A US$200,000 ($216,000) tip for a bartender turns out not to be as generous as it first appeared.
The woman posted a photo of the receipt to social media site Reddit, commenting: “Today the absolute weirdest thing happened to me, ever.”
She reports that two women in their 20s visited the St Louis restaurant where she works, with one of them “treating the other” and “saying things like ‘Don’t tell my sister how I tip’”.
“She seemed to be tossing a LOT of cash around to her guests and the situation was just bizarre,” she writes.
The pair were subsequently joined by a male friend.
When the group’s bill arrived, the female customer who had been hinting her tip would be generous and asking the server not to react in front of her sister, added a US$200,000 tip to the $111.54 bill (incorrectly tallying a total of US$211,000.54) before leaving.
While the bartender began imagining how the amount of money would change her life, her manager decided to phone the credit card processing company, discovering “that banks don’t honour payouts on excessive tips.”
The good-natured bartender joked that if she could contact her “guardian angel”, she would “at least thank her for the entertainment”, or for the sentiment, if it was well-intended.
Other commenters on Reddit took a different point of view, however, certain the seemingly generous gesture was, in fact, a scam.
One wrote: “I used to be a bartender, and every once in a while that would happen. The person just has to put something ‘impossible’ on the bill, and Visa will not process it.
“Since the amount and the tip are hand-written, it means you had to enter it into the till with the tip amount AFTER the sisters had left. Visa would outright reject it then as almost no one has that much credit. Even if Visa accepted it, the customer would just call later and claim she had been scammed.
Other commenters point out similar scams occur using PayPal, where customers receive goods but claim they haven’t and reverse the charges.