Not too long ago, I transferred the equivalent of $12 USD from a Fintech chequing account and immediately had my Wise account flagged for sanctions. I had to spend 2 hours drafting and collecting documentation that I was indeed, not a sanctioned entity.
A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down
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Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down
#92As a Wise user, only for personal international transactions, I'm very curious to read this! I've had good experiences so far.
Also very curious, as a former Wise user who stopped using them after they demanded impossible KYC requirements (proof of address with address components that simply don't exist for my address, luckily with no money in the account, but didn't budge even when I reached out to support) and then seem to have silently dropped this months later (still not using them - not going to risk that they come back with more bullsh…
what do you use now
Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down
#93Nowhere in this blog does it mention what the business actually does, which is always a red flag. I've seen plenty of stripe bashing posts on HN that end up with the business being in newsletter scams or adult content.
If you've ever dealt with financial institutions in a meaningful way, you'd know that the self-service variety, or the HSBC variety, will create hurdles and enforce policies arbitrarily with no recourse, care or concern for your well-being.
Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down
#94I can't prove it, but from interacting with 'support' teams who are clearly middle-people working with a clunky AI and accepting its output as absolute, that would be my first guess.
Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's wordpress, so technically not static, although if it was it wouldn't have this resource problem.
Don't cache plugins exist for WordPress? Or, barring that, wouldn't CloudFlare help?
They do, but they aren't very good. PHP is very fast, but unfortunately Wordpress is carefully designed to make it very slow.
Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down
#96At some point customer service died. Businesses of seem to no longer be interested in dealing with customers. Good customers come in all shapes and sizes, and often don't exactly fit a cookie cutter. It's frustrating to see businesses just cut and run the moment something becomes a problem that needs more than a series of pre-scripted responses to be resolved.
On one hand, this makes me incredibly sad. It means that all of us, as consumers, agreed we'd rather save a buck than get acceptable service.
On the other hand, as someone who did customer service in my younger years, 95% of calls were PEBKAC, so it's essentially a giant money drain for things of no real concern to you as a company.
I've often wondered how successful it would be to charge $3 or $5 per call, refunding the money in cases said call was needed.
Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down
#97The right solution here is to take the telecom tax invoice, edit it in a PDF editor to say Telecom bill, and send it back.
The process is stupid enough that this will work 95% of the time. Is it fraud? No, not really, I'd argue. You're just conforming the document to an arbitrary standard, but all the relevant details are factual, not fraudulent.
Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down
#98Today, in people who discover things that aren't banks don't act like banks
Tomorrow we'll have a double header featuring people who discover things that aren't hotels don't act like hotels and things that aren't taxis don't act like taxis.
If your business relies on the less-regulated "alternative" you're going to get burned eventually.
Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down
#99How can the business gets its money back ?
I would file a "dangerous professional" complaint with the appropriate regulator. (Don't say Wise is completely unregulated. NZ is a civilized country.)
Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down
#100The right solution here is to take the telecom tax invoice, edit it in a PDF editor to say Telecom bill, and send it back. The process is stupid enough that this will work 95% of the time. Is it fraud? No, not really, I'd argue. You're just conforming the document to an arbitrary standard, but all the relevant details are factual, not fraudulent.
That was my first thought as I was reading. Of course, I imagine almost every serious business would be extremely uncomfortable doing something like that. On the other hand, if the alternative is getting your account closed anyway, there's not much to lose.