THORNTON, Colo. — A woman is warning anyone who uses delivery grocery services to check their receipts after she said an Instacart shopper scammed her.
Roxanne Nice said she ordered about $40 worth of groceries from King Soopers. Since the order was a delivery, it was fulfilled by Instacart.
The items arrived at her door and she said everything she expected was there. But less than a week later, when Nice looked at her credit card statement, she said she realized the order she’d expected to cost less than $40 actually cost her more than $140.
When she looked at the receipt, Nice said nearly every item she ordered was marked as out of stock. She’d instead been charged for ithings she hadn’t received, marked as items substituted by the Instacart driver who fulfilled her order.
“If this happened to me, I’m sure it’s happening to other people,” she said in an interview with 9NEWS on Thursday morning.
Nice reached out to King Soopers on June 20 to report the problem and was told she’d be refunded in 7 to 10 business days. On Thursday, 11 business days later, the company e-mailed her and said a refund had begun to process.
Nice told 9NEWS she wouldn’t have thought to check her receipt for the delivery if she hadn’t spotted the large charge on her credit card from all the substituted items.
“The normal process is we will get a text message that basically requests permissions to add substitutions,” Nice said.
But she said never got a text message asking to substitute the items. And had she not looked at her credit card bill, she wouldn’t have realized something was wrong.
Then she did some research. She found stories of other Kroger customers who’d had a similar issue with Instacart deliveries of their groceries. So she reached out to 9NEWS.
“We are disappointed to hear one of our customers had an issue with their delivery order,” King Soopers Corporate Affairs spokeswoman Jessica Trowbridge said in a statement. “We are always happy to help solve problems and address concerns directly to ensure every customer has an amazing shopping experience, both online and in our stores. We are investigating this incident and have taken steps to take care of the customer.”
In a statement, Instacart said shoppers could be discontinued from the platform for fraudulent activity.
“Adding items to an order that were not requested by the customer is considered a violation of our guidelines, and is behavior that may result in deactivation,” the statement from Instacart said.
In an e-mail Nice shared with 9NEWS on Thursday afternoon, a customer service agent also offered to credit her account with $14.00 for the service fee she paid for the transaction.
Nice said if she was scammed, she’s not necessarily angry with the Instacart driver.
“This is a tough economy and I don’t know this person’s situation,” Nice said. “(I’m) disappointed. Definitely bad judgement. But they wouldn’t have been allowed to do that if King Soopers had mitigated this a year ago when they found out this was a problem. I think the company has a greater responsibility to ensure their platform is safe and their platform can’t be used this way.”
In the meantime, Nice wants anyone who uses the service to check their receipts.
Have a tip about a consumer story? E-mail 9NEWS reporter Steve Staeger at steve@9news.com.
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