Emily Duprie
A woman recently came forward on TikTok with a friendly reminder to always check your receipts- especially when they have a larger list of items on them. Apparently, it’s easy to sneak an extra $20 charge on there! Julia Taylor (julesakajuliataylor) discussed in her viral TikTok how she had gone grocery shopping at Walmart, noticed a higher final price than expected, and found she had been charged for a “Universal Unknown Item.” Whatever that means.
In her three-minute video, she says she had heard on TikTok about some people receiving strange additional charges but didn’t think it was real until it happened to her.
Julia had already left the store, thinking the extra costs was just from inflation. After rethinking the price, she decided to double-check her receipt and found a strange $20 charge hiding amongst her purchased products.
She explained her situation throughout the video.
After noticing the charge, “I’m like ‘I’m pretty sure that I didn’t buy something for $20,’” Taylor says in her video. “I always double-check the price on the shelf before I pick up an item, just because I do.”
Julia says she scanned her receipt on Fetch, a rewards app that earns users free gift cards and cash back if they snap their grocery, shopping, and restaurant receipts. She says she couldn’t tell from her receipt what the extra $19.86 charge was for, so she used the app to determine that. The app told her it was for a “universal unknown item.”
Still confused, Taylor took her receipt inside and spoke with Walmart customer service, who she says was “very kind, very gracious, very helpful.” She asked them to search for the item in their system to see what it was and determine whether she had gotten something wrong. The customer service workers searched for the item number twice but both times it came back as “not available,” Taylor says. Very fishy.
“I’m like ‘I think I’m getting scammed,’” Julia says. “I think someone is trying to scam me. Somehow, I don’t know, but I didn’t buy something for $20.”
According to viewers, this isn’t new information.
“I was very thankful that they did and thankful that I caught it, but y’all, this is a warning to check your receipts,” Taylor says. “If it was $5, I wouldn’t have noticed, but scammers still get away with stuff like that.” She concluded. Viewers said they’ve had similar experiences, specifically at Walmart. Some even claimed Walmart knows about the scams.
Have you had something happen like this before at Walmart or any other larger company? Perhaps another corporate lawsuit is underway…
