Tesla Nightmare: Customers Were Double Charged, Told To 'Call The Bank'

Tesla, Elon Musk's electric vehicle company, allegedly double charged customers without authorization or warning, a report revealed Monday.

After Southern California residents Tom Slattery, Clark Peterson and Christopher T. Lee paid for their brand-new Tesla vehicles, they found out that the company charged them twice. Tesla had taken tens of thousands of extra dollars without authorization, CNBC reported.

Slattery said he woke up on March 25 to find that Tesla had charged him $53,000 more than he expected to pay for a 2021 Model Y. He called Elon Musk’s company to complain, but got stonewalled, he said.

He later drove to the Tesla dealership in Burbank to speak with staff. “They told me to call my bank and have my bank reverse the charge,” Slattery said. “That was not acceptable. When you debit more than $50,000 and tell a customer to solve it on their own? I kept pushing.”

“It’s hard to imagine sales and service getting worse,” he continued. “I had almost $53,000 unauthorized stolen from my bank account. And nobody, nobody has called me, emailed me, there’s no sense of urgency in resolving this.”

Tesla has yet to give Slattery a refund or a commitment in writing as to when he'll get his money back.

As for Peterson, he had been on the phone with a delivery employee on March 25 discussing the arrival of his new car when he was informed that he had been charged twice, he told CNBC.

“He told me to call the bank and stop payment on that,” he recounted. “I said the money has left my account. I’m pretty familiar with the way wire transfers work. When the money’s gone the money’s gone! He was insistent I should call my bank. So I did. They confirmed like no, the money is in Tesla’s account now. We cannot do anything about that until we hear from them.”

Peterson was still waiting for his refund or any communication from Tesla as of Monday afternoon.

Christopher T. Lee said he and his girlfriend were forced to eat "broke college kid" food after Tesla took at least $56,000 more than the price of his Model Y, a hatchback version of the Model 3. The duplicate charges drained his bank account.

“I was supposed to only pay $56,578.63 for my Model 3. ... They ended up charging me twice for the car," he said.

But in this case, Tesla apparently had no record of overcharging Lee. The company urged him to call his bank, even though he paid via ACH.

Lee produced a video of the incident and posted it on YouTube with the title, "Did I just get scammed by Tesla?"

As of Monday, Lee was still waiting for a refund.

Two others also said they were double charged by Tesla. They asked to remain anonymous, CNBC noted.