Three days after several passengers complained, in the comments under the transport operator’s notice about paying by card on the bus, about money taken twice and three times over for the same journey, SRL „Servicii Comunale Ungheni” came back with a public answer: it checked „every case reported” — and found nothing.
Following the checks carried out, the aspects raised were not confirmed. In the case of fake profiles, it was not possible to establish contact in order to obtain additional information or to verify the complainants.
SRL „Servicii Comunale Ungheni”, public statement, 16 July 2026
The municipal company — which runs Ungheni’s five urban routes and the electronic ticketing system launched on 1 March — also announces that „in the period ahead” it will hold a public meeting on how public transport and electronic payments work, with „answers to all the questions”. The date and the place have not been announced so far.
What the statement does not say
The announcement does not specify how many complaints were checked, over what period, who carried out the check and by what method — nor how many of the complaints were put down to „fake profiles”. Not a single element of the check has been published.
The data needed for such a check exists at the operator, by its own account. At the launch of the system, in March, a representative of the company described for Radio Moldova what the company sees behind the validators:
We can see in real time all the validations on routes, at stops, we can see them by the hour
A representative of SRL „Servicii Comunale Ungheni”, for Radio Moldova, March 2026
Triunghi.md sent the operator, as early as 14 July, a set of questions about contactless charging — how double-charging is technically possible or impossible, what the refund procedure is, how many complaints the company has received since the launch. By the time this article was published, no answer had come. On Friday, 17 July, the newsroom sent a second set of questions, tied to the new statement: how many cases were checked and how, how a passenger can obtain a record of their own validations, and when the announced public meeting will take place.
Nor does the subject look closed to the commenters: underneath the operator’s statement itself, a woman from Ungheni asks where the journeys on the travel card have disappeared to.
Why one charge can look like three
Monday’s notice about contactless payment had drawn 12 comments by Tuesday. In them, a few passengers recounted that money had been taken from them twice and three times over, one that 28 lei had been withheld for a journey costing 6, another that their travel pass showed no balance.
Some of them have a technical explanation that the operator writes on its own portal. Contactless payment on the bus is not debited on the spot: the validator works offline, and all the journeys in a day are added up into a single amount, withdrawn at the end of the day. What the passenger sees immediately in the bank’s app may be pending authorisations, not final debits — which is why the notification can arrive late, sometimes after midnight, and why a second tap can look charged only because the first had not yet been processed. It is the simplest reason a person can believe, in good faith, that they were charged several times.
The explanation does not cover everything that was complained about, though. The 28 lei withheld for a single journey are not a multiple of the fare of 6. Repeated taps in the same bus should have been deduplicated by the very rule the operator writes on its portal. And a travel pass that shows no balance has nothing to do with daily aggregation.
The constraint the operator invokes is just as real. A complaint left in a comment, without the card number, without the time and without the route of the journey, cannot be searched for in the system’s records — not even by someone who wanted to find it. The person who disputes the check reaches the same conclusion: asking how something that leaves no trace at the bank can be confirmed, and calling for the travel pass to be paid through a bank, so that there is proof.
What a passenger can and cannot check
The operator’s portal, eungheni-transport.md, allows receipts and journey history to be downloaded only by those who used the physical card; whoever pays with a phone cannot obtain proof of payment. Neither the contactless payment page nor the frequently asked questions section describes any procedure by which a wrongly charged passenger could check their validations or claim their money back.
The rights of a wrongly charged passenger remain those set out by the law, not by the portal: a written complaint to the operator, which the consumer protection law obliges it to register and settle within at most 14 days; a refund request to the bank that issued the card, possible within 8 weeks of the debit — and the burden of proving that the operation was correctly recorded lies with the bank, not with the passenger. If the bank refuses, next come the National Bank or the courts.
Public money and a meeting with no date
The company is founded entirely by the Municipal Council and runs on public money: the fleet of 18 vehicles, worth almost 23.8 million lei, was handed over to its management, and the municipal budget covers, in 2026, compensation of 6 million lei for the costs included in the fare.
One thing the announced meeting could clear up: in the State Register of Local Acts, the only fare approved by the Municipal Council is the one of 6 lei per journey. The prices of the travel passes — at the heart of several of the complaints — do not appear in any decision published in the register. Their absence from the register does not, on its own, prove that the prices are charged without a basis: a fare can also be approved through an act that never reaches it.
In Ungheni, public transport moved entirely to electronic payment from 1 March, while Chișinău is only testing validators on a few trolleybus routes. The way the operator here handles the first disputes about money becomes, in that light, a precedent.
Until the promised meeting, what is left for passengers is the practical part: keep your bank statement or the payment notification, ask the operator in writing to check the journey — at im.serviciicomunale@gmail.com or at the office at 8 Oranjeriei street — and do not let the 8-week deadline for the refund request to the bank pass.