Payments and Disputes

This policy explains what happens when something goes wrong with money on LunchTrolley, and — just as importantly — what we can and cannot do about it.

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1. Start here: we never hold your money

LunchTrolley is free, and every payment happens directly between a colleague and their coordinator, through their own banks. We do not process payments, receive them, hold them, or see them.

So the honest headline is this: we cannot refund you, because we never had your money. There is no chargeback, no reversal and no dispute process we can run on your behalf. If someone owes you money, they owe it to you personally, and it is between the two of you.

What we can do is give you the record: what was ordered, what was owed, what each side said about paying it, and when. That is often the whole of what a disagreement about lunch actually needs.

If that trade-off is not right for you, don't use LunchTrolley to collect money you can't afford to lose. We would rather say that plainly than let you find out later.

2. Before you pay: check the details

We show you the payment details your coordinator typed in. We do not verify them. We do not check that the account exists, that it belongs to them, or that it is the right one.

Before sending money to a bank account or PayID you have not used before:

• Check that the account name is the name of the person you expect. We show it, and we warn your coordinator if it doesn't look like theirs — but we cannot know.
• If anything looks off, ask them in person or on a channel you already trust. Not by replying to an email.
• Be especially careful if payment details changed mid-round. We freeze them once a round opens precisely so this shouldn't happen. If you have been told details changed, verify it face to face.

Payment redirection — someone getting into an account and quietly changing where the money goes — is the most likely serious fraud on a product like this. Thirty seconds of checking is the defence.

3. If you paid and the food didn't come

Talk to your coordinator first. Overwhelmingly the answer is that the vendor was late, the order was wrong, or they haven't got to it yet.

If a round was cancelled after you paid, your coordinator owes you your money back directly. We will have emailed you to say so. We cannot return it for you.

If a coordinator takes money and does not buy the food, that is not a LunchTrolley dispute — it is theft, and it is a police matter. You can:

• Report it to police, including online at cyber.gov.au/report;
• Contact your bank immediately. If you paid the wrong account by mistake, Australian banks operate a mistaken internet payment process under the ePayments Code, and acting quickly matters a great deal;
• Report a scam at scamwatch.gov.au;
• Tell us, at hello@lunchtrolley.com. We will provide you with the record of the round, close the coordinator's account where we reasonably suspect fraud, and give the same record to police if they ask for it.

We will not pretend that last point is a remedy. It is evidence and account closure, not money back.

4. If you're a coordinator and someone hasn't paid

You can see who has marked themselves as paid and who hasn't, and you can email everyone in the round. That's the tooling. The rest is a conversation with a colleague.

Two things worth knowing:

• Marking an order as paid is something a colleague types, not something we verify. Check your own bank before confirming you've received anything.
• Confirming a payment is your assertion too. It records that you say the money arrived. It is not proof, and it does not commit us to anything.

If you're regularly out of pocket, the answer is a shorter deadline and a smaller round, not a better app.

5. If the amount was wrong

If a coordinator edits your order, we email you what changed and what you now owe. If you had already paid and the total went up, you owe the difference. If it went down, your coordinator owes you the difference back.

If you withdraw after paying, your coordinator owes you your money back.

In every case the money moves between the two of you. We record the amounts; we do not move them.

6. If you paid the wrong person

Contact your bank, immediately, and ask about their mistaken internet payment process. Speed matters — recovery gets much harder once the money has been spent or moved on.

Then tell the person you meant to pay, so they know your order is unpaid rather than ignored.

We cannot recall a payment. Not to a coordinator, not to a stranger, not one minute after you sent it.

7. What record we can give you, and to whom

For any round you were part of, we can provide: the vendor and the round, what you ordered, what you owed, the payment methods the round displayed (masked, if the round has since been archived), whether and when you marked it paid, whether and when the coordinator confirmed it, and the emails we sent you about it.

We give that record to the person it is about — your own order to you, the whole round to the coordinator who ran it. We will give it to police on request. We do not give one participant another participant's details beyond what the product already shows them.

Email hello@lunchtrolley.com and write from the address you used on the order, so we can tell it's you.

8. Complaints about us

If you think we've handled something badly — the service, this policy, our records — email hello@lunchtrolley.com. We'll respond within 30 days.

Nothing in this policy limits your rights under the Australian Consumer Law, including the consumer guarantees that apply to the service we supply. See clause 12 of the Terms of Service.

9. Contact

LunchTrolley — Parker Howard, sole trader ABN 88 206 778 370 PO Box 27, Mascot NSW 1460, Australia hello@lunchtrolley.com