The notice the public transport operator in Ungheni posted on Monday looked routine — you pay with a contactless card straight on the bus, you tap it on the validator, you wait for confirmation. Then comes the paragraph that lit up the comments.
The system is built so that it is impossible to be charged twice for one journey. Nobody is taking extra money from anyone. SRL „Servicii Comunale Ungheni”, public notice, 13 July 2026
Underneath it, people from Ungheni wrote exactly the opposite. One passenger says he tapped his card three times — the second at the driver’s prompting, the third on the second validator in the same bus — and that, when he checked his banking app, „all 3 attempts went through”. A woman says she travelled with her little girl and money was taken from her account twice. Another writes that, for a single ride, 28 lei was taken from her — against an official fare of 6. A fourth says his travel pass showed no balance, so he got off and walked to the city hall to top up his card.
These are people’s statements, not verified bank records; none of them has been tested with the bank or with the operator. But all of them sit, in public, underneath a notice saying such a thing cannot happen.
What the operator says on Facebook and what it says on its own site
The two are not the same thing.
On Facebook, the guarantee is absolute: it is impossible to be charged twice for one journey. On the operator’s own portal, eungheni-transport.md, the same idea sounds far narrower:
If you are not sure the payment went through, you can tap your card again — you will not be charged a second time for the same route in the same vehicle. The operator’s portal, „Travel CONTACTLESS” page
„Impossible, ever” and „not twice on the same route, in the same vehicle” are different promises. The second is a technical rule; the first is a claim about every situation at once.
And the most concrete of the complaints — the three taps, in the same bus — should have been covered even by the operator’s narrow guarantee.
How paying by card on the bus actually works
Part of the confusion has a real technical explanation, and the operator writes it on its own portal — without ever using it to explain things to people.
Contactless payment in transport does not work like it does in a shop. The validator does not debit on the spot. Transactions are made offline, and a day’s journeys are added up into a single amount, taken at the end:
At the end of each day, the total amount owed will be calculated on the basis of all tickets purchased. The total will be taken from your card account. The transaction will appear on your statement according to your bank’s rules, so it may take a little while before you see it. The operator’s portal
This is the standard public transport model — Modeshift, the platform the Ungheni system runs on, publicly describes it as fares „based on capping and aggregation”, with transactions that „happen offline as specified by Visa and Mastercard”. Industry documentation warns explicitly that, in this model, the amount a customer sees in an immediate notification may not be the amount actually charged, and a second tap can look charged simply because the first had not yet been processed.
That explains the notification arriving at midnight. It plausibly explains, too, why someone sees several movements in the app and concludes they were charged several times — what shows up immediately may be pending authorisations, not final debits.
What the model does not explain, on the current public information, are precisely the three things being complained about. The sum of 28 lei is not a multiple of the 6-lei fare. Repeated taps in the same vehicle should have been de-duplicated under the operator’s own rule. And the double charge on the mother travelling with her child contradicts the operator’s own FAQ, which says a single contactless device cannot pay for two tickets.
The operator denied the problem. It did not explain it.
What to do if you were charged too much
Here is the part missing entirely from the public communication — and which the law, by contrast, sets out very clearly.
Step one, with the operator. The consumer protection law obliges the provider to receive, register and examine complaints, and the time limit for settling them cannot exceed 14 calendar days. The same law makes the provider liable for damage caused by an improperly provided service. The complaint goes to SRL „Servicii Comunale Ungheni”, 8 Oranjeriei street, phone 060 990 059, im.serviciicomunale@gmail.com. Attach the date and time of the journey, the route and the screenshot from your banking app.
Step two, with the bank — and this is the strongest one. The payment services law provides a right that might have been written for this case: if you authorised a payment without the exact amount being set at that moment and the sum taken exceeded what you could reasonably have expected to pay, you are entitled to a refund. The request goes to the bank within 8 weeks of the debit, and the bank has 10 working days to give you the money back or to refuse with reasons, telling you where you can complain next. For a transaction that was simply unauthorised, the limit is 13 months, and the refund must be made immediately.
One thing is worth underlining: it is not for you to prove you did not authorise the payment. The law puts the burden of proof on the bank — it must show that the transaction was authenticated, correctly recorded and not affected by any technical fault.
Step three, if the bank refuses. That leaves the National Bank of Moldova and the courts. On the consumer side there is the State Inspectorate for the Supervision of Non-Food Products and Consumer Protection — Chișinău, 78 Vasile Alecsandri street, phone 022-515-151, secretariat@isspnpc.gov.md; a petition can also be filed through the eDemocrație platform.
What is written nowhere
We read the transport service regulation approved by the municipal council in January, and the contract with the operator. The regulation has chapters on inspection, on offences and on the fines a passenger risks for not validating. It recognises the passenger’s right „to be compensated for the damage caused”. But it contains no procedure by which someone wrongly charged by the system claims their money — from whom, within what deadline, with what documents. Nor does the operator’s contract say a word about electronic ticketing or complaints. Nor does the portal.
The same regulation obliges the operator to display the instructions for using electronic tickets in every bus and at stops. Those instructions are published nowhere online.
Two more things surface on reading the system’s own documents. The portal’s terms and conditions send disputes to „the competent courts at the seat of the Bank in Bucharest” and point the user to Romania’s National Consumer Protection Authority and the National Bank of Romania; the privacy policy names Telelink Services Romania as data controller and carries a last-updated date of 2019. For someone in Ungheni who has been overcharged, the route of appeal written into their own contract lies in another country.
And receipts and travel history can be downloaded from the portal only by those who used a physical card. Anyone paying by phone cannot obtain proof of payment — even though the law obliges the provider to hand over a document confirming the service was provided.
Who is answerable
The city hall reshared the operator’s notice with a message of its own: citizens are urged to communicate „directly with it” about any complaint.
Except that, under the council’s own acts, the city hall sets the fares and monitors and inspects the operator’s activity, and the validators in the 18 vehicles were installed under a project run by the city hall itself, financed through the National Fund for Regional and Local Development. The 6-lei fare is propped up, in 2026, with 6 million lei from the municipal budget. Under the sustainability plan approved in June, the authorities committed to at least two satisfaction surveys of citizens on public transport.
Triunghi.md has sent the operator and the city hall the questions this text cannot answer — how double-charging is technically impossible, where 28 lei for a 6-lei ride can come from, what the refund procedure is, how many billing complaints have come in since the launch, and who supplied the system. We will publish the answers.
Until then, one thing holds for anyone in Ungheni boarding a bus: if you see more taken from your account than you travelled for, you are not obliged to settle for „it is impossible”. You have 8 weeks to claim the money back from your bank — and the burden of proof is not yours.