Comment · Tue, December 6, 2022 · ND Owner
Nootropics Depot Gift Card
Original post in this thread
[deleted] · 10 points
Does anyone know if they offer online gift cards?
What they were answering
SorosAhaverom · 2 points
Appreciate the detailed explanation in your link. However I wish in these cases your team was open to making a manual crypto payment transaction in case the customer is uncomfortable with the personal information you request to rule out fraud.
I used a virtual debit card to pay for a $400 order back in September, which got flagged for fraud. Your agent asked me to provide a screenshot of the virtual card's details in my banking app, unaware that most banking apps are protected against screenshots due to security. I then asked for a chance to remake the payment in cryptocurrency (any token) but was denied, so I was forced to go through multiple days of back-and-forth of submitting the required documents. Which wouldn't have been as big of an issue if I didn't pay $84 for express shipping.
Eventually the package never arrived as DHL marked it as a "Ghost Shipment" and I got a refund so I can't blame you for that one, I just hope that in the future you will be open to a manual crypto payment in case of possible fraud instead of forcing the customer to hand over their national ID and utility bill pictures.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · ND Owner
What was your order number? I will look into the details, and see how they could have handled it better. The last thing I want to do is prevent legitimate customers from buying from us. I HATE that we have to do this! No joke, we have cancelled hundreds of thousands of dollars in orders like this. It pains me to think that not only are we turning down money from real customers, we are pissing people off who will likely never come back to us! It's the exact opposite of what any business tries to accomplish. You're supposed to accept orders from new customers, and make them happy and want to come back, not deny their orders and piss them off from day one! It's just that we almost went out of business because of this. In no uncertain terms, our bank essentially told us that we needed to figure out a way to stop the fraud, or we would lose our banking relationship. It sucks that it gets put back on us.
Also, we can't really explain to people how best to not have an order flagged by us, as that would just help the fraudsters get around our systems. My customer support team has a shitty job, as they don't want to be the one responsible for approving an order that later turns out to be fraud, so I think they err on the side of extreme caution. To top it all off, FinCen recently put out some insane new guidance for banks and processors regarding cryptocurrency tracking for US companies and US citizens. This pretty much made most legitimate crypto processors halt all business with any companies that are more than 25% owned/controlled by a US citizen.
https://www.fincen.gov/beneficial-ownership-information-reporting-rule-fact-sheet
To top it all off, when Russia invaded Ukraine, it really put a scare in banks. The sanctions were/are a big headache, and our banks essentially told us to make sure we were not accepting money from Russian citizens. Well we have (had?) a big presence in Russia. We had a LOT of Russian customers, and our sales to the country were only going up leading up to the invasion. When the invasion started, and the sanctions hit, every order that was on the way to customers of ours in Russia was halted, and any payment frozen. We couldn't even refund the customers! The banks physically cut off the ability to transact with Russia. However, our customers in Russia wanted to keep ordering from us, so they started moving to cryptocurrency. Well we have gotten conflicting information from our lawyers and the banks' lawyers on how we need to handle that, so we have been exercising a lot of caution there, too. It's just been a shit show of a year...