A mother was charged more than £4,500 for a two-hour parking stay.
Yaditi Kava, 39, was shocked to find £4,586 taken out of her account for what should have been a £4.50 charge in a shopping centre car park.
She had been out on a trip with her two girls before she returned to the multi-storey car park to find the pay stations not working and decided to pay at the barrier instead.
Due to a fault with the machine, she was debited thousands of pounds after leaving Queensmere Observatory Shopping Centre in Slough.
Yaditi told the BBC that she thought the ‘4,5’ displayed on the parking barrier screen was £4.50 only to receive a text message informing her she had paid more than 100 times that amount for the parking session.
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‘It was surreal – I just couldn’t fathom that they had taken that money’, she said.
The experience was so stressful that Yaditi said she nearly cancelled her daughter’s birthday party.
Despite being promised the money would be back in her account within three days, it took more than three weeks for her to be reimbursed and only after the mother-of-two reported the incident to The JVS Show, a radio programme hosted by Jonathan Vernon-Smith.
Yaditi said: ‘It was a godsend – One call from Jonathan, and the next day the money was in my bank.’
The car park operator, Savills, said the fault was an ‘isolated incident’ which it was investigating to prevent it occurring again.
It said: ‘We have been in regular contact with the customer to rectify the issue as a matter of priority and can confirm a full refund is being processed.’
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