American Airlines, Capital One, And Mastercard Issue Statements About Customer’s Accidental ‘African American’ Service Fee
Earlier this week, we reported about a woman named Kyetra Bryant — A Simp Named Slickback (@___seeryandavis) February 1, 2021" target="_blank" rel="noopener">traveling on American Airlines and seeing an “African American, African” service charge on her bank statement.
Hey @AmericanAir
— A Simp Named Slickback (@___seeryandavis) January 29, 2021
What is an African American African service charge??!?!? pic.twitter.com/UmR0sBGLPT
Now, American Airlines, Mastercard, and Capital One have all sent over statements about the incident.
Capital One Statement:
“We are aware that a customer has come forward expressing concern with how a recent transaction was recorded on their banking statement. We immediately began investigating the issue and have attempted to make contact with the customer to apologize for any confusion and provide insight into the situation.
Our investigation has shown that this technical issue is the result of a miscoding of a merchant’s name. It is entirely unrelated to any specific customer information.
At Capital One, we created a proprietary system that offers our customers greater details on all of their transactions. We do this in part by using technology that relies on an external database of business information. We are actively investigating precisely where the technology misinterpreted the merchant data and we are correcting the issue.”
Mastercard’s Statement:
“We are in the process of conducting a thorough investigation, however it is our understanding that American Airlines is not responsible for this error. American Airlines submitted the transaction correctly for a checked baggage purchase — including the proper merchant name. Our bank issuing and payment processing partners are working to understand how the error occurred so this does not happen again.”
American Airlines Statement:
“The customer alerted American to the offensively labeled baggage fee on her bank statement in mid-December. We were incredibly disturbed by what we saw and immediately launched an investigation to understand what occurred. After consulting with Mastercard, we were able to verify that the issue did not originate with American.”
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