Thousands Of NJ Drivers Just Got Big E-ZPass Fees By Mistake

Remember at the very beginning of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic when the New Jersey Turnpike Authority pulled toll collectors on the Garden State Parkway and New Jersey Turnpike and told everybody to go through the E-ZPass lanes, even if you're not an E-ZPass customer?

Well, a lot of people did exactly as we were all told and are now being greeted by hefty fees, some to the tune of 50 bucks.

The good news is that the fees are indeed a mistake.

The bad news is that a whole lot of people received notices with the erroneous fees. To the tune of almost 80,000 drivers.

As our Townsquare New Jersey News team reports, non-E-ZPass users who went through the E-ZPass lanes should have simply gotten a bill in the mail for the appropriate toll, you pay the tolls noted, and everybody's happy.

But, apparently, those tens of thousands of drivers never got that original bill which is supposed to be paid within 30 days, so they got second notices that had big fees slapped on, ballooning, for example, a $1.50 toll to a $51.50 bill.

If you're one of the many drivers who got the shocker of a bill, you may have grown even more frustrated when you tried to call customer service to figure out what the heck was actually going on.

According to our reporters, "...customers may have had a difficult time reaching customer service because staffing had been down due to the pandemic".

As for what you should do if you're somebody who not only was slapped with a fee but may have already paid it, NJTA officials say that, "...anyone who paid the administrative fee will have the money refunded and anyone who hasn't paid yet is going to have that administrative fee, whatever the amount, removed from their account automatically,"