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In August 2021, an image supposedly showing a receipt from Walmart with an erroneous $30 charge for GALE was circulated online. Many of these posts included a public service announcement warning other customers about this glitch, while some claimed that Walmart was purposefully adding this phantom charge to bilk customers out of $30. While this appears to be a genuine picture of a receipt with an erroneous charge on it, this is not a widespread issue. Furthermore, this receipt is from 2019, not 2021. We found a couple of other reports from 2018 and 2019 of people seeing an erroneous charge for GALE on their receipts. These reports all included a $32 charge and the same 12-digit serial code (00000000003k). In all three examples we found, the posters included anecdotes about how they quickly received a refund after bringing this error to the cashier's attention: Facebook user Rhea Azure wrote in 2019: A December 2018 Reddit post provided more information. That person said that the customer service representative said that the cashier likely entered a wrong number by mistake: We reached out to Walmart for more information but have not yet heard back. The above-displayed explanation, however, mirrors what we heard from a Walmart spokesperson in 2019 when we examined a similar rumor. Around the same time that these GALE receipts started circulating on social media, a similar claim was circulated about a $10 phantom charge for JAJKET. In this case, too, it seemed like social media users were exaggerating the impact of an individual's mistake into a nationwide issue. A spokesperson for Walmart told us at the time: While the images of a Walmart receipt with a GALE charge are real, these were isolated incidents involving human error and not a widespread systematic glitch. Furthermore, these receipts all date back to 2019 or earlier.
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