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So, I tried Dwolla

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Re: So, I tried Dwolla

#3

Post by trebor »

loceng wrote: post #2

I'm curious if others have had similar experiences.

Same here. I was considering this as a better alternative to PayPal, but if this is a somewhat consistent experience, it most certainly is not.

Re: So, I tried Dwolla

#6

Post by ok_craig »

The other day I was trying to make some kind of transaction with Dwolla, and before I could, they asked me a series of questions to verify my identity.

The questions had obviously been pulled from a background check based on my name that I didn't know they had done. It was asking me what the price of a house was when I originally bought it, and what street I lived on in a given time period.

Outside of this being really creepy, all of the questions weren't actually useful for identifying me because they all applied to my father. I am a Jr., and the background check must have been run for my dad.

I also now have a reasonable idea of the price range my dad paid for a house that we moved into when I was 7, which I never would have known or asked about otherwise.

At this point I'm afraid to continue using the service. They allowed me to transfer $1,000 into it, but apparently don't know enough about me to let me make certain transactions. They should get everything they need for me to use 100% of their service up front, and not have this staggered approach where additional identity info is required to transfer money, at the last minute when you're trying to do the transfer.

Right now it seems that they could at any arbitrary moment determine that they haven't actually identified me well enough, and suspend my account.

I don't think Dwolla is the payment solution we've been looking for. At least not yet.

Re: So, I tried Dwolla

#9

Post by wmf »

ok_craig wrote: post #6

The other day I was trying to make some kind of transaction with Dwolla, and before I could, they asked me a series of questions to verify my identity. The questions had obviously been pulled from a background check based on my name that I didn't know they had done. It was asking me what the price of a house was when I originally bought it, and what street I lived on in a given time period. Outside of this being real…

My understanding is that Dwolla is trying a fairly unusual approach to handling fraud, which is that they pay out of their own pockets for fraud (instead of kicking it down the line as all other financial institutions do) but this requires that they actually prevent fraud, not just identify it after the fact. And the cost of really stopping fraud turns out to be something that many people do not feel comfortable paying when they're personally confronted with it.

Re: So, I tried Dwolla

#10

Post by cykod »

Clowns implies that they screwed something up or did something wrong - from his story, he signed up and moved 5 figures of cash immediately (which is either exactly the limit of a business account or over it, see https://www.dwolla.com/about ) if I were in the payments business (and I was previously) this would have been a fraud red flag.

This is something that happened today (April 18th) - this is not five days of waiting around for money to free up. This is a gripe because the author triggered ever fraud alarm in the book and they have not responded fast enough.

I'd lean towards the "give them a little bit a of break" - yes it sucks he had to provide additional documentation and they haven't sorted it out yet, but no business could allow anonymous folks on the web to sign up and move 5 figures of cash providing only publicly available information as documentation.

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