A 19-year-old woman headed out to her local JD Wetherspoon pub for drinks with her friend on February 15, but claims she was refused service due to a manager's 'gut feeling'.
Amber Satriani says she and her 24-year-old pal went to The Glass House in St Helens and everything was going well until their drinks were taken away.
The pair ordered drinks via the Wetherspoons app and were asked to show their IDs when a staff member brought them to the table.
As reported by The Liverpool Echo, the employee is said to have then requested to scan Amber's friend's licence and went off to do so.
However, 10 minutes later the site's manager appeared, picked up the drinks and refused to serve them alcohol.
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Amber recalled "The manager said she couldn't serve us because she had a gut feeling [my friend's ID] was a fake because something had gone wrong with the scan.
"She didn’t even bother to scan my ID and instead just took both our drinks and said I'd be refunded through the app.
"After a few minutes I went up to the bar and asked if I could scan my ID to see if there was something wrong because obviously, we’d have to contact the DVLA if our cards were playing up, to which mine scanned completely fine."
Amber went on to say how they discovered her friend's ID wouldn't scan due to residue on the card and once removed it scanned without problem, however, the manager still refused the two women service.
She added: "We even showed our bank cards to show the names matched and had completely run out of any ideas how we could further prove our age. Even after all of that the manager still refused us service."
Amber posted about the incident on Facebook and asked whether anyone else had experienced a similar problem at the pub.
Many people claimed to have had similar issues according to the comments.
One woman replied: "Same thing happened to me. Reason given was that my ID hair was pink and mine's now black so it was fake."
Another wrote: "They told me my licence wasn’t me and I was using someone else’s card when I showed my name matched and made go to get my passport."
A third posted: "This happened to my daughter and her friends. I wouldn’t mind, they had been drinking there for two hours and then all of a sudden they refused to give them their drinks, even though they had paid for them. They haven’t been back since."
In response to the claims, a spokesperson for Wetherspoons said: "It is a legal requirement for all licensed premises to prevent the sale and consumption of alcohol by anyone under the age of 18 years old.
"Unfortunately, fake IDs are readily available over the internet which means that our employees, when checking a customer’s proof of age, have to be extremely vigilant and exercise a degree of discretion as to whether IDs presented to them are valid or not.
"Invariably this means that on occasion, customers who do present valid IDs will be refused service.
"We apologise for the inconvenience caused to those individuals to whom this may have happened to at the Glass House, St Helens."
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