Exactly why did you panic so much? You have a product and a mistake occurred. Credit card charges can be refunded quite easily (to my knowledge). Such large payments get haltes by the bank. If you indeed would’ve charged the customer, you would have refunded them, apologize, told them that it was a human error and assured them you now have safeguards put in place to prevent it from happening again (such as manually approving charges over 1000$ ). Then as compensation for their trouble, you would offer them the 250$ original charge for free this one time. Seems like this was written simply because you overreacted.