So today is payday. I have two Netspend accounts, one for bills and one for personal spending so the monies don’t get messed up. I have had my accounts for two years and for two years I have my direct deposit deposit into one and then transfer what free spending money I have left to the other. Well today, I go to transfer my money and I get an error:
You have encountered the following error(s):
Either your account or the recipients account has been blocked and cannot send/receive funds.
So I called Netspend and as usual, I get operators who all have accents so I already know where this is going to go … nowhere. It seems to be common practice these days for businesses to hire people in foreign countries so, like a hunter,can “deflect” any interactions with their actual customers they deal with. They give them no information on your account or any real job to do but to answer the phone and read a screen no matter if it’s an agent, a manager or a supervisor. But anyway, no one I spoke to could tell me why transfers were all of a sudden disabled from my account. They all kept telling me what it “could have been” when all the “could have’s” they provided weren’t anything I have experienced. So they asked me some security questions which, of course, come from a third party and one of them had nothing to do with where I lived and there was no “None of the above” option, so I am sure that is what caused me to fail their security questions. The question was, what street is closest to you and I had not heard of any of those streets even within 60 miles of my home that the rep listed. All the streets here are numbers and she was rattling off names of streets that didn’t even sound like they were in this area, so I guessed and probably got it wrong.
So then the lady sends the dreaded “ticket” to the supervisor and tells me to call back in 6 hours? So I call back in 6 hours only to be told the same thing. Then the rep goes on this sobb story about how customers were complaining about transfers they didn’t make on their cards. I call bullshit on that because if they took one look at my account they would see that the transfers have been going on for over two years to accounts all setup at the same time with all identical name and information on them so it’s not like it’s some new fag accessing my account. I explained this to the lady and she said they don’t have any control over transfers being locked. She claimed it was all done by a 3rd party and they don’t know why my account transfers were blocked, but told me I had to send in a copy of my social security card and ID to get the block removed and transfers are permanently blocked for no fuckin reason at all until then. THAT is when I blew up. No fuckin way am I sending my social security card to people who:
- Are obviously either in a foreign country or in some area in the U.S. that only hires immigrants or something so they don’t give two fucks about your account or the personal information they receive, as long as they are getting their minimum wage
- Netspend advertises that your SSN information is not required (even though I gave it when I got the card 2 years ago)
- You can’t even tell me why my account is blocked, so what makes you think I’m just going to trust you with my personal private information? Are you smoking crack?
Netspend brags about having online bill pay, which they do NOT have. I used their so-called “echeck” feature once (first and last time) and it took my recipient 3 weeks to even get it. I was better off just walking the 10 miles and giving them cash if I knew it was going to take that long. Now they claim you can transfer between Netspend cards, BUT they can lock the feature whenever they see fit for no reason at all. Their customer service is lousy at best. Calling them for anything is like giving commands to a brick; they can’t help you with anything but simple functions such as giving your balance, rattling off basic crap you already know, sending out replacement cards, etc. If anything major goes wrong with your account, may Thor, Zeus and the rest of the gods be with you because it will probably not get resolved and if it does, it most likely won’t be in a timely manner, you know, because “everything is handled by their mystery, so-called secured, 3rd party department” of whom you cannot speak to and consists of “they who cannot be named”.
Every single thing that Netspend advertises I could do with this account, I have not been able to without some hassle or just plain not being able to do it at all; who wants to deal with a financial institution, if you can even call them that, who doesn’t have any control over their systems? Sorry Netspend. You fail.
I heard you got acquired by another company recently, so maybe that’s why you have all this unnecessary crap going on lately but I’m done with you. I’ve even promoted and suggested this card to others, even posted some good review on my site but I’m just done. I have not seen once one company who gets acquired or joins in with another where their services get better, they almost always get worse and I feel that this is just a precursor for more fail. Real life living examples of big company changes where services got worse, rather than better are PayPal, AOL and Geo Metros.
From now on I am going to stick with the popular banks who have control over my account when there is an issue. Went to BB&T today and opened a new account … Netspend … I’m done.