Gas stations and cashback cunning: FIGISC intervenes

Gas station attendants seem to have become the preferred target of those who are performing a large number of close transactions, often worth a few euro cents, to climb the Super Cashback rankings. We have documented some cases on these pages in recent weeks, in Trescore Cremasco (CR), Caraglio (CN) and Nervesa della Battaglia (TV), the latter with as many as 148 payments in less than an hour and a half. A problem to be addressed urgently for two reasons: first of all to avoid that the operators of the service stations find themselves having to pay an excessive accumulation of commissions for the movements, then to avoid that the dynamic can distort the initiative to the detriment of those who participate in an honest way.

Super Cashback: cunning and self-service, solutions under consideration

It should be noted that the practice is not prohibited. In fact, there is no formal impediment and it does not constitute an offense with transactions that are correctly recorded by IO and other supported applications. However, we must put a stop: it is the first of the 10 points that we have drawn up by identifying the criticalities that have emerged so far in relation to the State Cashback and proposing as many possible solutions.

Introduce a limit to the number of close payments made at the the same merchant could constitute a technically feasible solution by virtue of the fact that the system receives an identifier relating to the store and can use it as a distinction for the management of a filter linked to the time of the operation.

Someone has hypothesized to limit payments to the same merchant to one per day, but this would penalize those who, for example, choose a credit card or an app to pay for coffee at the bar. What if it's no more than one every two hours? This could discourage practices that are not useful for the purpose such as splitting up the shopping at the supermarket, making more supplies in a few minutes and other similar unhealthy forcing.

Bruno Bearzi, National President of FIGISC Confcommercio ( Italian Federation of Road Systems for Fuel), during an interview granted to the Due di Denari program broadcast on Radio 24. Here are his words.

No minimum limit has been set for transactions or transactions multiple it happens that during the night closing hours many, rightly defined "Cashback crafty", arrive at our plants and make payments of 50 cents or 1 euro by performing 10 or 20 operations one after the other to climb in this ranking of 100,000.

This is the problem. And the solution? We have no way of knowing when it will arrive or in what form, but from Bearzi's words we learn that he is discussing it. We can only share the will to introduce it as quickly as possible.

From the informal discussions I had with the Administration, it would seem that being aware of the problem and in any case solicited by us, some initiative will be taken to short. I hope that it will be as soon as possible, also because it penalizes those who behave correctly.

It remains to understand who will take on the task of intervening on an initiative that is already fully operational: service station managers, the systems that regulate the delivery of fuel, who at institutional level is dealing with the Cashback project or others?