Paysafecard stole my money!

CUSTOMER COMPLAINT

Open Letter to the CEO (MD) of Paysafe

Dear Mr Udo Muller,

I am very disappointed with the service provided by your company. Today I deposited £350 in to my new Paysafe wallet which I opened on the 8th of April 2014. When I first opened the account I deposited £200 and applied for the unlimited status. Some 10 days later I received an email to say that the documents were not correct, as you required the Back of My ID card and the utility bill was rejected. I logged in to my account today to upload the correct documents and when you click on the link to research which ID you require you get a 404 error so you need to fix this link.

I therefore uploaded my documents and searched for a contact number to speak to Someone at Paysafe at which point I was told that the documents had been received and to be “Patient” for someone to look at this. However I can not use the funds I paid in to the account because of the limit of £250 you have with Skrill, and I am not happy if I have to wait 10 days and then someone may tell me the documents are incorrect. I was told it would all need to be looked at by your “Technical Team” and that I could not speak to them and neither could your customer care assistant. When I urged her to speak to someone in the team she duly hung up on me, which has infuriated me.

I called back and spoke to another member of staff who was equally as unsympathetic and duly told me to be patient again. I am not at all pleased with the service provided by your company and I will be posting this open letter on every single customer feedback forum I can find associated with your company.

Kind Regards
Unhappy Customer

Just wanted to add my own story about Paysafecard as I am getting nowhere with their support. My personal opinion is they are scamming people out of money, alongside their normal business.

Paysafecard is advertised as a way of not sending your bank details over the internet, instead you go to a local shop with a paypoint machine and exchange your money for a paysafecard which is basically a PIN number on a printed receipt. When you choose to pay on a site that accepts paysafe, you just have to enter the pin number for payment.

This sounded great to me being that I am a computer security guy who has seen many insecure websites storing credit card information incorrectly, so I rarely enter my card details anywhere online.

I purchased a card from a local shop and less than an hour later attempted to use it only to be told the card was blocked. I contacted paysafe by email and had no answer so I phoned them where they told me I had to email them a photo of my receipt. As I went to email them the picture I had just taken, I noticed they had just replied to my email hours before asking for the photo too. So I emailed them the photo of the receipt.

I got a reply thanking me for the photo and now they required my bank details, sort code and a photo of my passport emailed to them. A big part of the reason I purchased the card in the first place was to not send my bank details over the internet yet here they are asking me to do so in a way even less secure than before. They are basically asking me to send things that can be used for ID fraud over email, which I will not do.

So I emailed them asking if they can just unblock the card or re-issue another pin number as I won't send those details across the internet to anyone. The reply was just a copy and paste of the previous email asking for the bank details.

I sent another email asking for an alternative resolution or their complaints procedure and they have not replied. Googling around it seems they give a lot of people the silent treatment and there are many who have refused to send those kind of details to them, so they are making a nice amount of money by blocking these cards the instant they are first used and then holding the money to ransom by requesting all these things.

I am a computer security expert, there is no malware on my machine. I also run linux which doesn't have malware problems to the degree windows machines do. So I know that I am not infected with anything that is logging my keystrokes or intercepting my http/s requests to sites, which is how some of these steal this kind of data. No one could have used that pin before I used it about 45 minutes after purchasing it. Even if someone has worked out the algorithm for their pin numbers, the number of pins is so great the odds are astronomical of them using the one I purchased in that time frame.

So they simply blocked the new card I purchased and held it to ransom.

The money amount I paid paysafecard is fairly small and I would prefer to lose it than send pictures of my passport and bank details over the internet. Yet out of principal I intend to follow it up with the FCA or a similar service. They are ignoring me asking for a complaints procedure which they have to supply within 24 hours, which has been 3 days now. I asked for an alternative resolution to sending my bank details over the internet twice, the first time they replied with exactly a cut and paste of the first email asking me to send all the bank details, the second time I asked for a alternative resolution was in the mail that asked for the complaint procedure, which they just decided not to reply too.

Google is littered with people this has happened too and I wish I had read the reviews and horror stores before. All I can do is add mine and hope others don't have similar dealings with this company. I would avoid them like the plague.