So SE take down their account systems and I get my monthly payments 'rejected'

[Kraggy]

So I have two POL Ids which should have renewed last night, they didn't, I got the standard "Due to a processing error with your payment method, all recurring options for the following service account have been cancelled. The details are as follows." e-mail

When I try to reactivate them I get the dreaded 401 error on THREE cards all of which are valid. In the end I managed to add some Crysta via UltimatePay and PayPal but am now left in limbo.

Point is, the Debit Card I've used for years, and I used it yesterday in fact to reactivate a canceled Content ID a few hours before this payment failure.

I have no doubt at all it's related to SE's account maintenance, which make me more angry that they simply terminate IDs and make it MY problem to reactivate.

Anyone else suffer this? Given the years I've used this card it's implausible it was mere coincidence that the payment glitched right when SE was presumably taking the system down, or else had locked out new payments ahead of time.

Raised a ticket, no real expectation it'll get answered, previous tickets have gone into the trashcan unanswered.

[Alhanelem]

You must have some real crappy luck, or there's some information missing from your tickets or something. While sometimes they do take way longer or don't give me the answer I want, I can say that every support ticket I have ever filed has gotten some kind of response eventually. I've never had a support ticket go completely unanswered unless I closed it myself.

There's also a possibility that it's their response that is going in your trash can due to a spam filter, or it's not being sent to the email you're checking, or something. Just throwing out the possibilities.

Sucks to be having that issue though. I haven't had it, but you're not the first person I've seen complaining about this kind of CC issue.

[Kraggy]

It is a long time since I submitted a ticket, last one I think was 2009 from my records, again about a payment problem with a credit card being 'rejected' when it hadn't been, maybe they've improved: spam wouldn't be the issue, I never fail to get e-mails from their account system and the e-mail address I put into the ticket was cut/pasted from the 'rejection' e-mails so if I don't get a reply it won't be for that reason.

SE's payment system is of course notorious, a regular trickle of reports on here, on Alla and SE's PR site ever since I started XI in '05, I live in dread of "Error 401", last time I saw it was when after years of buying Crysta using PayPal via UltimatePay suddenly all attempts at using UP failed and I had to resort to PaysafeCard .. ironically UP worked this time so I could reactivate with Crysta.

[Kraggy]

This is why SE is such a pain to deal with:



We are contacting you regarding your issues when trying to register a payment method.

Please send us a picture of the card as well as a photo or scan of your proof of identity (passport, driver?s license or birth certificate) to sel-id@square-enix.com mentioning ticket number 4165404, as we require this for ownership verification purposes.

IMPORTANT: We only need the name and last four digits on the card - please black out all other information as we cannot store our customers' credit card information for security reasons. Any pictures showing the full card face will be immediatly deleted from our systems and we would have to re-request an appropriate picture.
I'm asking why my card's being mis-handled by their system, I raised a ticket after I logged into the account, I'm not asking for anything that an account thief could benefit from yet it's ME whi has to deal with the hassle of taking a picture of a card .. believe it or not I do NOT have any device capable of taking a photograph that I could e-mail to them .. and a scan of my driving license.

Why the hell am I being asked to prove who I am when I'm asking SE to fix THEIR system. There is nothing wrong with my card, my account details on SE and my bank haven't changed since last month when payments went through just fine.

I understand the need for 'security' but this is plain asinine considering what I'm asking them to do.

[Elexia]

You also have to take into consideration it might be your bank having an issue with SE and they want you to prove who you are as a security measure. It sucks but I guarantee you'd be raising hell if they didn't have this and you were hacked.

[Kraggy]

You also have to take into consideration it might be your bank having an issue with SE and they want you to prove who you are as a security measure. It sucks but I guarantee you'd be raising hell if they didn't have this and you were hacked.
The bank confirmed SE had never tried to take a payment.

However, I did get a good response from SE's CS department I have to say, so my initial skepticism was mis-placed.

While SE weren't definitive .. the CS department weren't told a whole lot by the financial people .. it seems that I tripped an anti-fraud check by performing too many transactions over the last 7 or 30 days (there seem to be two time-frames and it's not certain which one I fell foul of). This was no doubt due to my having reactivated 4 content IDs one at a time over the last two or three weeks.

I've never heard of this check before but it highly likely to have been the cause, and the fact that SE took the system down right around the time the payments failed was indeed a coincidence: I'm waiting till a week Saturday to breath entirely easy as there are two more payments due for FFXIV in the next 10 days.

I remain unconvinced of the need for the photo of ID and card TBH (which in the end I needed a friend to help me with), I find it hard to see how an account thief could have benefited when clearly in order to communicate the way I did with SE meant I had access to the SQEX account and also the linked e-mail address .. with that level of access a thief could simply have got round the problem the same way I did with Crysta.