A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down • Hacker News Board

Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down

#221

Post by recroad » Fri, Oct 31, 2025, 1:23 PM UTC

FateOfNations wrote: post #78

At 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.

Completely agree. I run a small company and great customer service has been a competitive advantage in what is more or less a red ocean. Just the ability to speak to a human being goes a long way, and if you actually solve their problem, you not only build loyalty but referrals.

Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down

#222

Post by lxgr » Fri, Oct 31, 2025, 1:24 PM UTC

csomar wrote: post #180

lxgr wrote: post #26

> a dropdown list of acceptable documents: a lease agreement, rates notice, tax document, utilities bill, or telecommunications bill. It’s baffling to me that these types of (usually unsigned in both the electronic and the ink way, not that the latter would prove anything in a scan) PDFs are still somehow the gold standard for “proofs” of address.

The OP doesn't know this but the first rep. just gave him the blueprint on how to "preserve" and "stamp-approve" his account regardless of whether he has a legitimate business or not. He just needed to get "that" paper and move on. It is a process of document collection not a real verification for business purposes.

> It is a process of document collection not a real verification for business purposes.

I wish we could as a society move on from rituals paying tribute to what used to be an authentication method, towards one that actually constitutes one today.

Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down

#223

Post by mlyle » Fri, Oct 31, 2025, 2:27 PM UTC

sigmar wrote: post #106

>A bit more back and forth… then the call was disconnected. who disconnected it? were you yelling at support? this seems relevant and you just put "yadda yadda... the call was disconnected" (not to defend Wise, just curious what happened there) >This isn’t just poor service — it’s unacceptable. meaningless LLM-addendums don't improve your blogpost

You've never had the experience of having a somewhat challenging / unusual request result in an agent abruptly dropping the call?

They can figure out pretty quickly that A) it's going to be hard to help you, and B) you're going to suck a lot of their time, and C) their poor luck of getting your call is going to make them look worse to their management.

I had a sequence of this happening three times with a utility. Unfortunately, it's the fourth agent who actually helped me that got yelled at, at no fault of her own. But I was pretty pissed at that point.

Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down

#224

Post by swat535 » Fri, Oct 31, 2025, 3:05 PM UTC

hpdigidrifter wrote: post #149

FateOfNations wrote: post #78

At 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.

Wise customer service is amazingly good though. I'd much prefer to use a company that spends 100% of the time on 80% of customers than one that spends 80% of it's time on 20% of the customers OP can't even provide proof from the tax office of being at that address, it's an angry rant rather than the whole picture. Would you go into business with him with nothing but a phone bill as proof?

To counter this, I was using my account for years with no issues, then one day I've had my Wise account "closed" for no reason other than "breach of terms".

No other insights or discussion and the appeal process basally took months with nothing but an automated response.

I've given up on all these "fintech" companies and am using tradition banks.. at least there is regulations and they can't randomly decide to close your account and remain unresponsive when you require support.

I've been telling my loved ones to stay away from Wise, PayPal and similar services.

Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down

#225

Post by solarwindy » Fri, Oct 31, 2025, 3:14 PM UTC

dboreham wrote: post #136

mjcl wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even corner cases. I worked for a fintech that launched a dda-ish product that had 16 digit account numbers, issued sequentially, with no check digits. At launch there didn't seem to be a CS process for dealing with pretty obvious "customer mistyped account number and sent their money to some else's account." problem.

Feature parity with blockchains.

Uh, no, most crypto wallet addresses have either a checksum or some other means of typo detection / prevention.

Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down

#226

Post by kevdoran » Fri, Oct 31, 2025, 3:16 PM UTC

I read this yesterday and thought "only a matter of time for us". We use Wise twice a month and have for a couple of years.

Today I was surprised to find out that matter of time was 12 hours, as I logged in and see:

"We've temporarily blocked your Wise account. We're missing important information from you."

When I click the link, it says: "That address doesn't look right" and shows my business address. That is right.

There's no way to contact nor do anything other than change the address. I of course don't want to change the address, because it's my business address. Lol.

Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down

#227

Post by charles_f » Fri, Oct 31, 2025, 3:35 PM UTC

FateOfNations wrote: post #78

At 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.

With these companies, if it takes more to keep the 10% of customers that will leave because of bad service than providing good service, then bad service will be delivered.

Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down

#228

Post by aendruk » Fri, Oct 31, 2025, 4:13 PM UTC

rsanek wrote: post #189

Man, that background animation is really distracting.

I couldn’t read with it and filtered it out with uBlock Origin:

  shaun.nz##.blogig-background-animation

Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down

#229

Post by nucleardog » Fri, Oct 31, 2025, 5:35 PM UTC

jhancock wrote: post #61

New Zealand banks are horrible. If they made it easy to hold USD and/or forex/fees on international card charges were reasonable, Wise wouldn't be needed in most cases. NZ banks also have no depositor protection. No equivalent of the US FDIC. Note below from 'jemmyw depositor protection added the past couple months.

> If they made it easy to hold USD and/or forex/fees on international card charges were reasonable, Wise wouldn't be needed in most cases.

Yeah, if the banks could provide a service similar to Wise I'd happily use a bank.

My bank wanted ~$800/mo in foreign exchange fees for what I'm doing. Wise charges me ~$100/mo. That's, what, 700% more fees? I'm saving $8.5k/yr.

Even if Wise imploded tomorrow and I lost the cash I have in there I'm pretty sure after this long I'm still ahead versus having used my bank all along.

And there are a lot of value-adds on top.

I can get a Visa card that lets me pay directly in the foreign currency instead of paying the exchange fee twice. This was a whole separate expensive/specialty product from my bank.

I can send electronic transfers (through Canada's Interac e-Transfer service) that exceed what a local bank will provide even to my business account and completely avoid the need for additional services/hacks/fees/etc. This is, apparently, "impossible and not supported by Interac" according to multiple banks I've talked to, the business rep, etc.

Long story short... I agree. Wise only exists because banks are kinda terrible at this. If the banks sucked less, few people would bother with the friction of the additional account.

Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down

#230

Post by nucleardog » Fri, Oct 31, 2025, 5:44 PM UTC

peanut-walrus wrote: post #120

The KYC/AML dance is really annoying. The actual bad guys know exactly what they need to pass all the checks, while regular people, as in this case, often get caught in the wheels. Banks or fintechs rarely have the kind of investigative powers they would need to actually find the criminals using them, nor do they really want to spend their time playing police. So anything even remotely suspicious? You're now out of o…

Only slightly related, but it gave me a laugh--

Wise needed beneficial ownership documentation for my business account. Presumably this was part of the whole KYC/AML/etc dance.

There's no standard form I could find for this, document to get out of the government service portal, or anything else. I finally just fired up a word processor and put together a single page document:

    To whom in may concern,
    
    Below is an accounting of all individuals who, directly or indirectly,
    through any contract, arrangement, understanding or otherwise own equity
    interests in 12341234 CANADA LTD.
    
    NAME             DOB              Ownership
    nucleardog       1970-01-01       100%
    
    I hereby certify that the above information is correct as of Dec 31, 2037.
    
    Nucleardog
    President
    12341234 CANADA LTD

No notes. They accepted it immediately and the account opening moved forward. Like... wat? Why was I stressed about this?

(I have since written myself many things things like this, e.g., salary verification letters. Always gives me a chuckle and feels like a weird superpower I've gained by paying the $250 or whatever to incorporate.)

If I were someone that set up forged accounts and stuff professionally this would've been absolutely _nothing_ to bypass. As someone legit doing this _once_ for _a_ business, it definitely took a lot more research and thought that it really should have.