favor. We were liberal in waiving OD fees and in some cases we worked with customers on breaking it into a few payments, but we were not taking that as a loss. You should not either.
First published on BankersOnline.com 9/10/12