Consumer complaint received 2023-02-02
Company: Payfare International Inc.
State: NJ
Product: Credit card or prepaid card
Sub-product: Payroll card
Issue: Trouble using the card
Sub-issue: Trouble getting information about the card

Complaint:
On XX/XX/XXXX, I received a notification of a transaction on my XXXX card for a XXXX membership totaling {$110.00}. Some time prior to this I had received a notification for another XXXX transaction, and had contacted the XXXX XXXX team immediately to dispute the charge. Luckily, it was only an authorization hold and was later removed. However, during the call to the bank I requested that no further XXXX charge be approved as I did not currently use a XXXX account. This request was ignored. For both transactions I immediately locked my card. In any case, once the second transaction occurred, within a few hours I immediately reached out to both XXXX and the XXXX XXXX team to attempt to resolve the transaction and get my money back. Upon initiating a dispute process with the XXXX XXXX Payfare team, I was told to provide evidence that I contacted XXXX, and also to cancel and request a replacement for my XXXX Prepaid Debit card. I would have done this immediately, but in order to cancel the card you must pay a {$5.00} fee. I believe that this fee is not justified since postage for the card as well as the cost of making the card most likely do not exceed {$1.00}. In addition, I felt paying a fee to begin a dispute goes against XXXXXXXX XXXX zero liability policy. It seemed to me that Payfare only desires a profit from disputes as they can secure a {$5.00} card replacement fee in addition to any fees they assess to the merchant. For this reason, I thought it would be better to attempt to get in contact with XXXX to get my money back. After this, even though I've contacted XXXX multiple more times and spoke to multiple departments including the billing department, the corporate customer relations department, the customer service department, and the XXXX XXXX membership department, they maintain that they can not refund the charge as they require the email address associated with the XXXX account. Since this charge was made under a XXXX account that I do not own I could not provide them with this information. They even went as far claiming, during one conversation, that the matter had been escalated to a fraud department, which would make a final resolution on the matter after 5-7 days. No resolution was ever received and during a later conversation with another customer service representative I was informed that the previous agent must have been lying as there was no such procedure. This wait time caused me to exceed the 7 day time limit imposed by the XXXX Payfare team to provide evidence of contacting the merchant. I would go to contact Payfare only a day or two after this 7 day time limit to say try and explain the situation, but the Payfare team would only say that they could not assist me further and hang up the call. I then called XXXX multiple times to explain this, but they would maintain that their position, and tell me to contact my bank. Every time I have tried to contact Payfare after this, they simply do not accept my call, referring to it as an invalid escalation ( You can not get in contact with Payfare directly. You must first contact doordash who tries to to forward your call ). I believe the inability to get into contact with one 's own financial institution is ridiculous ; any account holder ( especially in my case as one who has had a history of {$20000.00} of transactions ) should be able to contact their bank at any time for any reason and at least be able to speak with a representative first instead of being immediately declined. Furthermore, the dispute timeline imposed by payfair is utterly ridiculous. All the banks I have dealt with allow much more time for the dispute process. Additionally Payfare gives itself 60 days to decide on the dispute, even while giving their customers only 17 days total ( 10 days to report the dispute and 7 days to provide the additional documentation ). This is absurd because the process for the customer to contact the merchant and the process for the bank to contact the merchant are almost the exact same. How can a bank give itself more time than the customer? This seems completely contradictory to the purpose of consumer banks to protect the assets of their customer. Furthermore, I am unable to voice any of these issues to or resolve them with Payfare as I have no way of contacting them. At this point, I would be fine even paying the {$5.00} fee for the card replacement if I would be able to continue the dispute. ( I have kept my card locked since to prevent further transactions, but do not want to replace it until Payfare allows me to contact them and try to at least explain the situation further ). I understand that I didn't do everything right in terms of their exact policy, but I don't believe their policy is fair for cardholders. I also don't believe that their business practices are the best in terms of not giving their customers the ability to contact them.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation