Emailed

Pretty close to after opening, I answer the phone to a customer who was calling all the way over from North Carolina. (which is on the opposite side of the country from my store) 

And she was calling because last night she received an email receipt from my store...and she'd never been to my store before. Wasn't even in the state. 
So she was like "Can you explain to me why I'm getting this email receipt about purchases that were made in your store with a card that isn't mine?" 

And yah.
I could explain it easily. 

You see, our store can Email receipts to customers instead of printing them out.
We just enter their email address into the computer and walla! Receipt is emailed to that email address.

The computer doesn't do anything further than that. It just sends a copy of the receipt to the email address. 

And because the card used on the receipt didn't match the cards of the lady in North Carolina.

I pretty much put it down to human error. 
The email address of the customer who had bought stuff from our store had been entered incorrectly, and therefore had sent a receipt to the woman instead of the customer. 

The woman was a bit disbelieving. She was like "But my email address is "firstnamelastname@gmail.com" and my name is not a normal name!! 

Well...apparently it is normal enough for someone to have a similar enough email address for us to input. 

In any case.
I reassured her that there was nothing to worry about.
And she should be fine.

And I wasn't going to think more about it.

Only, a few hours later....I got another call...
Well I took over the phone from my coworker who was slammed at the register, and encountered another customer....

With the same problem.
He'd received an email saying that $80 worth of doggie stuff had been purchased at the store....and he doesn't own a dog....nor has he been to our store.

And from my understanding, the guy had basically gone and cancelled all his cards and such. 
--I think he'd been having other issues with his cards (information taken maybe?) which was what prompted that measure.

But he was calling to find out what had happened and what could be done and yadda yadda.

So I had to give him basically the same spiel. That someone from our store had purchased something, and sent the receipt to his email instead of theirs because most likely their email had been put in incorrectly and so he'd received the email instead of them.

The catch...is that this particular customer had paid with a check.....so it wasn't as easy to tell that the payment hadn't been taken from his account.
But I told him another customer had called with a similar issue earlier, and that I was pretty confident that he hadn't had any money taken, and that he'd only received the email. That was it.
After all...we treat checks a lot like debit cards at my work, so once the check goes through, it's taken out of a person's account basically as quickly as if they'd used a debit card.

So I told him, since he hadn't seen any charges yet in his accounts, that he should be fine, but he could keep an eye on it just in case for a couple more days.

Pretty sure there's nothing wrong....
Beyond the wrong email addresses in our computer system that is....

-Sarnic Dirchi