Cape Town man mistakenly charged R120k instead of R1,200 for petrol gets his money back

A Cape Town man who was mistakenly charged R120,000 instead of R1,200 for petrol at an Engen petrol station says he got his money back.

In a viral social media post this week, Sebastian Santino De Allende posted a picture of his receipt showing the huge amount he was charged for 52 litres of petrol.

According to De Allende, the incident took place at a garage in Muizenberg last week.

“Engen, I expect better! My full tank of petrol was R1,200. Your cashier took R120,020.14 from my account.

“The money is still not in my account and I’ve received no calls or e-mails about this. I have been trying to contact you privately but I cannot find any way. Fix this before I take action,” said De Allende.

The now-deleted posted went viral within hours and got the attention of Engen.

In an update, De Allende said he managed to get his money back from the petrol station and thanked everyone who helped his post go viral.

He said he deleted the original post after receiving “friend requests every five seconds”.

“Thank you to everyone for sharing the post about Engen. It got their attention and they immediately returned the money. I did delete the post because people were going crazy and I was getting friend requests every five seconds, It went way too viral but thank you, all sorted now,” said De Allende.

Support independent journalism by subscribing to the Sunday Times. Just R20 for the first month.