Paying for parking with your mobile phone: Twint customers are greeted by buses every other day

Digitalparking, the company that offers the Parkingpay parking function for Twint, is aware of the problem. This is due to a connection issue where Twint did not respond to Parkingpay’s payment request and the transaction stopped after three minutes.

Twint gives payment confirmation instead of error message

However, users of the application do not notice this and do not receive any error messages. On the contrary: a confirmation appears that the payment was successful. However, a receipt is not subsequently generated proving that the user has paid the parking fee. And the money is not deducted from the account.

According to Twint, the error occurs once in 150,000 transactions. Concretely, this means that almost every day someone was receiving an unfair fine for a technical error. Twint will verify the accuracy of this conversion upon request. However, these are only the situations that are the subject of complaints on Twint. It is quite possible that more customers will be affected. Twint wants to minimize incidents in the future, but exactly how this will be done is not specified. According to Twint, uploading an error message is out of the question. Important: Parkingpay’s own app is not affected by the issue.

Who pays parking tickets?

The person objecting to the fine must of course provide evidence. For example, towards the company Parkon, one of the largest parking controllers in German-speaking Switzerland. The company emphasizes that it is generally tolerant in case of technical errors.

However, in practice, it turns out that goodwill varies depending on the person giving support. In one case available to the “observer” the letter from the bank was accepted; In the second case, the request was insisted despite various supporting documents. In the worst case, those affected may face prosecution if they do not pay the fine.

Anyone who pays the fine and wants to claim the money back from those responsible experiences a real journey: Digitalparking directs its customers to Twint, which in turn refers to the data protection regulations and forwards those affected to the relevant bank.

Tip: Check if the parking meter is working

According to the press office, if the bank concludes that Twint is experiencing a technical problem, Twint will cover the penalties. In one of the cases presented to the observer, this only happened after the observer asked. In the second case, nothing has happened to date.

If you want to save yourself the trouble, you should follow Observer lawyer Daniel Leiser’s practical tip: “It’s best to wait three minutes by the car and check if the parking meter on the app is actually working.” This is solid advice, but difficult in practice. Alternatively there is still cash; In any case, there is no technical connection problem.