@aral

I hate to say it but it's not their fault at all.

A retailer can't remove the pre-auth. The bank/card company can. If they say they can't they're not telling you the truth. They can remove it. They are the ones that declined it.

It's worse if you use starling bank, for example, they seem to show the pre-auth and payment as 2 payments in their app to customers (don''t use them myself, just our experience of starling).