ePassporte: Unacceptable
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.
