R.J. Howard Computing

We are currently recommending that clients refrain from maintaining an account with ePassporte.com (which is a prepaid Visa card scheme).  Our experience has been that they have an unbelievably poor level of customer service and unnecessarily high fees.

It’s bad enough that simple service requests can easily take a week or more to get resolved; just try to get resolution on fraudulent charges.  They also appear to have a large number of service reps for whom English is a challenge, which only compounds the problem.

Since ePassporte is owned by a non-U.S. company, some shopping web sites will not accept it, their physical presence in the Los Angeles area notwithstanding.

Lastly, ePassporte’s monthly “statements” do not adhere to normal accounting standards.  For example, the same charge may appear on two different months’ statements, and the ending balance for one month doesn’t always equal the starting balance of the next.

For these and other reasons we are warning clients to avoid this vendor if at all possible.

Update 9/2/10:  Visa has suspended its relationship with ePassport.  Any clients with funds on deposit with ePassporte are advised to withdraw them immediately.

Clients are strongly urged to refrain from using ANY service or paying ANY invoices from Domain Registry of America.

This company sends out advertisements for domain services which are designed to look like invoices.  Unless you read every single word of the mailing, you could easily be fooled into paying the fake invoice, which also causes your domain to be transferred to their control.  This is all despite a court decision forbidding them from engaging in deceptive practices.

The only way to make them stop once and for all is to starve them.  Refuse to take the bait!